US Taiwan Policy After 2016 and Asian Security: A Strategic Cultural Analysis

1. Introduction

On May 20th, 2016, Ms. Tsai Ing-wen made her inaugural address but did not openly and literally adopt in it the “One China” principle which has been known as “the 1992 Consensus” for more than two decades, whose “core connotation” is that both the Chinese mainland and Taiwan politically belong to that one China, or “one China, different interpretations”. Instead, Tsai used a new term “the 1992 fact”, referring to that the Straits Exchange Foundation(SEF) and the Association of Relations Across the Taiwan Strait “through communication and negotiations, arrived at various joint acknowledgements and understandings”. Some observers thought the tone of Tsai’s rhetoric was acceptable, because it “could have been worse”, as Richard Bush put it, who is an American senior commentator at Brookings Institution and a former chairman and managing director of the American Institute in Taiwan.（Bush，2016）However, the official response from the mainland government was not in agreement with those optimistic commentators out there in America. Beijing made it clear that the 1992 Consensus is the bottom line and red line of cross-Strait relations and hence was not pleased at all with Tsai’s ambiguity, calling it “an incomplete exam paper”. Anyway, the case is there has been no major crisis since the inauguration festivity, “a crisis was avoided”, Richard Bush said.（Bush，2016）

However, Dr. Chih-yu Shih(石之瑜），one of Taiwan’s most renowned political science professors at National Taiwan University, was at odds with those optimistic comments and analyses. He argued that Tsai’s essential concept of the Cross-Strait Relationship is a “phased two-China policy oriented to Taiwan independence”(台独为导向的阶段性两个中国政策), namely, using Republic of China Taiwan to replace Republic of China, so as to bypass all the constitutional, legal and policy restrictions which bind Taipei to one China.（Shih，2016）As a result, the Tsai administration on Taiwan has the ideological potential for deteriorating the Cross-Strait relationship. The fact is that from May 2016 on, the political tumbling in the Cross-Strait relations has gone from bad to worse, culminating in diplomatic conflicts in global multilateral participation of Taipei, with ICAO assembly being a spotlight case, which in turn made Tsai use “China” instead of “mainland” in her open letter to DPP members, indicating her strong incentive to change the political status quo across the Strait. This ominous signaling makes it quite likely that Beijing, Taipei, and Washington will head for a more complicated and tangled triangle of security interactions, which is convincingly bad news for security environment in East Asia.

Therefore, how to stop the above nightmare from taking place has been an important question in a lot of extraordinary minds across the Pacific Ocean and the Strait. For example, in recent years, some influential former senior officials and leading International Relations scholars in the U.S. maintained that U.S. government should change the course of its Taiwan policy in order to avoid a direct and catastrophic U.S.-China conflict.

2. The Structural Conventional Wisdom of US Taiwan Policy After 2016

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Presidential security adviser to Jimmy Carter(1977-1981) and a world-class master of geopolitics at Johns Hopkins University, was one of the most influential advocates who speak in favor of a milder policy course for Washington. In his keynote speech during the Seminar on U.S. Foreign Policy held by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, May 30th, 2012, he said that Taiwan and Mainland China are heading towards a peaceful and unified future, and that U.S. should not be in the way.（Yu, 2012）

In addition to Brzezinski’s geopolitical argument, two structural analyses over America’s abandonment of Taiwan were presented by two prominent International Relations theorists, Professors John Mearsheimer and Charles Glaser. In 2011, Charles Glaser, a well-known International Relations Professor at George Washington University, who published an article in the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs, suggested that the U.S. should “consider backing away from its commitment to Taiwan”. Because “This would remove the most obvious and contentious flash point between the United States and China and smooth the way for better relations between them in the decades to come.” (Glaser, 2011: 87) In fact, Glaser’s policy recommendation was based on his “rational theory of international politics”, whose core causal logic believes that “A state’s choice of strategy should depend on three types of variables: the state’s own motives; material factors that influence the state’s military potential—power and offense-defense variables; and information about motives—both the state’s beliefs about the opposing state’s motives and its beliefs about the adversary’s information about its motives.” According to Glaser, when these variables work together, “[I]nternational anarchy does not create a general tendency for security-seeking states to pursue competitive strategies. Rather, under a range of conditions cooperation will be a rational state’s best option.” (Glaser, 2010:268)

