When Repeated Gaffes on Taiwan Raise the Risk of World War III
Biden throws the media, foreign policy community, and—most troubling—China into a frenzy with a six-word ad lib on Taiwan. But how did we get to this fragile state of affairs? And what's next?
But first, some scene-setting & housekeeping:
Now let me start by saying that this is certainly not the inaugural piece I had in mind for this new publication (indeed, I am, as of this writing, spinning multiple pieces at once like a Cirque du Soleil juggler). But I couldn’t help but think that given that I just departed the very military command that would be responsible for intervening militarily in the event China invades Taiwan and the U.S. president were to decide to come to Taiwan’s defense (this is a big “if”), I might have some useful insight and context to impart.
Such a scenario could bring not just the world’s three largest economic powers—the U.S., China, and Japan—to loggerheads, but also other military heavyweights, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, all over the fate of an island that, against all odds, has become a thriving democracy and the home base of the modern world’s most vital commodity: semiconductors. It would be a calamitous conflict, the likes of which we haven’t seen since World War II. It would have cascading effects on the geopolitical order and the world economy. And—as public war games demonstrate time and time again—such a conflict could very well go nuclear.
But I worry that the U.S. public is by and large ill-informed of the stakes at play, no less aware of why their country even cares about Taiwan in the first place. Hell – many people outside of government I’ve talked to think Taiwan is already under China’s control. Others correctly identify that a dispute over Taiwan’s sovereignty exists—and that the U.S. has a general interest in supporting Taiwan’s autonomy—but cannot explain HOW the dispute came about. More than one person mistook “Taiwan” for “Thailand” (“damn right we should fight to defend Pad Thai!”) when I broached the topic.
Sure, this is anecdotal. But I suspect it’s an accurate sample of the level of understanding a great number of Americans have on this issue.
The prerequisite for understanding the ins and outs of the most volatile geostrategic flashpoint of our generation should not be a subscription to “Foreign Affairs Magazine” or a stint working in the U.S. Intelligence Community. A public that is ignorant of the intricacies of this issue and the risk-benefit profile associated with U.S. actions (or inactions) is a public vulnerable to emotive vagaries of the political class at a time of crisis.
Look no further than George Bush’s folly in Iraq for an example of this. In the months leading up to the U.S. invasion, polling indicated some 70% of the American public believed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. The Bush Administration did not take pains to dispel this utter falsity. Public ignorance was a convenience. To this day, scholars debate why Bush decided to invade Iraq — a conflict that claimed the lives of 7,000 U.S. service members and some 400,000 Iraqi civilians.
This is a disturbing state of affairs. And I fear that the U.S. populace is no less vulnerable to that sort of manipulation of opinion today. That is, unless they’re adequately informed on the issues and decisions that shape their world. Complexities, consequences, tradeoffs, and all.
So that’s what I’ve set out to do here. To describe—and help make sense of—the complex series of events and decisions that shaped the precarious U.S.-China-Taiwan dynamic of today with the hope of leaving you, my curious reader, at least a little more informed on this important subject. I don’t claim to have all the answers. I also don’t have an opinion one way or the other on the overarching question of whether the U.S. should come to the defense of Taiwan in the event China mounts an invasion, so long as that decision is made by a public cognizant of its implications. But I do promise that I’ve given my utmost effort to deliver an accurate, comprehensive, and—to the extent humanely possible—objective read of the history. I’ve weighed and measured all available evidence and perspectives. I’ve identified major gaps in the historical record and done my best to fill those gaps by offering assessments and linking-logic of my own.
And as I began mapping out an overarching blueprint for an initially short-burst (some cheeky military jargon I picked up), executized (yet more military jargon) piece, I found that I couldn’t adequately articulate the contours of this issue in an abridged format without running the risk of being reductive. As you will come to find out, that’s just not my M.O. I don’t play fast and loose with the facts. I needed to investigate every facet of the structure—the foundation, the scaffolding, the rebar, the plumbing, the electrical (you get the point)—in order to give you an accurate picture of the house. This meant recounting some one hundred years of incredibly intricate and messy history.
It was quite a journey — one that reminded me of how seemingly small, inconsequential actions made in the heat of the moment can reverberate for generations to come. A series of decisions—some made with conscious forethought, others borne out of political expediency—have led us to this point. Key assumptions upon which fundamental policy decisions were based turned out to be false (some for the better, most for the worst). The control variable that has allowed the U.S. to kick the can down the road on the Taiwan question—the mediocrity of China’s military, that is—is rapidly withering away with every passing day. The status quo cannot last forever. We are, in my estimation, sleepwalking toward conflagration.
Before I let you get on with it, however, it’s important I note that the analysis expressed in this piece is wholly my own (unless otherwise noted) and informed entirely by open sources — i.e., information anyone with a dog-like persistence could glean from the internet, news publications, peer-reviewed journal periodicals, think tank studies, memoirs, etc. This piece also relies heavily on declassified U.S. government documents made available to the public with the passage of time (while often mundane and difficult to make sense of, I’ve found the declassified material related to the making of China and Taiwan policy to be a treasure trove of valuable insight and revelations). Finally, this piece makes frequent reference to Henry Kissinger’s opus on China, unironically titled “On China.” I cannot recommend this book enough for those interested in delving deeper into the history of U.S.-China relations and the age-old question of Taiwan.
What follows is an epic of my own. Thank you for reading.
-JH
It was all going very well, Biden’s visit to East Asia, that is — his first official trip to the region since taking office. Standing at a podium in Tokyo in late-May next to Japanese Prime Minister Nobua Kishida—the increasingly popular leader of arguably America’s most consequential ally—Biden officially unveiled a new U.S.-led regional trade pact, dubbed “Indo-Pacific Economic Framework,” thereby righting (sort of) the wrong that was Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He had just concluded a series of meetings in Seoul with South Korea’s new president, Yoon Suk-yeol, a conservative leader who has signaled a willingness to move away from his predecessor’s haphazard efforts to engage North Korea diplomatically as well as a renewed mandate to mend fences with Japan (yes, our two great Asian allies—Japan and South Korea—hate each other’s guts). Later in his trip, Biden and Kishida would join Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Australia’s new Prime Minister (just hours after his swearing in), Anthony Albanese, for a meeting of the “Quad” — a democratic bloc whose purpose has increasingly morphed into countering Chinese influence in the region. Oh — and North Korean leader Kim Jung Un decided not to test a nuke while Biden was “in theatre,” a potentiality U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had earlier failed to rule out. Things were shaping up swimmingly; the U.S.-lead network of alliances is stronger than ever!
