US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley recently suggested that Ukraine should start peace negotiations with Russia. The Ukrainian government expressed reluctance to do so. One way the US could promote eventual talks is to draw from its experience protecting Taiwan.
Imagine it is November next year, and Ukraine has recovered most, but not all, the territories Russia seized in 2014 and this year. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy might fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks the war has been profitable. He might worry that, after signing a peace treaty, Russia would rebuild and attack Ukraine again.
Zelenskiy would need international support, but what if the West had grown tired of the matter? For Zelenskiy, the best solution is Ukraine’s admission to NATO.
However, Ukraine would not garner the necessary support for admission from all NATO partners. This is where the Taiwan precedent could come into play.
In 1979, the US simultaneously ended diplomatic relations with the Republic of China, and inaugurated such ties with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
However, the US did not abandon Taiwan. In April 1979, the US Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA). In it are two basic security commitments.
First, the US would “make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability.”
Second, the US would “maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.”
PRC leaders must be under no illusion about the first provision — Taiwan, if the need arises, would have advanced US weapons. The second provision is less transparent. Still, PRC leaders probably ask why the US would legally maintain the military capacity to defend Taiwan if it was not also willing to use that capability.
Let us assume it is early next year. The US Congress and US President Joe Biden pass a “Ukraine defense act” (UDA) that includes both of the provisions described above, but applied to Ukraine.
Assume that the UDA includes a provision offered by Republicans that requires oversight to ensure lawful expenditure of relevant US funds, and supervision of the transfer and storage of US and allied weapons provided to Ukraine.
With the first provision, Zelenskiy would know that, regardless of what happens with Russia, his military arsenal would be amply stocked with US weapons. He could also be aware that Putin might worry that with the second provision there would be a chance that the US would step in if Russia invades Ukraine again. That a politically polarized US political system has made these commitments would render them all the more serious to Putin, and thus all the more credible to Zelenskiy.
Finally, Zelenskiy would see that nothing in the UDA would preclude accession by Ukraine to NATO at some point.
With these calculations in mind, Zelenskiy might be more likely to conclude that a peace treaty with Russia is not a prelude to being invaded by that country. For his part, Putin might grudgingly accept the UDA rather than risk a full-blown US-Ukraine security pact — as the US has with Japan and South Korea — or, even worse, early entry of Ukraine into NATO.
A UDA could give Zelenskiy the confidence to accept talks with Russia while not spooking Putin away from them.
Joseph Grieco is a professor of political science at Duke University; Giacomo Chiozza is the Sir Easa Saleh Al-Gurg Professor of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah.
The White House’s decision to take a 9.9 percent stake in Intel Corp is looking like very shrewd business indeed. Since the government bought in at US$20.47 a share last August, the US chipmaker’s surging stock price has delivered the US a US$43 billion return. One of the reasons the investment has so far proved so sound is that the White House has made sure of it. According to The Wall Street Journal, Howard personally pushed deals on Intel’s behalf with some of the most lucrative clients imaginable. They include Nvidia Corp, the company at the heart of the AI
A single photograph can cut through a lot of noise, but it can also be used to misrepresent the truth. At the very least, it can concentrate the mind on something that requires further investigation. On Monday last week, Ma Ying-jeou Foundation CEO Tai Hsia-ling (戴遐齡) and former National Security Council secretary-general King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) held a news conference in which they showed a photograph of former foundation CEO Hsiao Hsu-tsen (蕭旭岑), now Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) deputy chairman. In the image Hsiao is seated next to Xiamen Taiwan Businessmen Association chairman Han Ying-huan (韓螢煥). The two men were holding
I first met Professor Ray Jiing (井迎瑞) as a film and documentary student at Shih Hsin University’s (SHU) Department of Radio Television and Film in 1988. The following year, he went on to become the director of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive — forerunner of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI). Over his eight-year tenure, Jiing rescued and restored over 200 classic Taiwanese films. In 1997, he established the Graduate Institute of Studies in Documentary and Film Archiving at Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA), and I joined the program in his third cohort of students. Beyond a
A recent report concerning a student who is suing his teacher posed the question in its headline: Does failing a student in two subjects constitute bullying? The college student in Chiayi County apparently sought NT$2 million (US$63,603) in state compensation, but a court dismissed the case. The first reaction of many might have been to ask: What has happened to students nowadays? Some say that teachers have lost their authority, while others say students are overindulged. Some even start reminiscing over the days when “whatever the teacher says goes.” However, the real issue might be overlooked if emotional reactions like that are the
RSS