As he has long intended, US President Donald Trump is making dramatic moves to end the three-year war in Ukraine that has cost hundreds of thousands of military and civilian lives on both sides, and has become a grinding war of attrition. However, the way Trump has chosen to end it is, for a US president, an intolerable violation of international law and norms, and a rejection of the US’ moral standards.
There were ostensibly two choices for a new administration confronting the devastating situation left in Ukraine by former US president Joe Biden. One was to continue Biden’s timid, temporizing approach to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It had become yet another of the “endless wars” deplored by Biden and Trump that culminated in the disastrous abandonment of Afghanistan, although without US boots on the ground in Ukraine and no American casualties.
The second perceived termination of the conflict was to maintain and even expand Western support for Ukraine until Russian President Vladimir Putin finally recognized the strategic futility of his aggression. That would end the war on terms acceptable to Ukraine and the civilized world — that is, with no Russian forces in Ukraine, or Ukrainians in Russia, a guarantee of Ukrainian security, return of all prisoners and kidnapped persons, and accountability for Russian war crimes.
Trump, instead, has shocked much of the world and energized Russia and its global partners in tyranny and aggression by proclaiming that Russia was actually the victim, not the aggressor. Trump wants Ukraine to surrender its sovereignty and resources to achieve an apparent end to the conflict with no Western guarantee that it would not be reignited at Putin’s choosing.
The startling turn of events in Ukraine, and in the 80-year US commitment to the rules-based international order it took the lead in creating after World War II, has potentially tectonic consequences for the security situation in the Indo-Pacific region. US allies and security partners — such as Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and especially Taiwan — face existential threats from communist China and its dependent North Korean ally.
The operating geopolitical principles Trump has effectively proclaimed for Ukraine portend ominous consequences for Taiwan, a thriving democracy under decades of threats and coercion from Beijing.
The first rule that Trump honors is that small, weak countries under duress from larger, more powerful neighbors need to learn, sooner rather than later, that it is in their best interest to submit. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and the Ukrainian population that supports him, have refused to accept that lesson. So, while Putin continues to press Ukraine from the tyrannical outside, Trump applies leverage from the democratic side by threatening to withhold US funding for Ukraine’s weapons — the same pressure Trump wielded in his first term to persuade Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Zelenskiy, to provide derogatory information on Biden’s son Hunter.
The second rule Trump seems to be applying to countries under military threat from powerful neighbors is that they should avoid seeking collective defense either bilaterally with other neighbors, with major powers elsewhere or with multilateral security organizations. That assistance, although authorized by international law, will be perceived as threatening by the powerful aggressor nation, whether Russia or China.
The third restriction on the victim nation’s freedom of action is that it should not seek an independent, especially democratic, form of government anywhere in proximity to the aggressive dictatorship, because of the invidious comparisons the populations of both countries will draw about the merits of the two systems.
The fourth lesson Taiwan should draw from Ukraine’s experience is that it can avoid massive death and destruction — at least at first — by making incremental concessions of its sovereignty and/or resources to the aggressor nation or — incredibly — to its one-time protector, the US.
Ukraine is expected to surrender territory to Russia and valuable minerals to the US. For Taiwan, a comparable Trump-type deal would be to cede Kinmen County or other outlying islands to China and part of its chip production facilities to the US.
The combination of Joe Biden’s half-hearted support for Ukraine and Trump’s posture — obsequious toward Russia and graspingly opportunistic with Ukraine — has greatly enhanced the prospects for major strategic miscalculation by Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. To prevent the outbreak of war with any of the US’ adversaries, Trump needs to reset his posture on Ukraine by striking a fair and moderate deal on its mineral wealth, providing a permanent security guarantee, and making any territorial concessions by Ukraine entirely provisional and subject to eventual revision through popular referenda.
Regarding Taiwan, Trump needs to express his own version of the five security guarantee declarations that Joe Biden made, but without any of the walk-back language that his predecessor’s White House and US Department of State made to nullify the former president’s words. Moral and strategic clarity is the only way to stop Xi’s inexorable march to war.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the US secretary of defense from 2005 to 2006, and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010.
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