Joseph Bosco
Warren Buffet just cast a vote of no confidence in the ability and/or will of the administration of US President Joe Biden to deter China from attacking Taiwan just as it failed to deter Russia from invading Ukraine while boasting that it knew the assault was coming.
Buffet voted with his feet by walking away from his once-formidable investment in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world’s leading chipmaker and Taiwan’s flagship high-tech company. His announcement came only days after Elon Musk said that China’s conquest and occupation of Taiwan was “an inevitability.” Other foreign corporations have also grown increasingly nervous about the prospect of war across the Taiwan Strait and the danger that it would lead to a US-China conflict.
Some political and national security pundits, such as US Senator Josh Hawley and Elbridge Colby, a deputy assistant secretary of defense during the administration of former US president Donald Trump, argue that US support for Ukraine drains military resources that would be needed to supply Taiwan for its self-defense.
That zero-sum approach is flawed, first because the nature of a cross-strait conflict would differ from the kind of grinding land war that is being waged in Ukraine, and would employ mostly different naval, air and missile systems.
Moreover, geostrategically, the West must do whatever it takes to defend both Ukraine and Taiwan to prevent either Russia or China from successfully upending the international order. President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) and Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the US Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) have voiced their conviction that democracy must be defended everywhere that authoritarian powers are attacking it.
Biden and NATO have said they would support Ukraine’s defense for “as long as it takes” — after having looked the other way when Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 and eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014.
Putin, on the other hand, aided and abetted by his “no limits strategic partner,” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), is betting that Western resistance would flag in the face of Russia’s brutal onslaught and the Putin-stoked fears of escalation.
Putin and Xi are counting on the prospect that negotiations and the West’s proclivity for compromise would result in Ukraine being compelled to make territorial concessions to Moscow. As happened with Russia’s earlier invasions, that would provide the base for further Russian expansion. It would also encourage China’s aggressive plans for Taiwan.
The time for word games and rhetorical posturing is over — Washington must end its policy of strategic ambiguity on defending Taiwan. More than the provision of particular weapons systems, a clear official statement of US intention to defend Taiwan will both deter Chinese aggression, and assuage corporate and governmental concerns.
The muddling of the US’ commitment to Taiwan’s security started with former US president Richard Nixon’s decision to open US relations with China and to delegate the negotiation to Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser.
Granted, the year was 1972 and Taiwan was still ruled by the dictatorship of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), not yet irreversibly on the path to democracy. Yet, the importance of Taiwan’s geostrategic location had already been demonstrated by imperial Japan’s use of the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” to launch its war of aggression in Southeast Asia, and by then-US president Harry Truman’s decision after North Korea invaded South Korea to send the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait and halt communist expansion in East Asia.
Nixon had premised his opening to China on the belief that “China must change” its hostility toward the rules-based international order if the world was to avoid Chinese communist-led conflict in Asia and elsewhere. Those considerations did not inhibit Kissinger from agreeing to the Shanghai communique, which helped set the stage for the next four decades of emerging Sino-US confrontation over Taiwan.
It was the beginning of official US ambiguity on Taiwan, what Kissinger called “America’s return to Realpolitik.” Washington “acknowledge[d]” and did “not challenge” Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) — and Chiang’s — claim that Taiwan was “part of China,” and “reaffirm[ed] its interest in a peaceful settlement.”
Then-US president Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Bzrezinsky, followed the Nixon-Kissinger approach when Washington officially switched diplomatic relations from Taiwan to China in 1979. The sidelined and irate US Congress responded with the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), which strongly reaffirmed the US’ moral, political and security commitment to Taiwan.
However, the TRA continued the official ambiguity on whether the US would directly defend Taiwan beyond providing “defense articles and defense services … to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability.” It stated that Washington would “maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion” against Taiwan — but it did not commit to the exercise of that capacity.
The ambiguity was concisely articulated during the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis when Chinese defense officials asked then-US president Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of defense, Joseph Nye, what Washington would do if China attacked Taiwan. Nye did not invoke the TRA, saying instead: “We don’t know and you don’t know; it would depend on the circumstances.”
Former US secretary of defense William Perry said the statement “perfectly” expressed US policy. Every subsequent administration has reiterated that US policy on defending Taiwan “has not changed” — even after former US presidents George W. Bush and Trump, and now Biden (four times) stated or strongly implied they would use US force to defend Taiwan.
Xi must be made to understand that those presidential utterances were not top-of-the-head responses, but reflections of well-considered internal US policy. At this fraught point in US-China relations, the only way to convince Beijing they were not bluffs or posturing for domestic political purposes is for the Biden administration to issue a clear, formal statement of US policy to defend Taiwan.
If strategic ambiguity is not finally ended, it would lead to major strategic miscalculation on China’s part — precisely the opposite of what Nye thought he was achieving with his opaque formulation. Nye explained years later he wanted to prevent a repetition of the communists’ mistake in 1950 — Kissinger said the Korean War erupted because “we did not expect the invasion; China did not expect our reply.”
History may be about to repeat itself.
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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