“We won the First World War. We won the Second World War. We won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to Department of Defense,” US President Donald Trump said on Sept. 5 when he announced its rebranding with the secondary title of the Department of War. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reinforced the message in the same meeting, saying: “We haven’t won a major war since... Words matter.”
Although the US is not a direct combatant in Ukraine, it is certainly a party to the conflict as the main supplier of weapons and intelligence to Ukraine. However, for three years, former US president Joe Biden’s administration temporized and restrained Ukraine in a war of attrition that was becoming another “forever war.”
For eight months, the Trump team followed the same approach even as it sought a quick end to the war. Worse, Trump sided, almost malevolently, with Moscow under Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In the wake of the Department of War announcement, Trump last week suddenly switched his perception of Putin from a “brilliant and strong” leader destined to prevail in his ambitions, to a “paper tiger,” a weak and feckless loser who could not crush a smaller opponent shackled by Western fears of triggering World War III.
Nevertheless, as former US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell cautioned: “The world is watching to see if President Trump’s administration translates his rhetoric into action.”
Trump defined a victory for Kyiv as fighting and winning “all of Ukraine back in its original form.” To demonstrate a real commitment to that end, Washington would need to provide Kyiv, either directly or through European conduits, long-range Tomahawk missiles Ukraine needs to strike deep inside Russia, as well as the required intelligence and targeting information to make the attacks effective.
The US would also have to give Ukraine what the Biden and Trump administrations have feared providing — official permission to execute potentially decisive strikes.
Putin is relying on his ability to flatter and intimidate Trump into inaction. The Russian leader earlier this month said that he doubted Trump would provide the Tomahawks because “he knows how to listen” and because it would trigger “a qualitatively new stage of escalation.”
Trump, if he is so inclined, can easily disabuse Putin. He can implement his putative philosophy on fighting and winning wars by giving Ukraine missiles and intelligence, while withholding approval for an immediate strike. If Putin fails within 24 hours to halt all missile and drone attacks and begin pulling back Russia’s frontline forces, he could authorize the first Tomahawk strikes.
Until now, serious deterrence has not been tried against Russian aggression, but if the new forceful Trump-Hegseth rhetoric is backed up by action, Trump’s claim to have seized former US president Ronald Reagan’s peace-through-strength mantle would have gone a long way toward justification. It would also prove, contrary to the fears of many, that tyrannies can still be deterred and defeated even in the nuclear age.
That would be a crucially important message for Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), who harbors the same explicit ambitions to destroy the independent, democratic status of Taiwan that Putin directs at Ukraine.
The parallels are striking. The Budapest Memorandum — signed in 1997 by the US, the UK and Russia — guaranteed Ukraine’s political independence and territorial integrity in exchange for giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons. However, without enforcement, it did not withstand the relentless pressure from Putin to reconstitute at least the Russian, if not the Soviet, empire, whose disintegration he called “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the [20th] century.”
Similarly in many respects, the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act states that “any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, [would be] a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” The act also committed the US to provide “arms of a defensive character” to Taiwan and “to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion” against Taiwan.
It does not commit the US to exercise that “capacity” by directly defending Taiwan. Hence, the policy of “strategic ambiguity,” practiced by every administration since then and perfectly articulated by former US president Bill Clinton’s administration, which told Chinese interlocutors that the US decision to intervene militarily if China attacked Taiwan “would depend on the circumstances” — precisely the language Trump used when asked if he would authorize US action against Russian aircraft violating NATO airspace.
A positive response on Ukraine would help avoid the need for action on Taiwan — as long as Beijing is made to understand that Washington is prepared to take it.
Trump and Hegseth say the war department name signifies actual US intent to resist and defeat aggression against the US or its allies and democratic partners. To get that message across to Beijing, Trump must eliminate US ambiguity on Taiwan and declare official US intent to defend Taiwan — without the “clarifications” and walk-backs from his administration that characterized Biden’s many futile attempts to send a deterrent message to China.
Trump can no more rely on Xi’s assurance that he would not move on Taiwan while Trump is in office than former US president Barack Obama should have believed Xi’s promise not to militarize artificial islands in the South China Sea. Hegseth said words matter; so do actions.
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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