And then it happened, with just one stray-from-the-talking-points response to a question from a CBS reporter, Biden threatens to muddy a visit meant to shore up U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific after the twin distractions of the collapse of the Afghan government and the war in Ukraine had prevented his administration from devoting sufficient bandwidth to the United States’ preeminent challenge: China.
CBS reporter: “You didn’t want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons. Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan, if it comes to that?”
Biden: “Yes.”
CBS reporter: “You are?!”
Biden: “That’s the commitment we made. That’s the commitment we made.”
Panic at the disco, as Zolan Kanno-Youngs of The New York Times reports, with U.S. officials in the room—and back at the White House—scrambling to put out a statement walking back the president’s remarks. In just a few words, Biden had seemingly dispensed with the U.S’ decades-long policy of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan, whereby Washington remains intentionally ambiguous (neither confirming nor denying) as to whether it would come to island’s aid in the event China were to take the island by force.
“As the president said, our policy has not changed,” the White House frantically clarified in a statement to reporters shortly afterward. “He reiterated our One China Policy and our commitment to peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. He also reiterated our commitment under the Taiwan Relations Act to provide Taiwan with the military means to defend itself.” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin doubled down on the White House’s retort, saying, “I think the president was clear on the fact that the policy has not changed.” (But was he clear, Secretary Austin? Wouldn’t you say that the mere fact that you must clarify his statement is proof of the contrary? Just saying!).
Meanwhile, the Japanese, whose foreign policy is best described as a tightrope balancing act with the U.S. and China at either end ( a sort of “have your cake and eat it too” strategy, if you will, whereby Japan relies on its military alliance with the U.S. as a bulwark against China on the one hand while it simultaneously seeks to retain stable enough relations with Beijing to ensure continued commercial access to the vast Chinese market on the other), no doubt were also quick to distance themselves from Biden’s misfire. Japanese interlocutors likely reached out to their counterparts in Beijing to clarify that Prime Minister Kishida did not have any advance knowledge that Biden would ad-lib those comments at their joint press conference.
Unsurprisingly, China’s Foreign Ministry released a blistering statement of their own before news agencies could publish the White House’s clarification. In addition to expressing “strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition” (diplomatic signaling language that may seem boilerplate or vague, but is actually quite measurable, with the choice of adjective indicating the level of opposition to the other countries’ statement or action) the Chinese said, “No one should underestimate the strong determination, firm will, and strong ability of the Chinese people to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity…do not stand against the 1.4 billion Chinese people.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson—a firebrand seen as the face of China’s “Wolf-Warrior Diplomacy”—expanded on the Chinese government’s opposition to Biden’s comments from his official Twitter account the next day, firing off these tweets:
The Foreign Ministry tweets, while often pretty standard and predictable, sometimes evoke a bond villain-like flair, frequently citing cryptic, yet often comically misplaced or unintelligible, quotes. (Though if you are ever in need of some comic relief, I suggest you take a gander at the “press” statements the North Korean Government puts out). This is one of the more straightforward tweets:
This is not the first time Biden has publicly flubbed on the issue of Taiwan, only for his ritual cleanup brigade (as Peter Baker of NYT puts it) back at the White House to release a statement “pretend[ing] he did not really say what he clearly articulated.” During an August 2021 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Biden mistakenly asserted that Taiwan was a treaty ally of the United States and therefore enjoyed the mutual defense protection afforded to other U.S. treaty allies — Japan, Australia, South Korea, members of NATO, etc (there’s more). Replying to Anderson Cooper’s question, “are you saying the United States would come to Taiwan's defense if China attacked?” at a CNN Town Hall two months later, Biden said, “yes, we have a commitment." The consternation from the media, China, and other foreign governments after these two instances was just as precipitous as to that which accompanied his latest blunder.
But why all the fuss over a couple of words?
So happy you asked! In order to give you, my inquisitive reader, a sufficient answer to that I’m going to have to take you on a blast from the past. Buckle up.
The Road to Stalemate
Since much of the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s modern territorial claims hearken back to the territory of that which the Qing Dynasty held before its collapse in 1912 —well before there were international mechanisms in place for countries to settle territorial disputes or the term “international law” was even part of the lexicon—it’s important we start by looking at a map that delineates its boundaries around this time period (refer below).
As you can see, Taiwan and the majority of what is now Mongolia were under Qing Dynasty rule. The Qing Dynasty also exercised quasi-dominion over the Korean Peninsula and much of modern-day Southeast Asia via a tributary relationship. These states would “pay tribute” to the Chinese emperor by kowtowing to him in a highly ritualized and subordinate fashion, thereby acknowledging Chinese cultural preeminence in East Asia. In exchange, China would grant these states security guarantees and favorable trade arrangements.
However, the empire started to crumble after its defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 to an emboldened Japanese Empire, amid other systemic ailments that were simultaneously eating away at the dynasty’s rule. As part of their peace agreement with the Japanese, the Qing Dynasty agreed to cede Taiwan as well as it’s overwatch-like status over the Korean Peninsula. Less than two decades later, mainland China descended into a sort no-man’s land, with innumerable warring factions competing to gain control of the many population centers.
