The U.S. Can Play a ‘Taiwan Card’

Wall Street Journal
JOHN BOLTON
Taiwan’s elections have returned the Democratic Progressive Party to power. Rolling over the incumbent Kuomintang (KMT) nationalists, the DPP won both the presidency and a legislative majority, giving it controls of both elective branches for the first time.
President-elect Tsai Ing-wen didn’t center her campaign on attacking the KMT policy of closer relations with China, focusing instead on Taiwan’s lagging economy, but neither did she reject the bedrock DPP platform of independence from China. Her rhetoric, including her victory statement on Saturday, has been cautious. But her party’s base knows what it wants. Inevitably, therefore, East Asia warning flags are up.
Of course, the U.S. will also have presidential elections in 2016, and most of the Republican candidates are determined to replace the vacuum that exists where America’s China policy should be. This may involve modifying or even jettisoning the ambiguous “one China” mantra, along with even more far-reaching initiatives to counter Beijing’s rapidly accelerating political and military aggressiveness in the South and East China seas.
Repeatedly met with passivity from Washington and impotence from the region, Beijing has declared much of the South China Sea a Chinese province, designated a provincial capital, and is creating not merely “facts on the ground” but the ground itself, in the form of artificial islands on which it is constructing air and naval bases.
Predictably, China’s partisans in the West contend that Beijing’s current economic troubles mean Xi Jinping won’t move first to provoke trouble with Ms. Tsai’s administration in Taipei. But Beijing’s ongoing reckoning with economic reality doesn’t necessarily mean it will be less assertive internationally. Authoritarian governments confronted with domestic problems have historically sought to distract their citizens by rallying nationalistic support against foreign adversaries. Who better to blame for China’s economic crash than the U.S. and pesky Taiwan?
How Ms. Tsai would react to Mr. Xi’s provocations remains unknown. Of course China would prefer for Taiwan to fall into its lap like a ripe fruit, with its economic infrastructure and productivity intact, rather than to risk hostilities over the island. But in the period to come Beijing must consider not merely a less pliant Taiwanese government, but also America’s next president.
Beijing knows that the weak, inattentive President Barack Obama will be in office for only one more year. Whereas even Bill Clinton ordered U.S. carrier battle groups to Taiwan’s aid in the 1996 cross-Strait crisis, few Americans today believe that Mr. Obama would do the same.
How could Beijing’s leadership not draw the same conclusion? Washington’s current unwillingness to stand firm against Chinese belligerence in Asian waters only encourages Beijing to act before Jan. 20, 2017, perhaps especially before Ms. Tsai is inaugurated in four months. For now observers can only monitor East Asia’s geopolitical space, involving not just Taiwan but also the South and East China seas, until America’s inauguration day, praying that the Asian situation is not hopeless by then.
For a new U.S. president willing to act boldly, there are opportunities to halt and then reverse China’s seemingly inexorable march toward hegemony in East Asia. Playing the “China card” in the Nixon Administration made sense at the time, but the reflexive, near-addictive adherence to pro-China policies since has become unwise and increasingly risky as Beijing’s isolation and backwardness have diminished.
An alternative now would be to play the “Taiwan card” against China. America should insist that China reverse its territorial acquisitiveness, including abandoning its South China Sea bases and undoing the ecological damage its construction has caused. China is free to continue asserting its territorial claims diplomatically, but until they are peacefully resolved with its near neighbors, they and the U.S. are likewise free to ignore such claims in their entirety.
If Beijing isn’t willing to back down, America has a diplomatic ladder of escalation that would compel Beijing’s attention. The new U.S. administration could start with receiving Taiwanese diplomats officially at the State Department; upgrading the status of U.S. representation in Taipei from a private “institute” to an official diplomatic mission; inviting Taiwan’s president to travel officially to America; allowing the most senior U.S. officials to visit Taiwan to transact government business; and ultimately restoring full diplomatic recognition.
Beijing’s leaders would be appalled by this approach, as the U.S. is appalled by their maritime territorial aggression. China must understand that creating so-called provinces risks causing itself to lose control, perhaps forever, of another so-called province. Even were China to act more responsibly in nearby waters, of course, Taiwan’s fate would still be for its people to decide.
Too many foreigners continue echoing Beijing’s view that Taiwan is a problem only resolvable by uniting the island and the mainland as “one China.” But Taiwan’s freedom isn’t a problem. It is an inspiration. Let Beijing contemplate that fact on the ground.