Fri, Dec 16, 2016 page8

• Trump, and checks and balances

  • By Ian Inkster 音雅恩
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  When he reportedly emphasized that “the president of Taiwan called me,” it does seem that US president-elect Donald Trump was missing the point; It mattered less that he was the one who was called than that he announced this with the revolutionary term “president of Taiwan.” This alone illustrates the seeming “loose cannon” character of what Trump does.

  The difference between this and other off-the-peg declarations by Trump was that his casual overturning of more than 40 years of linguistic collusion was in the field of foreign relations, which might lead anywhere.

  For Taiwan, the difference was that we were now in the midst of things. It led to us.

  We still do not know how casual or how calculated the president-elect is at such times. We do not yet know who, if any others, were in the know, particularly whether others outside the White House were concerned prior to the statement — any key figure from the US Congress or even the US Supreme Court.

  Nor do we even know whether Taiwan was merely a pawn in commercial conflicts between the US and China — for instance, did Trump know much about the detailed history and politics of the Taiwan Strait problem? — or a more serious direct political intervention with long-term global aims.

  Given such doubts, some other questions might be addressed from a Taiwanese perspective.

  Are the famous “checks and balances” in the US constitution really effective in curbing a rampant president when he has a clear majority in Congress?

  The context of any answer to this question must include the uniquely peculiar international history of the cross-strait relationship. The multiple ambiguities generated since 1943 — when the Cairo Declaration of [then-US president Franklin] Roosevelt, [then-British prime minister Winston] Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) stated that after the war “the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China” — allow for different perspectives to arise within the US political system, generating the sort of tortuous debates that can allow dubious results to slip through.

  How could the branches of the US government today begin to come to grips with this sort of formulation — in 1943 none of these powers knew who or what would represent China by 1945 or 1949, nor is “restore” an entirely diplomatic term, nor is a “declaration” a law or a treaty.

  By 1949, the perspective of “two republics on one island” solved no problems at all, and subsequent tactics by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in Taiwan did not really improve matters.

  In the “Nixon shock” changes brought by then-US president Richard Nixon that saw the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan lose its international status in the UN in 1971 to be replaced by the communist mainland, many outsiders would have judged that Taiwan escaped by the skin of its teeth — the 1960s could have seen a KMT in Taiwan that would have modified its formal position of governance over the mainland on the understanding that this would be reciprocated internationally and in China by support for Taiwanese separate nationality.

  That might just have worked, but nothing of this sort was attempted, and the global powers really had little choice — Cold War or not — to admit to the clear difficulty of any global understanding of the island of Taiwan/ROC, itself long under martial law, as representative of the government or the lives of many millions of citizens of Maoist China. The credibility gap seemed just too big.

  From that time a complex relationship has been subsumed under the new ambiguity of the “one country, two systems” formula. On the one hand, it is of little wonder that most Western media coverage of the Trump crisis only emphasizes the first part of this — the “one China” element — on the other hand it will be even more of a wonder if the US political system generates a rational argument, and produces a rational solution, for big can of worms that has been opened.

  What forces are around to reduce the likelihood of this going further, or, put another way: What might stop the escalation of this situation to a degree where it moves drastically beyond Trump simply using the Taiwan issue to really annoy China as a backdrop to winning better trading, exchange, political and territorial concessions in the short term?

  It seems there are three definite loci of constraint, this on the understanding that recent history shows the international community and its organizations — eg, the UN — seem loath to act decisively in truly important cases.

  For instance, the UN intervention in East Timor in 1999 was belated and followed much warfare and damage, conformed anyway with original biases within the UN — which had never approved the 1970s invasion by Indonesia — and did not come directly up against a truly major power, such as China today.

  This leaves the three obvious sources of constraint.

  First, divisions within the political elite or fear of the massive military sophistication of the US might mean that China searches for a compromise.

  Second, forces within Taiwanese domestic politics could ensure that Taiwan takes on a mild stance and tries to act as a middleman to both major powers.

  Third, forces within the US, those of the so-called checks and balances, are supposedly designed for just this sort of situation and will flatten out the Trump rhetoric and affirm the “one China” position, or perhaps a slight modification of that.

  The first two of these possibilities are, I think, impossible to judge on today, although if, in fact, they did work in the same direction, they would revolutionize the political culture of East Asia. Much more likely is that within the US, the political system itself will somehow restore the “status quo” without lighting a touch-paper across the Pacific.

  So on to checks and balances. We have seen them at work already, with spokesmen from other branches of the US government negating the saliency or veracity of Trump’s apparent position. Probably the best tactic is to remove heat from the focus on Taiwan per se by placing Trump’s remarks within a wide program of hard negotiating tactics on primarily commercial issues between the two major powers.

  If the Taiwan issue can be interpreted as merely part of a rousing of emotions within the US against China’s economic policies and their effect upon the US economy, then this will deflect the tension and put the original comments on a less immediate and political footing.

  The theory is that the separation of political power into legislative (Congress), executive (president) and judiciary (Supreme Court) might curb a US president through the process of law enforcement. The president might be checked and balanced out by the other two branches of government.

  This does seem to be so in most cases of policy that relate to the internal laws of the federation of states. Within individual states things are not quite so clear, and in matters relating to diplomacy and warfare, etc — that is, to other nation states — things do become more problematic.

  In this century, the federal executive power has undoubtedly expanded. Where the president comes up directly against the US constitution, say in matters of free speech, then he is more distinctly curbed, but — again — in matters of foreign relations the constitution has less coverage.

  Curbing the US president through the separation of powers depends on a healthy, real and present confrontational dialogue between the three branches. In the present political culture of the US it might well be possible, primarily in areas of foreign policy, to adhere to proper institutional process, yet reap a terrible final harvest.

  I can certainly imagine two horrors: That Trump convinces the majority Republicans in both houses that the commercial threat posed by China should be addressed fast and through using dramatic military potential, if only indirectly, and second that only one new appointment to the Supreme Court could remove the judicial obstacles that might arise from Trumpian extremism.

  In Taiwan we can hope that Trump’s remarks were either on-the-hoof or merely part of a general assault on the Chinese economy, rather than a prelude to a drastically reformulated US foregn policy.

  Ian Inkster is professorial research associate at the Center of Taiwan Studies, SOAS, University of London and the editor of the international journal History of Technology.
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