By 1925, however, a Chinese nationalist government led by a young and charismatic leader bent on reigning in the regional warlords and reunifying the territories controlled by the former Qing Dynasty, Chiang Kai-shek, had managed to do just that (albeit it wouldn’t last for long). The U.S and other western powers recognized his government as the legitimate authority in China under the official name: Republic of China (ROC). Though shortly thereafter a young and charismatic (there’s a theme here) intellectual steeped in Marxist-Leninist ideology, Mao Zedong, had risen as the face of the growing Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and had begun a guerilla war against this national government.
Taking advantage of the instability to satiate its growing appetite for imperial conquests, the Japanese kicked off the Second Sino-Japanese War by gobbling up large swathes of China, including modern-day Beijing and Shanghai. And then, well, you know the rest. Japan quickly seized almost the entirety of East and Southeast Asia, as well as many of the remote islands of Oceania, then miscalculated royally by attacking Pearl Harbor in 1941 in an effort to render the U.S. Pacific Fleet—and therefore, in their mind, the U.S.’ ability to intervene—obsolete.
During the Pacific War, the ROC and Mao’s CCP agreed to pause their Civil War and actually joined forces to dispel the Japanese from their homeland. The U.S. funneled significant amounts money and military hardware to the ROC in support of their resistance to the Japanese. Washington later sent “boots on the ground” to train Chiang Kai-shek’s fledgling army. At one point it also sent a secret mission to meet with Mao at his headquarters in the remote Yan’an Mountains, as documents declassified years later revealed.
Many in the U.S. government saw Mao’s forces as better trained and more energetic than those of Chiang’s, who were poorly disciplined and often corrupt. These observations informed their assessment that it was all but inevitable that Mao would beat out the nationalists for control of China after the war with the Japanese concluded. Some advocated for the U.S. to therefore support Mao early on, believing it would give Washington a stronger hand in containing the communist movement and shaping the post-war geopolitical landscape of the region (this is a masterclass in “what-if” analysis that has my wheels spinning as of this writing. I will no doubt have to explore this sometime later. Would Taiwan even be an issue today had the U.S. exerted influence over Mao early on?).
Ultimately, however, the support became untenable as ROC proponents within the U.S. got to President Roosevelt’s ear, emphatically opposing the mere consideration of the U.S. allying itself with communists (There may have also been foreign sabotage efforts at play here too. I mean, we did, after all, ally ourselves with the Soviet Union during the war…). And so, the U.S. decided place its bets on Chiang Kai-shek. By 1943, the U.S.’ Fourteenth Air Force had established a network of airfields in central China from which it was prosecuting a successful bombing campaign on Japanese targets.
As predicted, the ROC-CCP Civil War resumed in earnest once the Japanese had surrendered to the U.S. in 1945. It quickly turned into a race for territory. By 1946, the CCP had taken control of most of Manchuria, newly vacated by Soviet forces that Stalin had brought in at the tail end of the war to force some 700,000 Japanese forces stationed there to surrender. Chiang’s government, meanwhile, was struggling to arrest his country’s skyrocketing post-war inflation, yet alone outmaneuver the CCP’s swelling ranks. Over the next three years, Mao’s army—gainfully supplied with weapons the Japanese had abandoned and receiving under-the-table tactical advice from the Soviet Union—had managed to chip away at the ROC’s control of major Chinese cities. By December 1949, the CCP had chased the nationalists out from almost all their former strongholds.
So, with nowhere left on the Chinese mainland to reconstitute, Chiang and his surviving loyalist forces fled to the only place they could that was not ruled by a foreign government — Taiwan. This tiny island that was two hundred and fifty times smaller than mainland China, but just 100 miles off its coast, would serve as the new basecamp. And as Chiang began to reacclimate the Taiwanese people to Chinese culture after over 50 years of supervision from their crazy Japanese uncle, he so to begin to plot his campaign to “re-reunify” one China within the borders set by the late, but mighty, Qi Dynasty …
“Oh yeah? You and what army?” Mao yells across the strait.
Good question, Mao.
A Government in Exile Turned Cold War Pawn?
It’s uncanny, really. Just how quickly great-power maneuvering on the geopolitical chess board can take a one-eighty, that is. The United States and the Soviet Union—allies in WWII who were really the only true victors to come out the other side with two feet—were now sworn enemies engaged in a zero-sum ideological contest for yet larger spheres of influence (“if you’re not with us, you’re against us, Lady India,” Uncle Sam says to the subcontinent, chastising her for remaining non-aligned). And that struggle would soon inform the U.S.’ policy toward the Chiang Kai-shek and his little island of nine million people. Indeed, it would determine Taiwan’s future.
You see, Harry Truman, now the U.S. president, was initially apathetic about Taiwan. He was under no allusion that Chiang’s forces would be able to stage an invasion of Mao’s China, now known as the “People’s Republic of China” (PRC), and its population of half a billion. And he was wary of getting between that which was inevitable - Mao’s forces invading the island and stamping out the last bastion of nationalist opposition once and for all. The U.S. government at this point was also skeptical of Mao’s nascent alliance with Stalin and did not want to give the communist neighbors an excuse to grow closer. In January 1950 Truman released a public statement announcing the U.S. “had no predatory designs in Formosa [Taiwan],” and would “not pursue a course which will lead to involvement in the civil conflict in China.” In effect he had publicly signaled to Mao that the U.S. would turn a blind eye if he invaded Taiwan.
But then the communist North Koreans, with the backing of the Soviet Union, surprised the world by crossing the 38th parallel and invading U.S.-backed South Korea in June 1950. All the sudden, it looked like the Soviets were adopting the same no rules bar approach to the Asia theatre as they were in post-war Europe. Perhaps the U.S. should extend the Truman Doctrine—a strategy Truman announced in 1947 specifically to contain communist expansion in Europe—to this part of the world, or so the thinking that developed at the many White House crisis meetings went.
And so, like the good politician he was, Truman turned on a dime, glossing over the fact that just five months earlier he had thrown Taiwan to the wind and announcing (two days after the onset of the Korean War) that it was now in the U.S.’ interest to contain communism in Asia at its current periphery. This new strategy necessitated he save Chiang Kai-shek and his fledgling island autocracy, no matter how inept or corrupt a partner he had proven to be. And so, he ordered the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet—headquartered at this time in Subic Bay, Philippines—to “neutralize” the Taiwan Strait by preventing military attacks in either direction across it.
