Late last year, former US secretary of state Colin Powell declared that Taiwan has no sovereignty. That was obviously then the US State Department's view.
A few days ago, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that Taiwan is a sovereign nation.
In essence, the US government has treated the status of Taiwan with uncertainty, to the point of being schizophrenic.
A similar ambiguity has also been applied to the potential US response to China's aggression if Taiwan declares formal independence. The US government concluded a while back that an opaque response would be the best way to keep those independence-minded Taiwanese off balance without giving an inordinate amount of leverage to the Chinese.
This approach has served the US' interests for years, by helping to keep peace in the Taiwan Strait. But it may have outlived its usefulness.
One reason is that this ambiguity seems to have weakened the Taiwanese people's confidence in the US. This, together with the US' active discouragement of formal Taiwan independence, has managed to dash the hopes of many Taiwanese people for their own nation and instead made them vulnerable to China's "poisoned carrot and heavy stick" tactics. One of the immediate effects has been the difficulty in passing the special arms procurement bill.
It's true that the main culprits are those treacherous pan-blue legislators. But support for the bill among average Taiwanese, although widespread, can only be depicted as shallow and lukewarm. The public finds it hard to be very enthusiastic about spending an enormous amount of tax-payer money on something that's intended to maintain a tenuous status quo, at best.
Furthermore, some might even be led to believe that the days of the status quo may be numbered -- if they're not gone already -- if neither the US nor the Taiwanese people are sufficiently vigilant.
For example, if the outdated US policy described above is left unaddressed and if enough Taiwanese people are slumbering, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) could be returned to power in 2008 and the status quo could soon crumble.
That's because the alliance established between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the KMT could bring about the absorption of Taiwan into China.
But the process would be conducted in such a way that the US would find the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) nearly toothless. That would be the case even though the likely back-door settlement of "unification" would be without the consent of the Taiwanese people, a clear violation of at least the intent if not the letter of the TRA.
Meanwhile, the US would discover that its ability to meddle in Taiwan's internal affairs had become quite limited in a KMT administration, since Beijing would be the one calling all of the shots -- at least in the context of cross-strait interaction. That means the US window of opportunity to effectively help prevent Taiwan from being stealthily annexed by China could be as short as one year, but no longer than two years, starting now.
The US must make up its mind by then. After that, events might outrun Washington's hesitation. The US could be left in the dust, haplessly watching its strategic interests in Taiwan literally snatched away, not to mention the outrage of witnessing a democracy being devoured by an authoritarian regime.
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