For some 50 years, American policy toward Taiwan has been based on the assertion that people on both sides of the Taiwan Straits believe that they are part of the same country and merely dispute who should run it and precisely how and when the island and the continent should be reunified. It is a falsehood so widely stated and so often repeated that officials sometimes forget that it is simply untrue. Indeed, they–and other members of the foreign-policy establishment–get anxious if you call it a lie.
It may have been a necessary lie when the United States recognized the People’s Republic of China, although it is more likely that the United States got snookered by Chinese diplomats in the mid-1970s, when they needed us far more than we needed them. It may even be necessary now, but a lie it remains. Acknowledging this fact is not merely a matter of intellectual hygiene but an imperative if we are to prevent China from attempting to gobble up this island nation of 24 million, thereby unhinging the international order in Asia and beyond.
On a recent visit to Taiwan, I had the chance to talk with the president, the candidates to replace her, senior ministers, academic experts, diplomats, and soldiers. Those conversations brought home to me just how pernicious the falsehood has been. Taiwan is an independent country. Its people have (on the evidence of repeated polling) little interest in becoming part of the mainland, and by substantial majorities consider themselves more Taiwanese than Chinese. It has its own currency, a thriving economy, lively democratic politics, sizable armed forces, a more and more desperate foreign policy–everything that makes a country independent.
The reflexive reaction of American officials and experts today when one mentions Taiwan is, as in the past, a red-faced insistence that they better not go for independence. Those officials rarely produce evidence that the Taiwanese are about to declare independence. They do not even seem to realize that Taiwan already is independent in every meaningful sense. They are just conditioned to fulminate, grimly or histrionically depending on their nature.
This finger-wagging is a pompous assertion of hegemony over a protectorate that we have yet to say unambiguously we will protect. When President Joe Biden repeatedly lets slip that we would do so with force, his aides, in a bureaucratic reflex created by years of unthinking habit, insist that the president does not mean it. As a result, once again Americans have set up a minor ally for failure, and then blamed them for our shortsightedness.
In this case, 50 years of being told, in effect, to sit in a corner and not disturb the grown-ups has made Taiwan more difficult for the United States to defend, and less able to defend itself. Because of Taiwan’s military isolation, its armed forces are literally insular, inexperienced, and deprived of all the benefits that countries like South Korea or Japan get from regular, routine training and operation with the U.S. armed forces. Because the United States, in a superfluity of cleverness and caution, continues to refuse to say whether it would fight for Taiwan, the Taiwanese themselves are not sure that they would adopt the New Hampshire motto “Live free or die.” And honestly, who can blame them?
Lie follows lie. A president of Taiwan cannot visit the United States–rather, they are “in transit” somewhere else, usually one of the few Caribbean countries (St. Kitts, for example) that China has not yet coerced into cutting diplomatic recognition. The United States has an “American Institute in Taiwan,” not an embassy. The deputy assistant secretaries of state responsible for Taiwan (and the same goes for those in the Defense Department, of course) cannot visit the country. The handful of American service personnel there cannot go about in uniform. The U.S. does not openly conduct exercises with the forces with which it would–maybe–fight side by side. All this when Washington needs, more than ever, intimate connections with Taiwan.
It is a comfortable lie, which the government is unwilling to acknowledge as such, let alone confront, because the United States has allowed China’s Communist rulers to shape how we understand this part of the world. And while China prepares its forces for a bloody invasion of the island, its real strategy is more that of the constant squeeze, in multiple dimensions simultaneously–bribing countries to drop their recognition of Taiwan, pushing it out of international forums, seducing and suborning Taiwanese surrogates and likely collaborators, and an intense ramping up of military operations around the island to unnerve its population and exhaust its defenders. In the past, the Chinese armed forces rarely crossed the “median line” between the island and the mainland–now they do so routinely. China periodically fires missiles near the island. It has violated the Taiwanese air-defense interception zone so far this year several times more frequently than it did in 2020. And, of course, it maintains a drumbeat of threats directed as much against the United States as against Taipei.
The Chinese are masters at the art of incremental and psychological pressure, which suggests the counter–namely, doing the same to them. Why not let American military personnel operate on the island in uniform? Why not let senior diplomats and defense officials visit? Why not conduct open training? Why not, come to think of it, maintain a knowing silence the next time President Biden slips and says that we would defend the island? The Chinese would react–but then again, American inaction over Chinese base-building in the South China Sea merely encouraged more such activity. Passivity is the greater danger here.
And the United States should be prepared to fight for Taiwan. Should the island fall to China, America’s most potent geopolitical rival will have gained the world’s 21st-largest economy, roughly equivalent to Switzerland’s or Poland’s. China would also gain a dense clot of advanced technology, particularly in the area of computer chips. A key piece of the so-called first island chain in the Pacific would be in hostile hands, endangering the sea lanes of our closest Pacific allies, particularly Japan. American credibility would take a brutal blow, and our allies would have to wonder whether they should accommodate China or resort to the development of their own nuclear arsenals to substitute for the guarantees of an unreliable superpower.
And not least important: Another liberal democratic state would be snuffed out, in a world in which free government, liberty, and rule of law are already under pressure.
Eighty-five years ago, the leader of the world’s greatest global power shrugged off interest in a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” There are those who would say the same today of Ukraine. Neville Chamberlain’s foolish words were seared in the memory of an earlier generation, who learned the hard way that the stakes in such places can be far larger and far graver than domestically obsessed politicians might imagine.
It is now generally acknowledged that history is very far from being at an end and that, pressing as they are, issues of transnational significance such as climate change and environmental degradation are not the only urgent ones. We are back in a world of great-power politics, and to deal with it, those who make policy need to do the simplest, if sometimes the hardest, thing: start with the truth, and take prudent but firm steps to undo the effects of falsehood.