America had now inserted itself in the Chinese Civil War, the new proverbial referee, there to keep the peace and safeguard the status quo. At least that’s how the conventional narrative in the history books goes.
However, the calculus leading up to Truman’s decision to put his finger on the scale vis-à-vis Taiwan is murky at best. Even Henry Kissinger, America’s fabled geopolitical strategist who was later the driving force behind the U.S.’ opening to the PRC in the late-1970s (more on him later), admits he doesn’t exactly know the full thought process behind Truman’s change of attitude. In his opus On China, he suggests an air of spontaneity in Truman’s decision, remarking:
“The trouble with policy planning is that its analyses cannot foresee the mood of the moment when a decision has to be made.”
So, with an intelligence gap like this we are left having to make an assessment. It feels odd that this is the state of affairs for what would turn out to be a monumental foreign policy decision, one that undergirds the U.S.’ relationship with the PRC and the Taiwanese today, seventy years later. But I guess it’s hard to fully grasp the ramifications of decisions made in the heat of the moment. Right, President Truman?
And after subjecting myself to far more head spinning “historical” accounts that seem to either regurgitate the same vague tropes that the “Korean War made him do it” or altogether ascribe seemingly unrelated justifications out of the blue without further explanation than I could handle, I’m left thinking it was likely a confluence of factors that ultimately led Truman to reverse course and determine Taiwan was a territory worth remaining out of the PRC’s hands.
In other words, I think there is more nuance to the story. So, here’s what I’ve come up with; I organize my analysis into three general “factor buckets” — a symbolic bucket, a strategic bucket, and a risk management bucket.
Symbolic
The communist invasion of South Korea by North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, believed at the time (and confirmed later) to have the backing of the Soviet Union and the PRC, shocked the Truman administration. To Washington, it looked like a new communist bloc had risen in the East — one that, if not promptly contained, could quickly spread its tentacles to every country in the region not outwardly backed by the U.S. It also believed Stalin was testing U.S. resolve in Asia by greenlighting the invasion. And Washington did not want Russia to perceive it had blinked in the face of their transgressions. It had to draw a line in the sand; to show it meant business not just in Europe, but also in Asia. Buttressing Taiwan, in part, supported this aim.
Truman was equally as concerned about signaling firm resolve to his domestic U.S. audience. In the preceding months up to his fateful Taiwan decision, his administration had come under fire from Republican lawmakers, led by opportunistic provocateur (my words) Senator Joseph McCarthy, for “losing China” to the communists. McCarthy suggested Truman’s State Department was riddled with communist sympathizers who acted as a malign restraining force in the shadows of the bureaucracy, squashing any attempts to contest Mao’s takeover of China. He called Secretary of State Dean Acheson a “dilettante diplomat who cringed before the Soviet colossus."
However unrealistic or devoid of logic this rhetoric was (Noam Chomsky had some famous words on this), it had penetrated the national psyche and actually forced the State Department to release a lengthy white paper describing how there was virtually no scenario where Mao, with his cult-like grip over the world’s largest population, did not beat out the feeble and ineffective nationalists. In other words, there was nothing the U.S. could have practically done to tip the balance in Chiang Kai-shek’s favor.
At the same time opposition lawmakers were lobbing accusations at Truman for “losing China,” they were urging him to “unleash Chiang.” While, again, a gross misestimation of his capabilities, Chiang had inhabited a sort of mythological status in some American circles (a similar zeal and affection to that which the far-left would later layer onto Che Guevara) for his opposition to the Chinese “commies.” That is all to say that, from a political perspective, Truman’s U-turn on Taiwan would not have been unpopular. In fact, the opposite.
A declassified memo written by Fisher Howe (no relation, lol), the Deputy Special Assistant for Intelligence at the State Department, in which he recounted a meeting he had with Dean Rusk, then the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (he later served as Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson), summarizes perfectly the government’s train-of-thought vis-à-vis the symbolic dividends the U.S. intervening on Taiwan’s behalf would achieve:
“[Rusk is] basing his thinking generally along the lines that world opinion and US opinion are generally unhappy at lack of a forthright action on our part in the Far East; that Formosa [Taiwan] presents a plausible place to ‘draw the line’ and is, in itself, important politically if not strategically, for what it represents in continued Communist expansion.”
Strategic
The onset of the Korean War—and the corresponding extension of the “Truman Doctrine” policy of Soviet containment in Asia—forced the Truman administration to view the region through a warfighting lens. It was now a game of “x’s” and “o’s” where control over strategically-significant geography mattered, both for the purpose of deterrence and—if or when deterrence failed—for practical war-prosecuting needs (i.e., ability to surge forces quickly, hold enemy forces at risk via aerial bombardment, maintain adequate supply lines of communication, etc.).
It is at this point, as yet more declassified documents reveal, that Truman appears to have authorized a strategic interpretation of the region that General Douglas McArthur (then the U.S.’ senior-most military leader overseeing the occupation of post-war Japan, and the soon-to-be lead of the U.N’s war effort in Korea) had sought his endorsement on just eleven days before the Korean war kicked off.
In what U.S. military strategists would later term the “First Island Chain” Strategy (a major U.S. conceptualization of the region to this day; so much so that there is a readily thrown around acronym for it — “FIC”), it involved taking advantage of the favorable geographical layout of the Western Pacific to constrict the Soviet Union’s (and today China’s) ability to project force in the Eastern and South Pacific. U.S. and allied bases on Japan and Okinawa (its uncanny how quickly Japan went from bitter enemy to beloved ally — more on this another time) formed the defensive link in the North, while U.S. bases in the Philippines and allied bases in British-controlled Malaysia and Singapore formed the defensive link in South. Taiwan—which sat smack dab in the middle of these nodes—was pivotal in order for the U.S. to retain the integrity of the larger chain. Or so that’s the argument McArthur was pushing. Underlining the importance of this in correspondence to Truman, he said:
“The geographic location of Formosa [Taiwan] is such that in the hands of a power unfriendly to the United States it constitutes an enemy salient in the very center of that portion of our position now keyed to Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines…Formosa [Taiwan] in the hands of the Communists can be compared to an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender ideally located to accomplish Soviet offensive strategy and at the same time checkmate counteroffensive operations by United States Forces.”
