Pinned: America’s Taiwan Policy

In chess, a pin is a situation in which a piece is forced to stay put because moving it would expose a more valuable piece behind it to capture. In effect, pinned pieces are blocking a check on a king or blocking an attack on a more valuable piece.

In the above situation, white’s bishop cannot take the knight without being taken by black’s pawn. And black’s knight cannot move because doing so would expose the king (an illegal move). It is a stalement.

New thought: consider these three rules about the status quo in Taiwan:

• China cannot attack Taiwan.
• Taiwan cannot declare independence.
• The US cannot allow either of these to happen.

The situation can be analogized as such:

The US is the watching Taiwan with the chess board and has control of the black knight. What do you do? Chill out. Just wait. Pro-independence President Chen barely won reelection by a slim margin; Taiwan’s foreign policy is imploding; the opposition party is taking trips to China; and cultural and economic ties are growing by leaps and bounds. But this won’t happen tomorrow—polls say 87% of Taiwanese think cross-strait dialogue can be possible only if both sides are equal, and 77% says China must implement democratization before they even talk about reunification. We need patience.

Kaplan caused a stir in the blogosphere when he wrote about a new cold war with China; Barnett has done the same with his BookTV debate on Sunday for his comments on Taiwan (noted by Younghusband here, Joe of MF here, and also here, here, here, here, and here).

China and the U.S. have very few competing interests, other than our strange, still-on-the-books promise to defend Taiwan at all costs (which should be jettisoned immediately.) We have no competing interests in the South China Sea. That’s China and Japan acting like children over a resource pool they must logically share.

China “acting like children” you say? What makes you think they’ll be different with a vulnerable Taiwan?

Politically, abandoning Taiwan is akin to pulling out of Somalia when we lost 19 soldiers. The Japanese and Koreans will see the US dump its defense promises whenever its politically convenient, and go ape. Tokyo will get nuclear weapons within 6 months.

Militarily, what are the worst case scenarios for a Taiwan invasion? In retaliation, Taiwan could strike Shanghai, Hong Kong, and the Three Gorges Dam with missiles and wreck the Chinese economy; if fought to a bloody draw (not impossible), spiteful leaders could launch nuclear ICBMs at the island. (Unlikely you say? We have no idea what desperate generals might do. Who wants to risk it?) It’s too terrifying to consider, and I’d rather listen to adults than Barnett’s economic determinist fantasy land.

As noted before, Barnett doesn’t get East Asian security—it’s the equivalent of your kid brother coming up to the chess board and saying, “black, just resign and let’s go make lunch already!” It’s pretty sad when a lazy law student can articulate better foreign policy than a “military strategy consultant,” “author of the groundbreaking bestseller,” with “cutting-edge analysis.”

Dr. Barnett: you’re usually pretty good about reviewing reviews, so why not try this argument on for size?

DISCLAIMER: The contributors at ComingAnarchy.com have differing opinions of Dr. Barnett and his work—the views expressed here are mine, not that of Chirol or Younghusband.