5 Faulty Assumptions About Taiwan
Posted on Monday, March 10, 2014
by Project2049Institute
By Dan Blumenthal
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Photo: MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images |
The government-to-government talks between Wang Yu-chi, head of
Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, and Zhang Zhijun, head of China's Taiwan
Affairs Office, are significant, but not for reasons many think. Indeed, the
talks are most noteworthy because they happened at all. A key element of
China's Taiwan policy has been to isolate the island and get all countries to
accept the Chinese position that Taiwan is not a country, but a province of
China.
Now Taiwan and China have had government-to-government talks.
China has moved a step closer to accepting Taiwan's de facto independent status
as a country with its own national government. The substance of the talks will
be far less noteworthy as Taiwan does not want to make any concessions or
agreements on political issues such as its international status.
U.S. policymakers should insist that this is now the precedent:
China has to work out its differences with Taiwan on a government-to-government
basis. The talks also provide us a chance to reflect on five faultyassumptions
about Taiwan, many developed during and since the normalization process with
China in the 1970s. Here they are:
1. Taiwan and China would reunify after a "decent
interval." This belief goes back to then-National Security
Advisor Henry Kissinger in his meetings with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai during
the early stages of U.S. President Richard Nixon's opening to China (It was
Nixon's opening: Kissinger thought Nixon odd for even suggesting an opening to
China.) Kissinger told Zhou that the "political evolution" of Taiwan
would proceed "in the direction" that Zhou wanted, meaning toward
unification with the "motherland." He also said that the United
Stated would not stand in the way of that "evolution."
Oops. Today Taiwan is standing
tall as a de facto independent democracy with an elected president, a national
legislature, and a national military. Kissinger and many of his successors were
just wrong. The Taiwan example is a damning case of how misguided
"realism" can be. A cacophony of supporters -- a bipartisan group of
congressmen, anti-communist groups, democracy supporters, and, foremost, the
Taiwanese people themselves -- banded together to make sure that the
"political evolution" of Taiwan proceeded in a direction opposite of
what Kissinger assumed. (There are still books to be written about how wrong
Kissinger was about Asia and about how the sloppy normalization process created
many of the problems in Asia that we live with today.)
Kissinger is a self-described
realist. But his realism ignores important factors that drive international
politics such as individual acts of leadership, beliefs in freedom and justice,
and the importance of emotion and public desires.
2. Taiwan: Homo economicus. Related to No. 1, the unstated
assumption in U.S. cross-strait policy after normalization has been that the
Taiwanese are driven mostly by rational, material self-interest. The opening of
China-Taiwan economic ties, a process that began two decades ago, was supposed
to lead to some sort of political solution as Taiwan acted in its economic
self-interest.
Well, Taiwan did invest heavily in China and in the process grew
both the Chinese and Taiwanese economies. But as economic ties have expanded,
the Taiwanese feel an ever stronger sense of uniqueness. Close contact did not
make the heart grow fonder. The more contact the Taiwanese have with China, the
more they feel different from the Chinese, including when it comes to the
openness of their society and how modern and advanced Taiwan is compared with
China. The other issue is a generational shift as fewer Taiwanese feel a
historical emotional attachment to China. "Reunification" is now only
possible for Beijing if it chooses to start a war.
3. Taiwan is
dependent on China's economy; it must eventually accept unification. This
is a cousin of point 2 above. The truth is that Taiwan and China are dependent
on each other (and on the United States, Japan, and South Korea) to design and
produce high-tech products. They are both highly dependent on other countries
to buy those products. Yes, Taiwan developed a very sophisticated China
strategy that made the mainland a key link on its high-tech supply chain. But
Taiwanese businessmen are arguably the most agile in Asia.
If China becomes too risky or
costly, Taiwanese business will move production elsewhere. To some extent this
is already happening as Taiwanese business is making large investments in
Vietnam, Myanmar, and Indonesia. Taiwan has many options.
The sad irony is that the only
country that can marginalize the Taiwanese economy is the United States. How?
By not allowing it into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). If Taiwan is
excluded, other countries benefiting from lower tariffs will develop
competitive advantages that could squeeze out high-end Taiwanese design and
manufactures. Unfortunately, excluding Taiwan from the TPP appears to be the
U.S. policy. Taiwan is not overly dependent on the Chinese economy. It is
overly dependent on the political whims of Washington.
These three assumptions all have
to do with how Taiwan got to where it is despite the exertions of our realists.
The next faulty assumptions have to do with how to have a more realistic
defense and deterrence policy in the Taiwan Strait that solidifies Taiwan's
progress:
4. Taiwan will have the defense policy we want. Actually
Taiwan will have the defense policy it wants. The United States currently
insists that Taiwan abandon its previous strategy of engaging its enemy away
from its shores and instead focus on defense of its homeland. The former
strategy made a great deal of sense given that Taiwan suffers from a lack of
strategic depth and is a maritime island, dependent on trade.