In Glaser’s understanding of strategic choice, states as rational security seekers during peace time “should” prefer cooperation to competition, with the former defined as “coordinated policies designed to avoid arms races and improve political relations”, while the latter as “unilateral military buildups, which can generate arms races, and the formation of alliances”.(Glaser, 2010:51). Specifically, when Taiwan is put in the context of US-China strategic relations, even though the island is “a clear expansionist objective” of China, Glaser argued that “If China’s aims are limited to Taiwan, the stakes for the United States are far too small to warrant efforts to slow China’s rise, whether through economic means or through the direct use of force”. (Ibid.: 273-274) Furthermore, Glaser reminded that “The U.S. ability to protect Taiwan will be further reduced by improvements in China’s conventional capabilities.” Therefore, taking into account both the necessity judged by intention and likelihood by capabilities, Glaser recommended that America’s optimal China policy concerning Taiwan should be letting it go in that “At some point, the risks of continuing to protect Taiwan could become too large. This is especially likely if Taiwan presses the limits of the extent of independence that China is willing to accept.” (Ibid.: 280)

In 2014, John Mearsheimer, the father of Offensive Realism and the most famous living Realist in America and the world, whose theory descriptively and prescriptively maintains that great powers aim to maximize national security by seeking power maximization defined as regional hegemony, made a similar version of prediction in an article, saying “While the United States has good reasons to want Taiwan as part of the balancing coalition it will build against China, there are also reasons to think this relationship is not sustainable over the long term.” According to Mearsheimer, China’s national power and powerful nationalist sentiment, geographical advantage over US in terms of projecting power onto Taiwan, these factors will encourage US to make a hard and painful decision to “forsake Taiwan”. To quote Professor Mearsheimer’s reasoning, “Given how dangerous it is for precipitating a war and given the fact that the United States will eventually reach the point where it cannot defend Taiwan, there is a reasonable chance that American policy makers will eventually conclude that it makes good strategic sense to abandon Taiwan and allow China to coerce it into accepting unification.”(Mearsheimer, 2014:36, 37). Therefore, Mearsheimer’s prediction is the Strait will become “dire” for Taiwan because of “China’s continued rise” and America’s painful “abandonment” of the island when US is unable or reluctant to challenge China and fight for Taiwan.

These three opinions certainly represent the policy preference of or strategic analysis by some important members of the US elite group of foreign policy, and provoked wide discussions in both China and the USA. However, this article takes a strategic cultural perspective on analyzing Washington’s commitment to Taiwan and argues that such academic opinions offered by Brzezinski, Glaser, and Mearsheimer are surely welcomed ones, but people should also see it clear that voluntarily giving up Taiwan goes against the basic elements and characteristics of U.S. strategic culture, thus making it unlikely in the foreseeable future to be adopted by any in-power top policy makers in the White House, the Foggy Bottom, the Pentagon, or on the Capitol Hill. In brief, even when China accumulates much power to make it very physically costly for America to “protect” Taiwan, Washington will come to aid and not let go of Taiwan without meaningful military fight. This is decided by the essential elements of US strategic culture. The following parts will present a theory of American strategic culture and explain the reasons, hoping to serve as an alternative analysis to the power-based structural ones presented by Glaser and Mearsheimer.

4. How Power Rationality Prevents Overuse of Force

As Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton implied, US decision-makers regarded promoting democracy abroad as a strategy to earn long-term national security. At the same time, power tends to be thought of as a short-term interest of national security, as Robert Gates demonstrated. However, when the wars America waged or got involved in turned out to be prolonged wars of attrition, power will gradually prevail over the idealist ideological interest, with the Vietnam War and the Iraq War being miserable cases. The painful withdrawal from those prolonged wars was driven by rational calculation of power cost and burden, so as to prevent further bleeding and destructive overspending of American military power and economic might. In other words, power rationality serves as a braking device which aims to better keep, increase and/or demonstrate American power.

