The US would not go to war with China over a "symbolic" move by Taiwan to declare independence unilaterally, a former US defense official said in Taipei yesterday.
Still, the former official acknowledged, whether the US would come to Taiwan's aid would depend largely on the sentiment of the US public and Congress.
"The American position is we want to protect the freedom on Taiwan, but we don't want to go to war with China over something symbolic like [Taiwan's] declaration of independence," said Joseph Nye, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under Bill Clinton's administration.
Nye, currently the dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, made the remarks in a question-and-answer session following a talk he gave yesterday morning at the Grand Hyatt Hotel on security in east Asia.
The veteran political observer added that while Taiwan is a democracy, and the people of Taiwan have the right to vote for full independence, "there is an American democracy and people have the vote as to whether we want to risk our lives over that. ... It depends, in a large part, on how it looks at the time."
Nye, who published an article titled A Taiwan Deal in the Washington Post in March 1998 proposing a three-part package to resolve the cross-strait impasse, said he still saw that as "the right approach."
"The article ... suggested that the US would make a declaration unilaterally saying that our policy was `no independence' and `no use of force.' And if Taiwan declares independence, we would not recognize it. Therefore, China would have no excuse to use force because there would be no recognition of independence," Nye said.
"Instead of that, what we should do is to encourage Taipei and Beijing to negotiate on relationships in which Taiwan would assure the mainland it would not make a formal declaration of independence and China would provide Taiwan with more international living space," Nye added.
But not everyone agreed with Nye, whose remarks were met with opposition from members of the audience including Koo Kuan-min (
Koo said that in 1998 he wrote an article titled Joseph Nye, You are Wrong to challenge Nye's Washington Post article. Koo said that while Taiwan had never formally declared independence, China had increased its military expenditure annually, posing a threat to regional stability.
Nye stressed the importance of the resumption of cross-strait talks. "What we said is there should be a dialogue. If you go back to 1992, you can have `one China with different interpretations' as a basis for beginning talks. It doesn't mean you'll have to accept the PRC definition of Taiwan as a province," Nye said.
But Koo said that his elder brother Koo Chen-fu (
Nye told his audience "not to place too much faith in words" uttered by the American side on cross-strait matters even at the very highest levels of government, "because the question is one which depends on how the facts appear to the American Congress and people at the time."
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