Now whether this was a major consideration in Truman’s hair-trigger decision to intervene to prevent a PRC takeover of Taiwan, or just a major dividend realized later, I cannot confirm. But the survival of Chiang’s government served a very strategic benefit for the U.S. and its band of democracies at the fledgling United Nations (UN). You see, as a WWII victor and charter member of the UN, the ROC held a permanent seat on the UN’s Security Council along with the U.S., the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France. This not only gave it a voice at the table to introduce or pass security-related resolutions, but also veto power over other countries resolutions. That Mao had essentially conquered all of China and was now governing over the world’s largest population, leaving Chiang yet a sliver of Chinese territory, did not matter. The U.S. and its allies continued to recognize the ROC as the rightful government for all of China; it was merely a “government in exile.” Safeguarding the ROC’s existence, and therefore ensuring the PRC did not assume China’s permanent seat, meant ensuring the balance of power on the UN security council remained very much in the U.S. and its allies’ favor.
In fact, this policy had already paid off for the U.S. in a very big way, at the Soviet Union’s expense. The Soviets—who had been boycotting the Security Council since January 1950 on the grounds that the seat at the table for China ought to change hands from the ROC to the PRC—had procedurally abstained from voting on a resolution establishing a UN command to expel the North Koreans from the South. In effect, they had given up their mighty veto power, which it no doubt would have used to strike down this motion in defense of their ally North Korea, whom Stalin had given the go-ahead to start the war.
Quite a Catch-22. Their abstention allowed the U.S. to market the Korean War as a multilateral one, a struggle of good vs. evil, with the peace-striving nations of the UN on one side and the kleptocratic communists on the other. Talk about winning the “information war.” Viewed from this lens of multilateral maneuvering, it surely was in the U.S.’ interest to maintain the status quo.
Oh, and Stalin, no offense, but you totally got played here bro.
Risk Management
The last “factor bucket” I would like to bring attention to is one that is difficult to fully appreciate with seventy years of hindsight, but is perhaps the most overlooked and important element in understanding the U.S.’ sudden reversal on Taiwan. And this is where I will harken back to that quote from Henry Kissinger: “the trouble with policy planning is that its analyses cannot foresee the mood of the moment when a decision has to be made.”
The mood of the moment was tense. And understandably. The U.S. had just started its first real “hot war” since WWII had ended. There was a very real fear that it could go nuclear as mutual suspicion had reached a fever pitch and the U.S., and now the Soviet Union (they had completed their first successful nuclear test a year earlier at this point), were still ironing out doctrinal thresholds for nuclear use. While Washington was optimistic its forces could beat back the communists in earnest, war always presents unknown challenges (Vladimir Putin’s adventurism in Ukraine is all the evidence you need of this). It could drag on for years on years. Worse yet, it could widen. From a war planning and prosecuting perspective, controlling for the operational environment was of utmost importance.
This meant, in part, ensuring Taiwan did not fall to the communists. As discussed earlier, top U.S. military brass had just begun to articulate the geostrategic necessity of Taiwan to the U.S.’ ability to project power and sustain forces in Asia. If the communists were to take Taiwan, it could complicate the latter aim. Such an eventuality could be the determining factor as to whether the U.S. won the Korean War. In an uncertain world—an uncertain war—Washington likely thought it a prudent goal to do its best to maintain the status quo in the West Pacific.
Adding to the trepidation war so efficiently creates, the U.S. government caught wind of two disturbing revelations regarding stakeholder intentions vis-à-vis Taiwan in the preceding months to the outbreak of hostilities on the Korean Peninsula, as Eric P. Swanson so concisely notes in his analysis of the decision to send the Seventh Fleet into Taiwan Strait. In January 1950, the CIA got its hands on a copy of the recently inked Sino-Soviet “Treaty of Friendship and Alliance.” The treaty included a secret clause that the Soviets would enter the into a war on the side of the PRC if the U.S. overtly used its military to defend against a PRC invasion of Taiwan.
The second revelation came from Philip Jessup, an American diplomat who had just come back to Washington after a multi-leg trip in Asia meeting with U.S. friendlies, including Chiang. Jessup was perturbed by Chiang’s blasé attitude toward the prospect of a war with the PRC over his little island. Jessup claimed Chiang actually wanted to kick-off the hostilities himself, “to create World War III,” because he believed the U.S. would then be forced to defend Taiwan. Taiwan was starting to look more and more like a powder-keg that could blow up at any moment.
Taken together, this information posed a grave dilemma for the Truman Administration. It would be reasonable to assume that, should Chiang kick off hostilities with the PRC, the U.S. public—buoyed by opposition politicians—likely would demand Truman defend the nationalists against PRC retaliation. But doing so would trigger Soviet involvement. In a very real sense, it would bring about World War III. The U.S. needed to maintain the status quo without triggering this.
And this is where how Truman deployed the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait is important. Instead of making its mission a one-sided “defense of Taiwan” (which would prompt Soviet involvement), Truman ordered the fleet to “neutralize” the Taiwan Strait by preventing military attacks from either side — from both the PRC and the U.S.’ implacable partner, Mr. Chiang. The U.S. was to serve as a buffer between antagonists, preservers of an uneasy peace. From a risk management perspective, this was the best option to maintain status quo and prevent a wider war from erupting.