Now the United States insists that
Taiwan withstand a potentially blistering missile and air campaign, not hit
back, and focus only on preparing for a possible invasion of the island. This
is both unwise and unrealistic. No democratic president can simply ask his
people to hunker down and take a missile salvo. There would be enormous public
pressure to hit back, in order to bolster national morale if nothing else. But
the ability to hit back even in a limited fashion can work strategically as
well.
Consider a fairly recent example:
After a devastating air campaign by Israel in 2006, the fact that Hezbollah was
still able to fire even crude rockets into Israel was a source of great
frustration among the Israeli military and of terror among Israel's population.
The belief among most observers is that Israel lost that war despite its
superior military capabilities. Hezbollah was still able to reach out and touch
Israel.
Taiwan's military wants to retain
some ability to show its population that it can hit back, even if such a
capability would not be decisive. A show of force of this kind would also
signal to China that it has to pay a higher price in blood and treasure to
achieve its political goals. Remember, a failure in national security policy
can be very threatening to the Chinese Communist Party. While it could mean a Chinese
escalation after an initial tactical failure, it could also mean that China
would cut its losses after "making its point" and call it quits.
But Taiwan's military does not
just want some strike capability to deter and embarrass China; it also needs the
means to defend its airspace and break blockades. Here is how our faulty
assumptions translate into policy: The United States insists that Taiwan does
not need or cannot have an air force. But Taiwan's main procurement goal is new
F-16s. The Taiwanese know that they need some ability to engage Chinese
fighters and provide some protection over Taiwan. Taiwan's other big
procurement goal is submarines. But after approving the sale of submarines to
Taiwan, the United States has been sitting on Taiwan's request for submarines
for 13 years. Taiwan has an open request for submarines that has been
collecting dust in the interagency decision-making process. This is a moral and
strategic outrage. Taiwan needs a very robust undersea warfare capability that
could cause China big headaches in trying to track that capability.
If the United States not provide
Taiwan with the defense capabilities it needs, it will likely develop more
dangerous options (as it did in the 1980s). The point is that Taiwan's
president will need to protect his people with any means he has, no matter what
the Washington bureaucracy thinks.
5. We won't
act to help Taiwan. This may be the most dangerous assumption of all. There is
a sense of fatalism and defeatism combined with a notion that "unification
is inevitable" setting in among foreign-and defense-policy observers in
Washington and around the world.
The argument is that Taiwan is indefensible and that the United
States won't risk its relations with China over Taiwan. But there is a credible
argument that Washington gets into conflicts because potential adversaries
underestimate U.S. willingness to abide by its commitments. It is worth
remembering that the United States was not supposed to "die for
Danzig," that Berlin did not seem worth it either in the Cold War, and
that South Korea was outside the U.S. defense perimeter before the Korean War.
The United States is hard to read
because of the diffusion and openness of its policymaking. And it may seem and
even be unpredictable. But a defensible reading of history is that when the
global balance of power is at stake, the United States reacts forcefully. If
China started a war over Taiwan, all previous assumptions would be quickly
dispatched, and fear, anxiety, emotion, a president's calculation over vital
interests, and allied concern would all set in. It would be a mistake for China
in particular to read too much into seeming U.S. complacency now. If Taiwan is
under coercive threat, all calculations change. The United States wants to
avoid a conflict; to do so, it cannot allow its benign negligence of Taiwan to
be interpreted as a lessening of U.S. commitment to Taiwan's security.
The talks between the Mainland
Affairs Council and the Taiwan Affairs Office prove that the supposedly master
grand strategists, such as Kissinger and some his successors, were wrong about
a major international issue. They simply did not factor in all the elements
that drive international politics. When they assumed Taiwan away, they ignored
Taiwan's will to exist and thrive, as well as broad U.S. public support for
Taiwan. Now, whether by design or not, China has taken a step toward
recognizing Taiwan's status in international politics. (It is sad and ironic
that high-level Taiwanese officials can go to China but not the United States
for high-level summitry). The talks will not lead to any substantive
breakthrough, but they are a symbolic breakthrough. To avoid miscalculation and
conflict, the United States would do well to fortify this gain and insist that
the precedent has been set. Continued government-to-government talks between
China and Taiwan should continue often and at all levels.
This is the road to a peaceful
resolution of disputes between Beijing and Taipei. Meanwhile, the United States
must keep its powder dry, read its own strategic history, and not self-deter by
assuming the worst about the credibility of its own commitments. The United
States must also realize that Taiwan will also continue to hedge by improving
its defense capacity in its own way. The United States must be realistic about
what a democracy must do to demonstrate its ability to defend itself and must
stop the flights of fancy that have led to a current de facto arms-sales
freeze. This sort of policy would serve U.S. interests and may even be
realistic.
Dan Blumenthal is the director of Asian Studies at the American
Enterprise Institute. This article was originally published in Foreign
Policy on February 12, 2014.