Taiwan is the fortress island dominating the sea passage between the South and East China Seas, the linchpin of the first island chain of US allies that blocks the Chinese navy from dominating Asia’s coastal nations from Japan and South Korea down to Indonesia and Australia and westward past Singapore and India to the Persian Gulf and Europe.
by Richard Schulman
China’s communist dictatorship is determined to become the dominant power in the world and crush the opposition of the free peoples in Asia and Australia, as it just did in Hong Kong. To do so, it must become the hegemonic power on that continent, such that no other Asian nation dares oppose it.
To that end, China is furiously building up its navy, already the largest in the world, with an amphibious assault capability. As part of its formidable military buildup, China is fielding nuclear weapons, missiles of various ranges and intended targets, anti-satellite and cyber-war capabilities, and a modern air force. In violation of international law, it claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea. That sea is just north of the Malacca Strait, through which a third of world trade passes.
But China’s immediate target is the conquest of Taiwan. Taiwan and the US must ensure that China is thwarted in this endeavor.
Richard Haass, president of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in New York, has just co-authored a Foreign Affairs article, “American Support for Taiwan Must Be Unambiguous,” that scooped the present article by 24 hours. We strongly urge readers to read both the Foreign Affairs article and ours here, because they have different strengths. Haass et al. excel at describing a diplomatic approach that will maximize face-saving in Beijing without conceding what is essential from a US standpoint. Our article provides a blunt summary of US-Chinese relations regarding Taiwan. The reader will come away understanding why China is rooting for Joe Biden to win the presidential race rather than Donald Trump. The reader will also understand why Taiwan has such great geopolitical importance to both the US and China. Our article also takes exception to the CFR’s predictable genuflections to Henry Kissinger.
Taiwan’s geographical importance
To subordinate the countries of East Asia to itself, China must control the East and South China Seas. It can claim sovereignty over the South China Sea and build illegal military installations atop shoals there, but it will not really control those coastal waters, much less gain secure access to the Pacific Ocean, until it breaks the first island chain controlled by US allies running from Japan down to Australia.
Taiwan is the linchpin of this entire island chain. It sits midway between the East and South China Seas, an island fortress commanding access to both seas. China specialist Gordon Chang writes:
“[F]or more than a century the United States has drawn its western defense perimeter off the coast of East Asia, and Taiwan sits at the center of that crucial line, at the intersection of the South China Sea and East China Sea. It is not ‘the turd in the punch-bowl of U.S.-China relations’ as an American admiral was reported to have said; it is ‘the cork in the bottle,’ as Admiral Ernest King termed it. Taiwan helps keep China’s navy and air force confined to the country’s peripheral areas. At a time of increasing Chinese territorial aggression, Taiwan’s role in anchoring America’s western defense perimeter is critical.”
Balance of power considerations
Although the US no longer is the uncontested world hegemon that it was in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed, it still is the only great power militarily unchallenged in its own region, the Americas. Since the 1890s when the US began building its own powerful blue water navy, its grand strategy, like that of 18th and 19th century Great Britain before it, has been to act as an offshore balancer — a nation uninterested in dominating any important geographical region beside its own. But, as offensive realism predicts, the US, like every other great power before it, is very much interested in making sure that no other nation succeeds in obtaining hegemony in its own region and then using that secure platform to seek world domination.
Thus, 18th and 19th century Britain through continental alliances and, if necessary, wars, endeavored to prevent first France, then Germany, from dominating the European continent. In the first half of the 20th century, the US fought in World War I and II to prevent German domination of Europe and the Mediterranean, while simultaneously, during WWII, fighting to prevent Japan from dominating Asia.
The first Cold War
The motive for the Cold War was the US imperative, during the 1945-1991 period, to prevent the Soviet Union from dominating Europe and Asia. To achieve that purpose, the US built up conventional and nuclear forces and formed extensive alliances in Europe, the Mideast, and the Pacific region. That strategy, carried out with fairly consistent bipartisan support, held off the Soviet Union until the peaceful collapse of its formidable empire in 1991.
Now, in the 21st century, with a much larger population and economic base, China threatens to become an even more dangerous and totalitarian threat than the Soviet Union was.
For China, the road to world domination necessarily begins with becoming the unchallenged hegemon in Asia. It has brutally conquered peaceful Tibet and now tortures the Uighurs of Sinkiang. Fresh from devouring the island state of Hong Kong in violation of treaty obligations, it now mobilizes to do the same to Taiwan.
Why this must not succeed
If that were to happen, the other nations of East Asia would see that the US cannot prevent them from being dominated by China and would resign themselves to negotiating their new tributary status to the Great Khans of Beijing. The US must therefore ensure that Taiwan has an independent capability of resisting a Chinese takeover, underwritten with guaranteed military backup from the US, with none of the ambiguity enshrined in previous US policy. This must be a bipartisan commitment, passed into law by Congress, signed by the President, and confirmed by a mutual defense pact with Taiwan.