Cat’s out the Bag
So there you have it, folks. A far more comprehensive answer to why Truman executed an about-face on Taiwan. There were a multitude of symbolic and strategic considerations at play, as well as operational imperatives, tied to a need to mitigate risk. In one long run-on sentence, here’s your cliff note summary:
In part heeding to domestic political pressure, Truman wanted to show the Soviet Union the U.S. “meant business,” while avoiding a direct conflict with it, and maintaining a relatively stable operating environment via which he could freely prosecute a war of unknown scope and length in Korea, while also greenlighting a larger strategic conception of the region based on geography and exhortations from his top military brass and all the while retaining a favorable situation on the UN Security Council that could support U.S. narratives of Soviet unilateralism and mischievousness.
Attitudes harden. Bureaucracies become resistant to change. Politicians, hyper-aware of their seemingly always diminishing “political capital,” pick and choose their battles, often resigning to having to “pass the buck” on complex issues to their successors. The U.S. Navy Seventh Fleet’s Taiwan Strait mission, an operation Truman authorized during the fog of a new war, would remain in effect in some form or another until 1979. Though you could argue a form of the mission existed thereafter, and even up to this day. What Truman set in motion, would become very difficult reverse.
Don’t mistake these observations as nonsupport for Taiwan. As I will explore later, the island turned into a vibrant society — a constant reminder to its ex-countrymen just one hundred miles away of the freedoms that only a democratic system can bring about for its people. It’s just important the U.S. public take a look under the hood to understand how we got to where we’re at now.
And there’s something uncanny about it being Truman, the failed clothing salesman turned accidental president, that set us on this course. A course that may well come to an acrimonious—and potentially bloody—end sometime in our lifetime, perhaps even by the end of this decade.
Positions Harden
Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, America’s fabled WWII General, would double down on the U.S.’ support of Taiwan in a manner one might expect of a military man. The most visible face of the “unleash Chiang” camp, at his first State of the Union Address in 1953 he announced the U.S. would end the Seventh Fleet’s “neutralization” mission. He reasoned that since the mission necessitated the fleet to prevent hostilities from both directions, the U.S. was in effect “required to serve as a defensive arm of Communist China,” even while PRC troops were now fighting UN forces in Korea. The announcement did not amount to a wholesale exit by the fleet from the Taiwan Strait; declassified diplomatic correspondence confirms Eisenhower ordered the fleet to “continue under present orders to prevent attack from the Mainland [PRC] on Formosa [Taiwan],” but it was no longer responsible for preventing Chiang’s forces from mounting hostilities against the PRC.
Long were the days of the U.S. as the proverbial referee; it was now squarely on the side of the ROC. At least part of this shift in policy was motivated by a U.S. strategy to force the PRC to divert forces away from Korea to its southern flank to respond to now-unchained ROC forces in the Taiwan Strait. The strategy by and large worked, playing an “important role in the PRC’s willingness to open talks” toward ending the Korean war, as Bruce Ellemen contends. Just months later, the UN, Soviet Union, and PRC reached an armistice, ending hostilities on the Korean Peninsula.
Testing Eisenhower’s invigorated support for the ROC, Mao kicked off what become known as the First Taiwan Strait Crisis by shelling Quemoy and Matsu, small contested islands off the coast of the Chinese mainland (far closer to the mainland than Taiwan) where ROC forces had begun to mass troops. It was a watershed moment; when push came to shove was the U.S. really willing to risk war with the PRC?
The answer was yes. Eisenhower responded by signing into law a mutual defense agreement with the ROC in 1955, which officially obligated U.S. forces to defend Taiwan in the event the PRC mounted an invasion. Even though the defense treaty did not extend to the small offshore islands (it only covered Taiwan and its nearby Pescadores Islands), Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, then publicly signaled a U.S. willingness to use nuclear weapons against the PRC if the shelling did not promptly desist. Mao backed down.
That is until 1958, when he retested the U.S.’ commitment to Chiang by kicking off the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. Eisenhower and his national security apparatus had basically stood idly by in the three years since the end of the First Taiwan Strait Crisis as Chiang had reinforced his military garrisons on Quemoy and Matsu, including with some of his most elite forces. The forces had begun harassing the PRC, flying reconnaissance missions along the mainland coast and dropping propaganda leaflets. Mao wanted to combat this activity. He also viewed this as an opportune time not only probe the U.S. resolve to their nationalist ally but also to gauge Soviet support for his own country (by this time, cracks had begun to form in the Sino-Soviet alliance). Things heated up quickly.
The PRC fired artillery at ROC troop positions on Quemoy and Matsu, notching up casualties in the hundreds. ROC forces responded in kind, shelling Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) positions on the mainland coast.
Eisenhower’s tacit support of these small islands that were closer to the Chinese mainland than Taiwan and which Dulles himself had earlier offhandedly called “a bunch of rocks,” had bitten him in the butt.
Chiang wasn’t budging either. He was resolute in demanding U.S. support to defend the islands, even though the U.S. had deliberately abstained from extending the mutual defense treaty to these islands. Eisenhower was worried about the impact the loss of Quemoy and Matsu would have on ROC morale, despite his belief that the islands had no real strategic or military value, as George Eliades notes. He wanted to find an acceptable solution short of a wider war that would allow Chiang to save face.
During a time period in the Cold War where any retracement from the front lines amounted to kowtowing to the communist adversary, he was also looking to save face without appearing to back down to Mao. Chiang, the junior partner in an alliance that was essentially the only thing guaranteeing his survival, had masterfully entangled the U.S. into a grave predicament. “Oh, the mess that Chiang guy got us in,” I imagine Eisenhower lamenting to Richard Nixon, his Vice President at the time (I’m certain Nixon internalized this).
The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up military options for Eisenhower to respond, including at least one option involving the use of tactical nuclear weapons, as Eisenhower suggests in his own memoirs. But he was resolved to exhausting all conventional options before resorting to nukes. He opted to send weapons and ammunition to the ROC military, including never-before-used Sidewinder missiles, which the ROC Air Force employed against PLA Air Force MiG-15 and MiG-17 fighter aircraft in air-to-air skirmishes to devastating effect. The U.S. Seventh Fleet parked aircraft carriers and Navy destroyers off the coast of mainland China as a show of force and escorted ROC resupply ships across the Strait to these small islands. Then luckily, the PLA ran out of artillery pieces, proving a natural opening for diplomacy.
