Taiwan must look “increasingly dark” to China, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) codirector for security studies Thomas Donnelly said.
In a paper published this week by the Hudson Institute, Donnelly said Beijing had been hoping that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) would be returned to power in next year’s elections and put Taiwan back on a path to “inevitable” unification.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) “has often been an apparently pliant partner,” he said.
However, the prospects for peaceful unification, or even unification by intimidation short of the actual use of military force, are now “not great,” he said.
A former member of the US-China Review Commission and policy group director for the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Armed Services, Donnelly said that Taiwanese reaction to Chinese attempts to suppress democracy in Hong Kong reflects “a rejection of any ‘one country, two systems’ solution.”
Taiwan has no wish to forgo democratic forms of government or the “sotto voce but de facto independence that is the guarantee of that government,” Donnelly said.
“Neither deep trade ties nor Chinese soft power nor an increasingly overwhelming military balance has served to move Taiwan much closer to buckling to Beijing’s desires,” he wrote.
“Taiwan’s political identity, even among the KMT, is no longer simply sinocentric. Like Japan, Taiwan remains a source of tension with China, driven by its own internal dynamic,” he said.
The paper, on US foreign policy in the Pacific, is titled Interest, Fear and Honor.
Donnelly said that the tensions created by China threaten not just the geopolitical and economic interests in the region, but also touch a “changing sense of self-regard — of national honor.”
He said the combination of China’s rising capability and capacity and US operational absence has already created serious strategic and geopolitical uncertainties in Taiwan and elsewhere.
“No one knows what China might do in any given situation, but that’s the point: The loss of US military pre-eminence is a key ingredient in many recipes for mischief,” Donnelly said.
The tensions created by China’s rise may not lead to conflict, but considering the sheer number of potential disputes, “the arithmetic is intimidating,” he said.
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