The People’s Republic of China (PRC) sent its aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, through the Taiwan Strait early this month, at least in part responding to President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) telephone conversation congratulating US president-elect Donald Trump.
That is Beijing’s style: Make an unacceptable long-distance telephone call, and an aircraft carrier shows up in your backyard. It is akin to proclaiming the South China Sea a Chinese province and constructing islands in international waters to house military bases; to declaring a provocative air defense identification zone in the East China Sea; and to seizing Singaporean military equipment recently transiting Hong Kong after annual military exercises in Taiwan.
It is high time to revisit the “one China policy” and decide what the US thinks it means, 45 years after the Shanghai Communique. Trump has said the policy is negotiable. Negotiation should not mean Washington gives and Beijing takes. The US needs strategically coherent priorities reflecting not 1972, but 2017, encompassing more than trade and monetary policy, and specifically including Taiwan. Let us see how an increasingly belligerent China responds.
Constantly chanting “one China policy” is a favorite Beijing negotiating tactic: Pick a benign-sounding slogan; persuade foreign interlocutors to accept it; and then redefine it to Beijing’s satisfaction, dragging the unwary foreigners along for the ride.
To Beijing, “one China” means the PRC is the sole legitimate “China,” as sloganized in “the three noes”: no Taiwanese independence; no two Chinas; no one China, one Taiwan. For too long, the US has unthinkingly succumbed to this wordplay.
However, even in the Shanghai Communique, Washington merely “acknowledges” that “all Chinese” believe “there is but one China,” of which Taiwan is part.
Taiwanese public opinion surveys for decades have shown fewer and fewer citizens describing themselves as “Chinese.” Who allowed them to change their minds?
Washington has always said unification had to come peacefully and by mutual agreement. Mutual agreement has not come in 67 years and will not in any foreseeable future, especially given China’s increasingly brutal reinterpretation of another slogan — “one country, two systems” in Hong Kong.
Beijing and its acolytes expected that Taiwan would simply collapse. It has not. Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) 1949 retreat was not a temporary respite before final surrender. Neither the Shanghai Communique nor former US president Jimmy Carter’s 1978 derecognition of the Republic of China persuaded Taiwan to go gentle into that good night — especially after the US Congress enacted the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.
Eventually Taiwan became a democracy, with the 1996 popular election of Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) as president, the peaceful, democratic transfer of power to the opposition party in 2000, and further peaceful transfers in 2008 and last year. So inconsiderate of those free-thinking Taiwanese.
What should the US do now? In addition to a diplomatic ladder of escalation, it can take concrete steps helpful to US interests. Here is one prompted by China’s recent impoundment of Singapore’s military equipment. Spoiler alert: Beijing will not approve.
The US could enhance its East Asia military posture by increasing military sales to Taiwan and by again stationing military personnel and assets there, probably negotiating favorable financial terms. It need not approximate former US general Douglas MacArthur’s image of Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” or renegotiate a mutual defense treaty.
Basing rights and related activity do not imply a full defense alliance. US activities would not be dissimilar to Singapore’s, although they could be more extensive. The Taiwan Relations Act is expansive enough to encompass such a relationship, so new legislative authority is unnecessary.
Some may object that a US military presence would violate the Shanghai Communique, but the language of the Taiwan Relations Act should take precedence. Circumstances in the region are fundamentally different from 1972, as Beijing would be the first to proclaim.
Nearby Asian governments would cite the enormous increase in Chinese military power and belligerence. Most important, effectively permanent changes in the Taiwan-China relationship have occurred, making much of the communique obsolete. The doctrine of rebus sic stantibus — things thus standing — justifies taking a different perspective than in 1972.
Taiwan’s geographic location is closer to East Asia’s mainland and the South China Sea than either Okinawa or Guam, giving US forces greater flexibility for rapid deployment throughout the region should the need arise.
Washington might also help ease tensions with Tokyo by redeploying at least some US forces from Okinawa, a festering problem in the US-Japan relationship. Moreover, the current Philippine leadership offers little chance of increasing military and other cooperation there in the foreseeable future.
Guaranteeing freedom of the seas, deterring military adventurism and preventing unilateral territorial annexations are core US interests in East and Southeast Asia. Today, as opposed to 1972, a closer military relationship with Taiwan would be a significant step toward achieving these objectives. If China disagrees, by all means let us talk.
John Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This article first appeared in print in the Wall Street Journal.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment. Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield. Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made the astonishing assertion during an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle, published on Friday last week, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a dictator. She also essentially absolved Putin of blame for initiating the war in Ukraine. Commentators have since listed the reasons that Cheng’s assertion was not only absurd, but bordered on dangerous. Her claim is certainly absurd to the extent that there is no need to discuss the substance of it: It would be far more useful to assess what drove her to make the point and stick so
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
Yesterday, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), once the dominant political party in Taiwan and the historic bearer of Chinese republicanism, officially crowned Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) as its chairwoman. A former advocate for Taiwanese independence turned Beijing-leaning firebrand, Cheng represents the KMT’s latest metamorphosis — not toward modernity, moderation or vision, but toward denial, distortion and decline. In an interview with Deutsche Welle that has now gone viral, Cheng declared with an unsettling confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not a dictator,” but rather a “democratically elected leader.” She went on to lecture the German journalist that Russia had been “democratized
RSS