The timing couldn’t have been better — the Eisenhower Administration was fumbling the ball publicly trying to rationalize its risking World War III over a couple of barren rocks to a skeptical U.S. public. Mao’s government—seemingly achieving what it set out to do; testing red lines with the U.S. and confirming its suspicion that Beijing’s alliance with Moscow was in dire straits (Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was loath to back Mao during this crisis, fearing a nuclear conflagration), that is—announced a unilateral ceasefire. Crisis averted, at least for the time being.
While relieved that some semblance of normalcy had returned to the Taiwan Strait, the whole ordeal left a bad taste in the Eisenhower Administration’s mouth. Even Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, perhaps the most hawkish anti-communist in government and the pioneer of the massive retaliation doctrine, admitted the U.S. could not permit such a situation to arise again. In October 1958, he traveled to Taiwan. There he reaffirmed that the U.S.-ROC mutual defense treaty was purely defensive in nature and that the U.S. would not support ROC military adventurism on the Chinese mainland. He then convinced a begrudging Chiang to agree in a Joint Communique to focus his efforts on taking back China through political rather than military means, arguing “free world opinion wants to see a liquidation of the ‘civil war’ which carries with it the risk of general war.”
A presidency that started with brinksmanship and allusions of grandeur voiced with the “Unleash Chiang” rouse was humbled. The status quo turned out to be preferable to nuclear Armageddon. Truman, though Eisenhower would never admit, was vindicated. Neutralization of the Taiwan Strait was the name of the game.
And with that, the U.S. president kicked the can down the road on the Taiwan question, yet again, a thorny problem for his predecessors to handle.
A fragile peace across the strait ensued. Though the ROC Army and the PLA settled into quite an idiosyncratic gentleman’s agreement whereby they would bombard the other with non-lethal artillery shells containing propaganda leaflets on alternate days of the week. This lasted until 1979, when the U.S. officially switched diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC. Not even geopolitics can escape the quirks of the human condition.
Turning the Page
China (and Taiwan) policy under the Kennedy and the Johnson Administrations did not change much at all (reflected by Kissinger’s only devoting some twenty pages out of his six-hundred-page book On China to their tenures). In other words, the status quo ensued without interruption — China continued to propagandize its citizenry and the outside world with continuous threats of invading their “breakaway province,” while the U.S. military remained on standby to defend Taiwan should that rhetoric turn to action. That there was not another crisis situation in the Taiwan Strait during this time period is thanks in large part to both sides being wholly distracted with more pressing challenges. The U.S. with its folly in Vietnam, and the PRC with Mao’s disastrous domestic ideological purification movements known as The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution, as well as a fresh conflict with India on their shared border.
Chiang, for his part, had schemed to initiate hostilities against mainland China multiple times throughout the decade, but was met with sharp nonsupport from the U.S every time. His efforts in the late 1960’s to acquire nuclear weapons (a saga that would continue over the next two decades) led U.S. diplomats to increasingly view the ROC as a nuisance and liability. As the leader of an authoritarian state (the Taiwan of then is not the Taiwan of today, with its democratic institutions and a vibrant civil society), he was also preoccupied with an all-encompassing mission not uncommon to dictators: stamping out any semblance of opposition to ensure his regime’s survival.
The relative lull in friction in the preceding decade provided an opening for the U.S. to make serious alterations to its relationship with the PRC — something Richard Nixon, now the U.S. president, was teaming to do. For all his flaws, Nixon was a strategic thinker. This you cannot deny. In October 1967, a month after he had declared his run for presidency in the 1968 election, he articulated a larger vision for the U.S. strategy in Asia beyond the myopic Vietnam War in a much studied piece in Foreign Affairs. His most incisive analysis in the piece concerned his thinking on the PRC. It read:
“We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.”
This was an extraordinary shift in attitude for a person who had portrayed himself as a staunch anti communist throughout his political career. But I guess running for president requires you to take a more sober and practical view of the challenges you may soon face, beyond the intellectually constricting lens of strict ideology.
When he finally made it to office, the foreign policy challenges on his plate were steep. He had inherited a disastrous war in Vietnam and a strong domestic imperative to end it. The nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union had grown dangerously out of control. It was high time to ease Cold War tensions and bring about a fresh vision for the U.S.’ role on the global stage. The Sino-Soviet split presented him an opportunity to achieve these goals. A foreign policy based on realpolitik would be the name of the game. And he had in Henry Kissinger—his National Security Advisor—the quintessential strategic operator to help execute his vision.
The idea was that in opening dialogue with the PRC (after some twenty-five years of diplomatic isolation), Nixon could then induce the Soviet Union to improve its own relations with Washington, thereby lessening bilateral tensions. Moscow—fearing strengthened ties between its number one adversary and its former ally, and thus a potential isolation of its own—would naturally feel pressured to do so. Or so that was the thinking. It was all about playing the communist giants off each other to maximize U.S. bargaining power. It was better for the U.S., as Kissinger stated, “to be closer to either Moscow or Peking [Beijing] than either was to the other” (scholars would later call this strategy “Triangular Diplomacy”). And it would be a race to the top between Moscow and Beijing as to which power had better relations with Washington.
There was hope too that in executing this balance of power strategy, Nixon could persuade both Moscow and Beijing to restrain the North Vietnamese—the communists’ mutual ally—to a palatable extent whereby he could execute a semi-orderly withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam.
The first step of course was the opening to China. Luckily, Mao by this point had independently come to the strategic conclusion that it was in the PRC’s interest to improve relations with the U.S. Throughout 1969, PLA forces had clashed in a series of deadly border skirmishes with the Soviet Army at the Ussuri River, a poorly demarcated section of the PRC’s northern border with the Soviet Union. By the fall of 1969, U.S. intelligence (now declassified) indicated that the Soviet Union had amassed over 300,000 troops on the border. Mao, for his part, had amassed an unfathomable 1.5 million PLA troops on his side of the border. A large-scale war looked imminent. And the Soviet’s had begun probing international capitals to determine how they might react if Moscow conducted a preemptive strike on PRC nuclear weapons facilities. Now was the time to act.
