Book Review

Mixed Signals

• Byline:ROBERT GREEN
• Publication Date:07/01/2009

Former ROC President Chiang Ching-kuo receives then US Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, right, in December 1978. Christopher traveled to Taipei to discuss future relations after the US government announced it would establish diplomatic ties with mainland China. (File Photo)

A Georgetown University historian helps decode a half-century of diplomatic exchanges between the United States and Taiwan.

Official US policy on the Taiwan Strait hinges on the preservation of the status quo. The United States is opposed to any change not agreed upon by the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, a position that has frustrated both Taipei's desire for greater international recognition as well as Beijing's desire to capture territory it claims as its own. But preserving the status quo, a patently static objective, belies the extraordinary intensity of diplomatic exchanges between Taipei and Washington over the last half-century and the evolution of a relationship that has been marked by a succession of dramatic developments.

In Strait Talk: United States-Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, a professor of history at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., chronicles the tortured route that led to the United States withdrawal of recognition for the Republic of China (ROC) and arrival at the US policy of strategic ambiguity. Tucker writes that strategic ambiguity, first adopted under former US President Dwight Eisenhower, is intended "to keep friend and foe, Taipei and Beijing, guessing about the circumstances under which the US might intercede in a military conflict in the Strait."

Arguably, the policy has contributed to stability in East Asia and the preservation of the status quo, but it has met with skepticism even in Washington, where successive administrations have grappled with its subtleties. Former US President George W. Bush, determined to be a decisive voice in global affairs, attempted to abandon the ambiguity altogether. During his first presidential term, Bush warned Beijing that the United States would "do whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself."

The message was clear enough, until Bush became increasingly alarmed by the adoption of referenda and other tactics to further a permanent separation of Taiwan from mainland China during the administration of former ROC President Chen Shui-bian. Bush was advised to signal disapproval to the Chen administration by stating that the United States does not support independence activities without the consent of the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Bush responded with his habitual, if tortured, straight talk: "I'm not a nuance guy--'Do not support.' 'Oppose.' It's the same to me."

The Bush administration therefore succeeded in delivering firm messages to both Beijing and Taipei, and both reacted badly to the heavy-handed approach. Ultimately, Bush quieted the signals coming from Washington and reverted to the ambiguity that he originally found so distasteful.

Tucker's study illustrates similar frustrations for US presidents when attempting to grapple with mainland China-Taiwan policy over the past half-century. The portrait that emerges is one of the growing influence of mainland China on the thinking of US leaders and an attendant drop in official support for Taiwan. The result, according to Tucker, is a legacy of mistrust between Taipei and Washington. "Mistrust," she writes, "has been just one feature of US-Taiwan relations, but it has been the most central, damaging, and persistent."

Changing the Rules

If there is a central villain in Tucker's tale of US policy moving away from Taipei and toward Beijing, it is Henry Kissinger, who served first as national security advisor to former US President Richard Nixon and then as secretary of state under both Nixon and his successor, former US President Gerald Ford. Kissinger, who is considered a foreign policy guru even today, saw an opening for his ardently anti-communist boss Nixon to isolate the Soviet Union by opening relations with the regime in Beijing.

Ideologically, Nixon and Kissinger believed that geostrategic concerns required an emphasis on great nations, such as Russia and mainland China, even at the expense of fellow democracies and old friends. After Nixon was elected on an anti-war platform, he took office in 1969 with the desire to wind down US involvement in Vietnam. Kissinger, overestimating the influence of Beijing on Hanoi, believed that a rapprochement with the Chinese could aid in the extraction of US troops from Vietnam and help enlist mainland China in US attempts to contain the Soviet Union.

To reach an agreement with the Chinese, Kissinger engaged in secret talks, leaving the US Department of State and supporters of the ROC in the dark. Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy resulted in the 1972 meeting in mainland China between Nixon and Mao Zedong, the former chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Strategically, Nixon and Kissinger believed that the normalization of relations with the regime in Beijing would shift the balance of power toward the United States in its struggle against the Soviet Union by recruiting the world's most populous nation and by driving a wedge between the two giants of the communist bloc.