Power rationality has two policy implications rooted deep in Realism. First, U.S. must prevent the emergence of a peer competitor that is capable of dominating important geopolitical regions like Europe, East Asia and the Middle East, and challenging America’s relative power status as the only regional hegemony in modern international history. Mearsheimer’s offensive realism provides the best theory that explains why US went great length to defeat challengers like Germany in the two world wars, imperial Japan in World War II, and the Soviet Union in the Cold War. (Mearsheimer, 2001)

Second, the U.S. should understand the limit of military power and use it prudently to avoid unnecessary overseas military operations that don’t really serve U.S. vital interests. Mearsheimer best explained this point when he criticized Bush’s decision on the 2003 Iraq War and the social engineering fantasy that guided the decision. Mearsheimer wrote, “Given American military might and the belief that democracy was sweeping the globe, the Bush administration and its supporters reasoned that it would be relatively easy to remake the Arab and Muslim world in America’s image.” (Mearsheimer, 2011:26) But the truth turned out to be very painful, as Mearsheimer observed, “They were wrong, of course, for the Bush administration failed to understand the limits of what American military power could do to transform the Middle East.”(Mearsheimer, 2011:26)

In brief, if liberal principle ignites America’s internationalist ambition to vehemently sell and spread western political values, then power rationality creates nationalist calculation of promoting physical and substantive interests, which serves as the Realist braking mechanism for stopping U.S. from blind overseas commitments. Before 2016, the relatively isolationist attitude towards Somalia and Balkan issue as well as the reluctance of U.S. government and people to shoulder the commitment of nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq manifest the strong impact of power rationality. In the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s quasi-isolationist foreign policy approach to making “America First”, his anti-immigration rhetoric, and his advocacy for burden shifting to the shoulders of American allies, all mark an impressive return of power rationality after more than 15 years of liberal internationalist over-consumption of American power.

In addition to Trump the businessman-turned politician and other people in politics, scholars’ advocacy for a less liberal and more realist foreign policy agenda serves as another constraining power of American use of military force for such objectives as democratizing lesser powers in important regions. Harvard’s star Professor Stephen Walt warned that “the rest of the world fears, resents, and sometimes hates America’s current global role” due to Washington’s liberal approach to using power in foreign policy. (Walt, 2006:11) Walt and Mearsheimer recommended that America drop its liberal global hegemony agenda, and“forgo ambitious efforts to remake other societies and concentrate on what really matters: preserving U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere and countering potential hegemons in Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf.”All in all, America must go back onto its traditional and realist grand strategic track of “offshore balancing”.（Mearsheimer and Walt, 2016:71）

5. The Taiwan Question After 2016: Maintaining Status Quo Remains the Most Rational Option for Asian Security

Donald Trump, an America-first nationalist, was surprisingly selected by American people and their electorate college, whose foreign policy thinking has shown signs of both positive modifications and negative uncertainties. The most consequential uncertainty concerning Taiwan must be the one that Mr.Trump answered a congratulation call from Ms. Tsai and tweeted in a way that he may challenge the "one China" principle, after many media and people on the island speculated the gloomy prospect of Taiwan to be sacrificed by Trump in that Tsai In-wen was believed to be more supportive of Hillary Clinton and mistakenly expected a Clinton’s victory rather than defeat.

For sure, the Taiwan question has been officially and widely recognized as at the core of China’s national interests. Chinese leaders understand that it is also “the main obstacle to Sino-U.S. relations, and could even deteriorate into an explosive problem”, to quote Mr. Deng Xiaoping’s comment. (Deng, 1993: 97) Americans are as well aware of the subtlety and significance of Taiwan in Sino-U.S. Bilateral relations. For example, in 2008, former U.S. Secretary of State Albright reminded then President-elect Obama that China’s leaders were “most insistent about hearing” US presidential “assurances on Taiwan”. Otherwise, if the US presidents “fail to oblige, all other business will become secondary.” (Albright, 2008: 194)

However, China does not naively believe that US will say goodbye to Taiwan simply because it goes strongly against the US strategic culture. According to the US strategic culture, keeping the Taiwan question a thorny one is a strategy of killing two birds with one stone. In other words, it is not only a moral mission defined by the liberal principle to make East Asia safe for “democracies” like Taiwan, but also a strategic goal rooted deep in the power rationality to prevent China from growing into a peer competitor, which may in turn make the suspicion come true that “China planned to seek the ultimate expulsion of the United Sates from the region”. (Bader, 2012: 55)Nevertheless, for both Beijing and Washington, the bottom line and worst case here is Taiwan foolishly pursues independence and purposefully drags America and China into “the Thucydides’s Trap”. Otherwise, any strategic proposal to give up Taiwan would be impossible to penetrate through the filter of strategic culture and become the actual policy of the U.S. government. Therefore, in The National Military Strategy of The United States of America 2011: Redefining America’s Military Leadership, the U.S. made it clear that it “will continue to monitor carefully China’s military developments and the implications those developments have on the military balance in the Taiwan Strait”.(Mullen, 2011:14) Likewise, Hillary Clinton reiterated that “to promote reform” is “a major goal” of US strategy in Asia, and Taiwan is one of the “democratic societies that had delivered tremendous economic benefits to their people”. (Clinton, 2015: 55)

