For much of former US president Joe Biden’s term, Elbridge Colby, now US President Donald Trump’s undersecretary for defense policy, opposed the US commitment to Ukraine, halting and erratic as it was. He argued that the weapons going to war in Europe would be needed in the Indo-Pacific region to deter or defeat a likely Chinese attack against Taiwan, a higher US national security priority.
However, in his US Senate confirmation hearing, he seemed to downgrade the urgency of defending Taiwan.
“Taiwan is an important US national interest, but not an existential one,” he said.
Whether his own thinking has changed or it reflects an accommodation of Trump’s view is open to question.
Two weeks ago, Colby persuaded US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to suspend the flow of US arms to Ukraine, a decision Trump said he knew nothing about and promptly reversed.
Then, Colby last week asked Japan and Australia to declare what action they would take to defend Taiwan against a potential attack by China. It was an odd demand considering the decades-long US policy of strategic ambiguity.
Then-US assistant secretary of defense Joseph Nye and then-US secretary of defense William Perry both said in 1995: “It would depend on the circumstances.”
Biden’s repeated offhand attempts to change the declaratory policy were walked back by bureaucracy.
Australian Minister for Defence Pat Conroy responded to Colby’s challenge in similarly ambiguous terms: “The decision to commit Australian troops to a conflict will be made by the government of the day, not in advance. We won’t discuss hypotheticals.”
Japan, also taken aback, responded in kind.
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger was highly successful in determining former US president Richard Nixon’s policy instincts, then influencing and maneuvering them to integrate his own preferences. When Nixon made the decision to pursue an opening with China, Kissinger, whose decades-long career in national security policy had evinced no interest in the People’s Republic of China to that point, seized the opportunity to be part of a historic project and to mold it as an important part of his own legacy.
Preparing for his second presidential campaign, Nixon had laid out his thinking on China and the best way to bring it into “the family of nations.” In his seminal 1967 Foreign Affairs article, “Asia After Vietnam,” he said: “China must change.”
However, his approach to China cautioned against making premature and excessive concessions, yet in the face of two tough negotiators — Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and then-Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) — he and Kissinger did just that: extracting US forces from Taiwan and removing the Seventh Fleet from the Taiwan Strait, all before serious negotiations had even begun over the future of Taiwan. The view that China must be accommodated to avoid war over Taiwan has permeated US strategy ever since.
Colby has called for setting national security priorities in an era of finite resources and diminished public tolerance for foreign commitments. In his book, The Strategy of Denial, he wrote: “The fundamental reality is that there are structural limitations on what the United States can do — it cannot do everything at once. Thus, it must make hard choices.”
The fundamental problem with Colby’s analysis — both before and after his shift on Taiwan — is its inherent assumption that the US cannot meet all its moral and strategic commitments, and must choose which to honor and which to cast aside.
Rather than making the US great again, it is a prescription for selective defeatism in the face of global challenges posed by the new axis of evil: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
The four malign powers all declare the US and the international order it has built and protected for eight decades as their individual and collective enemy. In one form or another, each has pledged mutual support and cooperation against what Iran calls “the Great Satan,” Russia and China brand an “imperial hegemon,” and North Korea sees as “the most depraved state in the world.”
Prioritizing commitments — or selective defeatism — means writing off populations that rely on the US to protect them from one form of tyranny or another, or consigning them to a permanent state of warfare like that presently underway in Ukraine. Colby, and those who would agree that Ukraine or Taiwan do not merit high levels of US support, might comfort themselves for having avoided another costly and risky US involvement, but history has also shown the costs and risks of nonintervention — a world dominated by malign actors such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
It is not the first time since World War II that the US has faced multidirectional threats and tried to prioritize them.
Then-US secretary of state Dean Acheson in January 1950 drew a US security perimeter around US strategic interests, but omitted Taiwan and South Korea in Asia. Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung and Stalin immediately began planning an advance of communist forces in the region. The only question was whether Taiwan or South Korea would be the first or second target. Kim Il-sung pre-empted the deliberations and moved first. North Korean forces poured across the 38th parallel and the Korean War was on.
Then-US president Harry Truman suddenly adjusted his administration’s priorities and led a collective UN military response to North Korea’s aggression. Simultaneously, to keep Mao from launching a “reunification” attack on Taiwan and Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) from trying to retake China, Truman sent the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait, where it patrolled for the next two decades until Nixon pulled it out in 1972 in his and Kissinger’s pre-emptive goodwill gesture to Mao.
The danger for Taiwan now is that the Trump administration would seize upon the noncommittal responses from allies in Asia as an excuse to further retreat from its increasingly tenuous commitment to Taiwan. Kissinger could not have arranged a more convenient, or cynical, scenario.
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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