Tucker is perhaps most critical of the speed of the negotiations. The process seemed to develop an urgency that hardly reflected the reality of the situation. Beijing, possessing a long view of history, placed more emphasis on long-term goals than the eager American statesmen. Tucker attributes some of this urgency to the personal ambitions of Nixon and Kissinger to go down in history as the authors of a historic opening to mainland China.

 

Since formal diplomatic ties were severed in 1979, the American Institute in Taiwan in Taipei has served as the United States' primary representative office on the island. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)

The artificial urgency, in retrospect, seems to have undermined US negotiating positions. For its part, the United States got little more than the opening of a communications channel with Beijing. Mao, however, helped speed the withdrawal of US troops from neighboring Vietnam and got a commitment from the United States to draw down its forces in Taiwan and eventually end the US-Taiwan Mutual Defense Treaty--a treaty that undercut Mao's claim that Taiwan was part of mainland China and solely an internal matter.

It is hard to argue with Tucker's assessment of the shuttle diplomacy. "Nixon and Kissinger wanted so intensely to realize their goal," she writes, "that they surrendered more than was necessary to achieve it, and the price was paid, not in the near term by the Nixon White House, but over the long term by the people of Taiwan and by US diplomacy writ large."

At the time, the opening with mainland China was enormously popular with the American public and sealed the reputations of Nixon and Kissinger as statesmen of great vision. Yet as Nixon and Kissinger pressed forward to fully recognize the government in Beijing, their efforts met fierce resistance in the US Congress, which was loath to abandon Taiwan or to appease the communists in Beijing. Watergate and hostility to the abandonment of Taiwan ultimately foiled a complete normalization of US-mainland China relations under Nixon.

Kissinger subsequently developed a hostility to Taipei that is hard to understand, except in terms of personal ambition and resentment. Kissinger refused to meet with Taiwanese diplomats and believed that Beijing had every right to expect the United States to end its defense commitments to Taiwan, which would almost surely result in a mainland attack on Taiwan. "To us the question of the defense commitment is primarily a question of the way it can be presented politically," Kissinger explained to mainland China's leaders. "It is not a question of maintaining it for an indefinite period of time."

That such hostility to an old ally could exist in the executive branch of the US government alarmed Taipei and contributed to the growing mistrust that Tucker tracks.

The Lowest Point

The normalization of the relationship between Beijing and Washington was completed by former US President Jimmy Carter in 1979, when mainland China was recognized by the United States and the ROC was derecognized. The withdrawal of support for the ROC plunged the US-Taiwan relationship to its lowest point.

Many in the United States shared Taiwan's deep disappointment, especially in the US Congress. In response to Carter's severing of official relations with Taipei, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which tied US prestige to the defense of Taiwan by requiring, by law, that the United States arm Taiwan for defensive purposes. The Chinese, Congress was saying, might have secured an unwarranted diplomatic victory, but they would not have Taiwan as well.

 

The third meeting between representatives from Taiwan and mainland China in late April continued the trend of lessening tensions between the two sides, a goal long shared by the United States. (Central News Agency)

Tucker's work is perhaps most effective when examining the push and pull of power between the US Congress and the White House. It can come as a surprise to other nations how often US foreign policy is determined by partisan gamesmanship and by members of congress who often have scant foreign policy experience.

This lesson has not been lost on the Taiwanese. Tucker alludes to the ritual indoctrination of new members of the US House of Representatives, who are elected for two-year terms, to the competition between Beijing and Taipei by partisan supporters. While Beijing ruthlessly pursued mainland-friendly decisions from the US executive branch, Taiwan, with its downgraded diplomatic status and curtailed access to the White House and Department of State, focused on the US Congress. Lobbyists from Taiwan could appeal to members of Congress on many fronts--anti-communist sentiment, a shared wartime history with the ROC, Beijing's human rights violations and its curtailment of religious freedoms.

