Nicholas Berry
CDI Senior Analyst, nberry@cdi.org
CDI Asia Forum, April 24, 2001
Taiwan has successfully employed a consistent strategy for over two decades, a strategy designed to increase tensions between Beijing and Washington, thereby buying time to consolidate Taiwan’s autonomy. Taiwan needs and wants protection from the United States. Beijing must be made to appear a threat to Washington, a condition which will then facilitate Washington taking sides in Taiwan’s favor. Taiwan is not ready to re-unify with the mainland, much less negotiate about it. Its strategy buys security as well as time.
There are three prongs to Taipei’s strategy.
The first seeks to restore military ties to the United States that were severed when President Carter recognized Beijing in 1979 after accepting China’s stipulation that Washington abrogate the U.S.-Republic of China security treaty and remove its troops from the island.
In response, Taiwan immediately and successfully lobbied the Congress to pass the Taiwan Relations Act. The legislation, albeit with some imprecise wording, committed the United States to provide defensive arms to Taiwan and to maintain the military capacity to come to Taiwan’s defense. U.S. military ties to Taiwan received a big boost in 1992 when Bush I sold 150 F-16s to Taiwan (a decision made in part to firm up Texas’ electoral votes, the state where the fighters would be manufactured). The sale predictably incurred Beijing’s wrath, which confirmed the efficacy of Taipei’s strategy.
Clinton managed to mute and defer controversial arms sales as he followed his China policy of engagement, global integration, and diplomatic understandings with Beijing. Taiwan’s leaders and their American friends were not pleased.
Bush II has now reversed Clinton’s arms sales policy by selling — for the first time — unambiguous offensive weapons. The United States will produce and sell up to eight diesel-electric submarines capable of launching torpedoes and cruise missiles. Beijing had warned Washington not to sell these deadly submarines (along with Aegis-equipped destroyers and PAC-3 anti-aircraft/anti-missile systems — weapons that remain under consideration). Hours before the arms sale to Taiwan was announced, China’s Ambassador Yang Jiechi told a luncheon audience that “China-U.S. relations are at a crossroads; continued U.S. sales of advanced weapons to Taiwan threatens China’s national security, violates its sovereignty, and emboldens the separatist forces on that Chinese island.” Beijing, infused with the nationalism that is sweeping China, expressed outrage after the announcement, not only over the submarine sale but also at the U.S. decision to expand the training of Taiwan forces on a series of advanced weapons systems, including the PAC-3 anti-missile system. This bit-by-bit restoration of the U.S.-Taiwan alliance will inevitably provoke China to dramatic acts of symbolic anger.
Of course, Beijing blithely supported Taiwan’s strategy by holding the 24 members of the EP-3E crew for 11 days and then refusing to make provisions for the aircraft’s return. (In my eight hours of discussions with a group of Chinese officials and analysts in Beijing on April 6, midway into the stalemate over the incident, not once did any Chinese official link Beijing’s strong nationalist stance on the plane and crew with Washington’s upcoming decision on arms sales to Taiwan.)
Taiwan’s second strategic prong has a long history. Ever since the Republic of China moved to Taiwan after its defeat by the communists in 1949, Taipei’s propaganda refrain has targeted the American people, media, and Congress. Its message drums home “Red China’s” brutal dictatorship — a regime that massacres its young, arrests priests and members of spiritual groups, and silences intellectuals. Taiwan added a new verse with the advent of genuine democracy on the island in the mid 1990s. As it repeats continually, Taiwan now represents freedom and democracy in contrast to the communist repression across the Taiwan Strait. This prong relies heavily on Taiwan’s army of paid lobbyists in Washington and their friends in Congress on both sides of the aisle.
The third prong is more recent. Taiwan has developed a strategy to challenge the U.S. pledge to Beijing that it will abstain from diplomatic relations with Taiwan officials. In 1995, Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui, using his clout in the U.S. Congress to pressure Clinton, received a visa to visit his alma mater, Cornell University, where he gave a provocative speech on the theme of Taiwan’s road to democracy. Beijing, following predictable behavior, strongly objected and conducted military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, including missile shots off Taiwan’s coast.
This strategic prong persists. Lee Teng-hui has been granted a visa to again visit Cornell in May. Beijing has protested. Although the Bush administration rightly points out that Lee is no longer an official with diplomatic status, it is also considering granting a visa to the current president, Chen Shui-bian, who has requested a two-day “stopover” visa for New York on his way to a Caribbean tour and one for a stopover in Houston upon his return. President Chen, of course, could take other routes to the Caribbean, but if he receives his visas, his trip would confirm in many people’s minds the growing political-military ties between the United States and Taiwan.
Taiwan, a country of 23 million, has managed to patiently erode the relations between the world’s most powerful state and the world’s largest. It is an amazing feat of strategic maneuver.
-----------------------------
Citation: Nicholas Berry, "Taiwan's Big Victory on Arms Sales," CDI Asia Forum, April 24, 2001.
Original URL: http://www.cdi.org/asia/fa042401.html
----------------------------