Ambiguity as a response to an aggressive power is an invitation to war, as the French and British learned to their cost in relation to Hitler, and the US in relationship to Korea in 1950 and Iraq in 1990.
The successful containment of China by the US and its allies will result in the collapse or overthrow of China’s communist regime and the liberation of its captive nations and rural hukou (戶口) serfs. The Taiwanese can then consider whether they wish to unite with a democratic China. We don’t think they will, however, any more than Austria wishes to unite with the Germany that seized it in 1938. Two-thirds of the Taiwanese now self-identify as Taiwanese, not Chinese.
A short history US-China relations concerning Taiwan
Without dwelling on the relatively beneficial relationship of the US to China up to 1948 by comparison with Japan and the European great powers – contrary to the Beijing regime’s rewriting of that history – the present state of US relations with Communist China began in 1971 with President Richard Nixon’s opening to China. Its purpose was to form a US-Chinese understanding in opposition to the Soviet Union. While that made sense at the time, the accompanying US kowtowing didn’t. As an article in The Diplomat points out,
“Nixon and [Nixon’s national security adviser Henry] Kissinger gave China nearly everything that they could have asked for. The most important of these concessions was the ‘one China’ policy, in which the United States acknowledged ‘that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.’”
Kissinger doubled down on his betrayal of both Taiwanese and US interests by advocating “creative ambiguity” as to whether the US would defend Taiwan in case Communist China moved to conquer it militarily.
From Carter to Obama
President Jimmy Carter favored the Nixon-Kissinger approach to Taiwan and then some. He terminated diplomatic relations with Taiwan as well as a mutual defense pact of twenty-five years standing. But Congress balked and forced on the Carter administration the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) , which mandates US government help in Taiwan’s defense. This is the act that the Haass-CFR article leans on to commit the US to explicitly defending Taiwan while reassuring Beijing that nothing really has changed.
Nevertheless, President Ronald Reagan continued a bipartisan executive-branch tradition of short-changing Taiwan. His administration successfully pressured Taiwan to shut down its advanced nuclear weapons program in the name of non-proliferation. This was a major blow against Taiwan’s ability to defend itself.
President Barack Obama during his two-term administration managed to do more lasting damage to US national security interests in the Pacific and to Taiwan than any of his predecessors. In 2012, the Chinese and Philippine navies got into a scrap over the Scarborough shoal, which is “only 124 nautical miles from the main Philippine island of Luzon and about 550 nautical miles from China’s Hainan Island. The shoal, just rocks above the high-tide waterline, is strategic because it guards Manila and Subic Bay,” Gordon Chang writes. The US brokered an agreement in which both sides were to withdraw. The Philippines did, but China didn’t, and the US did nothing to hold it accountable.
The US empowers Beijing’s imperial faction
Chang continues:
“[T]he Manila political establishment was unnerved by the Obama administration’s failure to defend sovereign territory covered by the U.S.-Philippines mutual defense treaty, and this led to the almost complete breakdown in relations between the two allies when the already anti-American Rodrigo Duterte took office as president in 2016.
“Moreover, by doing nothing to hold China accountable for its deception, an act of territorial aggression, America empowered the most belligerent elements in the Chinese political system by showing everybody else in Beijing that aggression worked.
“Within months after taking control of Scarborough, an emboldened China rapidly stepped up incursions around the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea” and the Spratly chain in the South China Sea.
“The Obama team, continuing its abandonment of Manila, also failed to support its ally after the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague handed down its landmark decision in Philippines v. China in July 2016. The decision invalidated Beijing’s nine-dash line and almost all of China positions.”
Biden’s culpability
As Obama’s Vice-President with wide foreign policy involvement, Joe Biden bears major responsibility for these disastrous decisions. As the progressive publication Vox writes,
“From his years serving as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his time in Congress and later as point person on key aspects of Barack Obama’s handling of the world as vice president, Biden knows what it’s like to have his hands on the controls.
“In 2012, Foreign Policy’s James Taub wrote, ‘It is safe to say that on foreign policy, Biden is the most powerful US vice president in history save for his immediate predecessor, Dick Cheney.’
“That’s the kind of background and know-how few commanders in chief have. ‘He will come into office with a résumé that’s unmatched on foreign policy experience,’ with the possible exception George H.W. Bush, said former Biden congressional adviser James Rubin.”
Alas, Vox concedes, “The bad news is that Biden hasn’t always been — and, according to some, never was — successful on the world stage.”
Indeed.
An even more serious blunder
The Biden-Obama administration compounded its strategic errors by accepting China’s assurances that it wouldn’t militarize the South China Sea artificial islands it had illegally built. The Biden-Obama administration then did nothing but impotently protest when China broke its promise and militarized them. This was a major strategic coup for the Xi dictatorship and the worst military setback of the present century for the US.