The Taiwanese had become so good at working these connections that the ROC lobby became, in Tucker's words, "a lobbying juggernaut second only to Israel in its ability to manipulate Washington." The lobby enlisted supporters who over the years became so attached to Taiwan that they worked themselves into paroxysms of disgust over Carter's derecognition. In a study edited by congressional staffer John Tierney Jr. entitled About Face, Robert Dole, then a Republican senator from Kansas, wrote of the consequences of Carter's decision: "The United States cannot afford to abandon good allies and friends for short-term political expediency."

No champion of Taiwan was more vocal than Barry Goldwater, a former Republican senator from Arizona and onetime presidential candidate. In his article in About Face entitled "The Betrayal of Taiwan by President Carter," Goldwater writes that by recognizing the regime in Beijing, Carter "downgraded, humiliated, and victimized the Republic of China on Taiwan, one of this nation's most faithful and valuable allies." Goldwater went on to launch a quixotic lawsuit trying to undo Carter's executive decision.

Congressional support strengthened Taipei's belief in the efficacy of lobbying US officials to minimize the effects of mainland China-friendly policies emanating from the Oval Office. Taiwan's friends in Congress ultimately secured for Taiwan a continued de facto military alliance, though they could not prevent a US drift toward Beijing. The history of the US-Taiwan relationship, so skillfully woven together in Tucker's work, suggests that Taiwan benefited from continuously cultivating supporters in the United States to preserve security ties, even after the disappointing loss of official support.

Does History Matter?

In her account of this strained relationship, Tucker for the most part steers clear of the theoretical approaches found in most political science books on the subject. She is, after all, a historian, and as she states at the outset, "The final reason for writing this book has been to demonstrate that history matters. Current relations and future problems can be fully understood only through a historical framework."

This assertion, de rigueur for her field, nonetheless fails to explain how history shapes foreign policy. It is, in fact, a subject of great debate among those who study international relations. In providing a record of the exchanges that have led to the current state of US-Taiwan relations, she succeeds admirably. History is good at addressing the what, but has more trouble with the why.

Does the history of the events, for example, adequately allow us to understand why the United States would abandon an old ally and seek a relationship with a communist state with which it had little in common? Is there a theoretical model that better explains over time why states act in particular ways?

Nixon and Kissinger based their own approach to foreign policy on a European model of great state power politics. In their view, the actions of states and the making and breaking of alliances was better explained by the desire for a balance of power rather than historical connections or the accumulation of events. Tucker's chronicle of US-Taiwan relations also indicates that the interplay of institutions might be more important drivers of international relations. Her excellent excavation of the power struggle between the executive and legislative branches of the US government seems to suggest that an understanding of the divisions within the branches of the US government is of great value as a guide to predicting or shaping the course of future US policy on Taiwan.

Similarly, the trajectory of the US shift toward better relations with mainland China at the expense of Taiwan indicates a powerful argument that the US government, no matter how sympathetic to Taiwan, will place larger geostrategic considerations first, even if it is unwilling to abandon the defense guarantees to Taiwan. Sometimes those considerations will complement Taiwan's interests, and sometimes they will not.

Mistrust, therefore, is sure to linger. Tucker calls for straight talk between the United States and Taiwan to mitigate the misunderstandings and focus on common goals. It is an admirable notion, but as the history she recounts shows, the avoidance of straight talk and the use of ambiguity have given both the United States and Taiwan greater leeway in pursuing their own interests, despite being deeply unsatisfying to advocates in both the United States and Taiwan of a firmer alliance.

Today, a number of factors increase the likelihood of positive relations between the United States and Taiwan, even within the larger framework of strategic ambiguity. Taiwan's robust democracy and vital role in global commerce engender sympathy and admiration in the United States and position Taiwan as a model for development in East Asia. Moreover, Taiwan's recent engagement with the mainland has lessened tensions in the Taiwan Strait and allowed, at least for now, a rare opportunity for discussions to move beyond the necessities of national defense.

Robert Green is a regular contributor to Economist Intelligence Unit publications on Taiwan.

Copyright © 2009 by Robert Green