The Taiwan Relations Act is the policy embodiment of US strategic culture concerning the three-way Cross-Strait relations. According to the Act, American Strait Policy contains such security elements as: (1) “to declare that peace and stability in the area are in the political, security, and economic interests of the United States, and are matters of international concern”; (2) “to make clear that the United States decision to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means”; (3) “to consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States”; and (4) “to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan”.

The Act obviously makes any policy recommendation about giving up Taiwan voluntarily a substantive challenge to American international security commitment and credibility, thus facing great difficulties to gain any meaningful political and social support in America. The case is Washington’s Taiwan policy has remained unchanged despite the White House occupants come and go.

Arms sales to Taiwan remain as a strategic tool for America to keep its role and interest on Taiwan. Jeffrey Bader, former Asia Policy adviser to President Obama, described this point well when he listed as follows the three different purposes Arms sales to Taiwan served, “One was to provide Taiwan with the wherewithal to withstand a Chinese attack long enough for U.S. assistance to turn the tide. Second, such sales would signal that the United States remained committed to Taiwan’s security. Third, they would demonstrate U.S. credibility to other friends and allies in the region who would be alarmed at the use of force in the Taiwan Strait.” (Bader, 2012:71)

Besides security commitment to Taiwan, values are also claimed to play an important role in America’s responsibility to be on Taiwan’s side. For instance, in 2014, Kin Moy, then deputy assistant secretary of state in charge of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, and now Director of the American Institute in Taiwan, said that he firmly believes that “strengthening our long-standing friendship with the people on Taiwan remains a key element of the U.S. strategic rebalance to the Asia-Pacific.” He continued, “Our enduring relationship under the Taiwan Relations Act represents a unique asset for the United States and is an important multiplier of our influence in the region. This friendship is grounded in history, shared values, and our common commitment to democracy, free markets, rule of law, and human rights.”(Moy, 2014)

Even though America’s strategic culture will never allow forsaking Taiwan to be a policy, but in the event of an ani-secession war between the Mainland and the island, Beijing will surely go all out to prevent a separatist success. In other words, Chinese patriotic nationalism will be the most serious stopping power against American’s liberalism. On November 11, 2016, in his remarks at the commemoration on the 150th anniversary of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s birth, President Xi Jinping solemnly said, "We would never allow any people, any organization or any political party, in any time and any form, to separate any piece of Chinese territory from the nation."(Xi, 2016) This is a clear message of Beijing to warn against Ms. Tsai In-wen or anybody’s attempt at Taiwan’s independence in any form.

Rationality shows that peaceful settlement is still the Pareto optimal solution to the Taiwan question and it is urgent for Washington and Beijing to make better strategic communication and prepare for better crisis management and control. It is in the highest interest of both U.S. and China to avoid being dragged into military conflicts by pro-independence separatist politicians on Taiwan. However, since she took power on May 20th, 2016, Ms. Tsai In-wen has failed to make reassurance of “the 1992 Consensus”. What makes things worse is she keeps making moves towards independence.

It is well-known that Beijing has a legal card to stop any coming attempt by Taipei at crossing the red line.“Anti-Secession Law”was an important measure taken by the Mainland China on the Taiwan question in the last ten years, manifesting the determination against Taiwan independence, and setting the priority of peaceful settlement in the form of legislation. It declares that in three cases “non-peaceful means and other necessary measures” can be employed to “protect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity”. They are: (1) the "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces should act under any name or by any means to cause the fact of Taiwan's secession from China; (2)major incidents entailing Taiwan's secession from China should occur; or (3)possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted.

As a legislation against Taiwan independence, “Anti-Secession Law” is not a law “that authorizes military force” as certain western media interpreted, but a law that demonstrates the bottom-line on the cross-Strait peace and development. Its emphasis on peaceful settlement not only reflects the basic stance and fundamental interests of the Mainland and Taiwan, but also takes into account the national interests of the U.S.. As a result, the Bush Administration did not respond strongly to the making of the law, even being criticized by some neoconservatives as giving “weak response”(Kagan, 2005). Various political opinions and behaviors of the Obama Administration also show that the U.S. dos not want to be dragged into long-lasting and power-consuming conflicts by the separatist forces on Taiwan. The U.S. has been vigilant against the behaviors that stubborn Taiwan separatists take advantage of U.S. concern about Strait issue to play with dangerous politics of brinkmanship that provokes Beijing.