In February 2017, one month after assuming office, President Donald Trump seemed destined to continue previous administrations’ East Asian policies, with their tilt toward China at the expense of Taiwan. It was in that month Trump affirmed the Nixon-Kissinger One China policy. Better yet from Beijing’s standpoint, on his first day in office the month before, Trump had withdrawn the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an Obama administration brokered trade agreement with eleven other Pacific-area nations to decrease their dependence on China for trade. The TPP was endorsed by many Republicans, including Vice President Pence.
No more benign neglect of Taiwan
But that may have been the Beijing regime’s last good news from Washington. According to the China-friendly Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy,
“Most conspicuous from Beijing’s perspective were Trump’s decisions to sign into law the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in late 2017 and the Taiwan Travel Act (TTA) in March 2018. The 2018 NDAA not only reaffirmed the long-standing Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) and the Six Assurances—provisions that set the terms of Washington’s informal relationship with Taipei—but also recommended that the United States expand and elevate military relations with Taiwan, including through the possibility of port of call exchanges between the two navies.
“The TTA, meanwhile, was passed by voice vote in the House of Representatives and by unanimous consent in the Senate. The law aims to break self-imposed constraints on the level of official contact between government officials in Washington and Taipei. Although the TTA amounts to a nonbinding ‘formal opinion’ known as a sense of Congress resolution, its passage and the level of congressional support it attracted sent a strong message to Beijing.”
Huawei, TAIPEI Act, artificial islands
Trump moved to shut down Huawei, the crown jewel of Beijing’s military-industrial-intelligence complex, by denying it access to the US technology it needed.
In March 2020, the US passed the TAIPEI act, which committed the US to advocate “for Taiwan’s membership in all international organizations in which statehood is not a requirement” and “for Taiwan to be granted observer status in other appropriate international organizations.”
Then in “In July,” the Wall Street Journal reports, “the U.S. declared Beijing’s maritime claims in the South China Sea unlawful for the first time, and [in late August] it backed up this finding with sanctions aimed at Chinese firms” involved in the illegal artificial islands.
But foolish military sales
The Trump administration also approved the sale of sixty fourth-generation F-16 fighter jets that Taiwan had requested decades earlier. But these would be no match for China’s fifth-generation J-20, and both Taiwan and the US should know better than waste Taiwan’s precious defense funds on such white elephants. As both Taiwan’s recently retired chief of general staff, Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, as well as US strategists have emphasized, Taiwan would be better served by an affordable anti-access / area denial (A2/AD) strategy rather than expensive showpiece weapons from Lockheed and other favored US vendors. The purchases may please US defense lobbyists and look nice in Taiwanese patriotic parades, but they will all be destroyed by Chinese missiles and air superiority on the first day of an invasion.
Whereas if Taiwan were to turn its presently poorly trained reservists into an effective territorial fighting force – that force, combined with thousands of small arms, mines, missiles, torpedoes, and Taiwan’s challenging mountain terrain – would make Taiwan a poison pill for a Chinese invasion force to try to swallow. And this all the more so, once US forces appeared over the horizon.
Emulating Israel and revolutionary France
Taiwan might learn much from Israeli advisers regarding the importance of capable reservists for a small nation under siege. (Israel also has another not so well publicized capability that would enhance Taiwan’s ability to defend itself.)
Repeated US war game simulations have shown Taiwan falling to China despite US help. But this situation is not engraved in stone, nor is the present demoralization of the Taiwanese population regarding its ability to resist a Chinese invasion. In 1792 France had one of the weakest militaries in Europe. Then it undertook massive military reforms, including the famous levée en masse. By 1793 it had the strongest army in Europe. If both Taiwan and the US become gripped with a similar sense of urgency, Taiwan can quickly become defensible. If China’s invasion fails, the regime that launched it will also fall.
What if Biden?
Trump has proved to be a pain in the butt for China, and he could prove to be more so in a second term.
What can be expected if a Biden administration takes over Washington in 2021? So far, Congress has been pursuing an admirably bipartisan approach to China. But what if Biden becomes the nation’s commander-in-chief? It’s no secret that China is rooting for him, not Trump, to become the next US president. For many US voters, that could be held as a strike against Biden, especially if voters are reminded of son Hunter’s raking in the cash in China as an unspoken favor by the communists to the boy’s Dad, who was helping steer the nation’s policy decisions on China.
Xi and his Politburo comrades doubtless remember fondly the Biden-Obama administration’s complacence to China’s aggressions in the South China Sea. There are also Biden’s agreeably Sinophile comments. Last year the former vice president said that he told former president Barack Obama, “China is not our problem.”
And at an Iowa City event during his recent primary campaign, NBC News reports, “Biden was explaining why he believes concerns that China could eventually surpass the U.S. as a world superpower and economic force are overstated. ‘China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,’ the former vice president said. ‘I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us,’ he added.”
Biden doesn’t seem able to conceptualize that the Chinese people are “not bad folks” but that their leaders, the regime that controls what they are allowed to think and who they must fight for, are indeed bad folks.
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