Pinned: America’s Taiwan Policy, Reconsidered

This is a modification of a post originally published three years ago. I repost in the hopes of relaunching a dialogue on America’s Taiwan policy. President Obama will naturally put this vital policy standpoint up for review and it should be discussed.

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.
• – If one party seeks to act, the US must stop them from doing so.

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. Wait. The new opposition party is relatively friendly to China, especially when compared to the previous regime, now underfire for corruption. Cultural and economic ties are growing. But reunification won’t happen tomorrow—polls dating from 2005 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:

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.

I disagree—the logic of at least saying we will protect Taiwan is clear. Politically, abandoning Taiwan would terrify our allies to whom we ave defense commitments. Militarily, our implicit guarantees being withdrawn would be a green light for China to proceed in a military takeover of Taiwan, which could result in retaliation with a strike on Shanghai, Hong Kong, and the Three Gorges Dam, and 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?)

How many lives are worth stopping this? US policymakers don’t want to answer that question. Accordingly, the ultimate goal is preventing hostilities—for as long as possible. That means no independence declaration and no military invasion. The best way to maintain this is to speak Victorian! In other words the US must state that it will honor its defense pledge to Taiwan in the event this small democratic nation is attacked by an authoritarian communist power. And it must supply Taiwan with military hardware accordingly. But it cannot overstate its support and push Taiwan to “pull a Georgia.” The Russian invasion of Georgia may end up having an impact on the Far East. We must assume that Taiwan has watched the lukewarm American response to Russia’s invasion with extreme concern, because it shows that America really isn’t willing to protect reckless leaders that may be considered allies. Hopefully it acts to restrain Taiwan’s urges for declaring independence, and does not inspire China about the benefits that could be reaped from an invasion.