From Beijing’s perspective, its foreign policy priority has been to ensure a peaceful international environment and favorable neighbouring context, maintaining stability of international and regional societies to keep sustainable economic growth, to promote domestic social stability, and to achieve the Chinese Dream defined as “to build a moderately prosperous society and realize national rejuvenation”. Therefore, China is undoubtedly unwilling to see the Taiwan question going on the wrong track of pro-secession. Instead, Beijing has been going great lengths to keep a stable Sino-U.S. political relation and to prevent bilateral trade, global trade and security issues from jeopardizing the momentum of a sustainable and healthy economic growth.

Hence, ideologies, behaviors and policies that lead to various forms of Taiwan independence are the common threat to both Chinese and American national interests; thus fighting against them is the mutual requirement and the political foundation for a win-win situation between Beijing and Washington. In 2002, then Chinese President Jiang Zemin told U.S. President Bush frankly that “China and the U.S. have a common ground on the Taiwan question— both sides insist One-China policy and hope for the peaceful settlement.” Mr. Jiang labeled the pro-independence separatists as “the biggest threat to Strait stability and Sino-U.S. Relations”. He urged American government to “abide by One-China Policy and the Three Sino-U.S. Joint Communiqués” and to “play a constructive role in Chinese peaceful reunification.” (Jiang, 2006: 525-526)

On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Albright’s point of view reflects American people’s strategic rationality on the Taiwan question when she wrote, “The United States is not formally committed to rescuing Taiwan in the event of attack because we don’t want the Taiwanese to be so sure of our protection that they provoke Beijing.” (Albright, 2008:196) This is a serious strategic reminder to the leadership group in Taipei. On November 2, 2016, when President Xi met KMT president Ms. Hung Hsiu-chu in Beijing, he presented six points as his latest thinking on promoting peace and development on both sides of the Strait, among which the top two were “adhering to ‘the 1992 consensus’ that embodies the one-China principle” and “fighting determinedly against the pro-independence forces and their separatist activities”. (Peng, 2016) Therefore, judging from the trend of Cross-Strait relations, as the comprehensive development of Mainland China and the continuous increase of Cross-Strait economic and cultural exchange, time is on the side of Beijing. As a result, radical measures must be prevented, even though the situation has worsened recently as Tsai In-wen did not recognize “1992 Consensus”.

6. Conclusion

Strategic culture is a set of concepts that filter a nation’s policy choices of and decisions on when military force should be used to achieve international-political ends. Liberal principle and power rationality are the two essential elements of the U.S. strategic culture, with the former always having an upper hand over the later. In the case of Taiwan, some American prominent IR scholars like John Mearsheimer believe that US may forsake Taiwan when China, as a rising great power, becomes powerful enough to make it too costly for Washington to come to Taiwan’s rescue in the event of an anti-secession conflict between Beijing and Taipei. However, arguments like Mearsheimer’s go against US strategic cultural beliefs, thus people can conclude that US will not let go of Taiwan and make it helpless in a possible war across the Strait, because protecting Taiwan is required by liberal principle, while stopping China from growing too powerful serves America’s power calculation and hegemonic maintenance.

Chinese leaders understand that Taiwan has been regarded by Washington as “a never-sinking aircraft carrier”, which demonstrates the strategic value of Taiwan to the White House and the Pentagon. For example, more than three decades ago, Mr. Deng Xiaoping once pointed out that “When it comes to the Taiwan question, the U.S. will cling to it and will never give it up; we know this for sure.”(Deng, 1993: 86) He continued to ask his colleagues to “spend time” in persuading Taiwan and US to accept “one country, two systems” as the peaceful solution to the Taiwan question. This strategic judgment still stands today. Therefore, we should follow the profound judgment of Mr. Deng on the Taiwan question: be strategically patient and prepare for the worst case scenario. Let’s hope that leaders in Beijing, Taipei, and Washington demonstrate their strategic wisdom, and work hard together to effectively manage troubles or even crises to safeguard peace and development for all.