Nixon then initiated a series of public and private signaling efforts meant to indicate to Mao that the U.S. sought a rapprochement. He inconspicuously eased some trade restrictions the U.S. had long placed on the PRC then began passing positive messages via backchannel interlocutors in Pakistan, Romania, and Poland. After playing hard to get for some time, Mao demonstrated his receptiveness to turning a new chapter with the U.S., which began with his invitation in 1971 to the U.S. National Table Tennis team to visit Beijing and culminated in an invitation for Nixon to visit Beijing himself and meet with him and his most trusted confidant, Premier Zhou Enlai.
Nixon accepted the offer but asked that Kissinger secretly visit Beijing as a prequel to his own visit. Kissinger’s pre-visit would allow the U.S. to ascertain the PRC’s thinking—after twenty-five years of not talking—on the major bilateral irritants as well as potential deliverables the two sides could formalize during Nixon’s visit. Mao agreed to the request.
Going into Kissinger’s clandestine visit, both he and Nixon knew they would have to make concessions on Taiwan in order for the president’s visit and a subsequent official normalization of U.S.-PRC relations to occur. While this was an inevitability—a question not of whether to give on Taiwan, but how much—Nixon reportedly advised Kissinger ahead of the meeting “not to indicate a willingness to abandon much of our support for Taiwan until it was necessary to do so,” adding, "discussions with the Chinese cannot look like a sellout of Taiwan."
But as Nancy Bernkopf Tucker notes in her essay Taiwan Expendable? Nixon and Kissinger Go to China Nixon and Kissinger had already come to a conclusion that if they wanted to normalize ties with the PRC, they would have to essentially throw their relationship with Taiwan to the wind. They just “understood that to placate domestic political constituencies…[they] had to create an appearance of concern about Taiwan.”
Troves of declassified documents, including readouts of Kissinger and Zhou’s discussions, made available in 2001 after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit prove as much. Invalidating Kissinger’s claims in his first memoir White House Years that the topic of Taiwan had barely come up in his conversations with Zhou, the documents show a Zhou clearly drawing PRC red lines concerning Taiwan and a forward-leaning Kissinger willing to make major concessions in order to realize the Nixon visit.
After losing the smoke screen afforded by his transcripts with the Chinese being highly classified, Kissinger would correct some of the historical record in On China—published in 2011—and address his perceived eagerness to surrender America’s heretofore ally to advance relations with the PRC.
Whereas the “traditional approach” to diplomatic negotiations, he said, is to “outline one’s maximum position and gradually retreat to a more sustainable stance,” his preferred course in negotiations with the PRC over Taiwan was to “make opening proposals close to what one judges to be the most sustainable outcome.” Since the “margin for concession for both sides [were] narrow,” he reasoned, “we therefore from the beginning put forward views on Taiwan we judged necessary for constructive evolution.”
Indeed, as evidenced in readouts from their first session of talks, Zhou immediately challenged Kissinger to address what the PRC viewed as its core interest: a recognition from the U.S. that Taiwan was an inalienable part of China, and “as the sole legitimate government of China,” the PRC thus had sole sovereignty over the island. He said, “[the U.S.] must recognize the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China and not make any exceptions. Just as we [the PRC] recognize the U.S. as the sole legitimate government without considering Hawaii, the last state, an exception to your sovereignty.” He recalled to Kissinger that before the Korean War the U.S. considered the fate of Taiwan as an “internal affair,” one that Washington promised not to interfere with. He suggested the U.S. return to that policy. Then he ended his initial diatribe by calling the U.S.-ROC defense treaty “illegal” and mandating that the U.S. withdraw all its military forces from Taiwan.
Kissinger began his reply by agreeing with Zhou on the contradictory nature of the U.S.’ Taiwan policy, saying, “There’s no question that if the Korean War hadn’t occurred…Taiwan would probably be today a part of the PRC.” While he afterward clarified that this inconsistent history did not mean the U.S. could simply forsake its foreign policy interest that developed vis-à-vis Taiwan, this was an extraordinary admission for Kissinger to make. Addressing Zhou’s concerns regarding the U.S. defense presence on Taiwan, Kissinger offered to remove two-thirds of U.S. troops (troops the U.S. surged there as a base of operations for offensives in Vietnam) once the Vietnam war had come to a close, and “to begin reducing” the remaining U.S. forces on Taiwan (troops whose mission was squarely to defend Taiwan) as “relations improve.”
Kissinger’s most welcomed overture, from the PRC’s standpoint, came when he suggested the U.S. was prepared to endorse what the two sides would later term a “One-China” policy. He said, “As for the political future of Taiwan, we are not advocating a ‘two Chinas’ solution or a ‘one China, one Taiwan’ solution.” This was a decisive statement from the U.S. envoy. It foreclosed continued policy consideration that a sizable number of lawmakers and foreign policy elites had advocated in the preceding two decades whereby the U.S. would recognize the PRC and Taiwan as separate countries entirely. In line with this, Kissinger then pledged that the U.S. would never support a Taiwan independence movement.
By the end of the first day of talks, it was abundantly clear to the Chinese that the U.S. really was intent on turning a new chapter.
In reading the transcripts from their second day of talks, it’s evident that Zhou was in a far more combative mood, as if a voice in his head had told him that the concessions Kissinger offered a day earlier were too good to be true. Zhou needed clarification that the U.S. was prepared to (1) recognize that Taiwan belongs to China, (2) accept the preposition that it does not support “two Chinas,” or “one China, one Taiwan,” (3) promise not to support any Taiwan independence movement, and (4) recognize the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China.
Kissinger gave him the clarification he needed, on all but the fourth point of formal recognition of the PRC. This would require that the U.S. sever formal recognition of the ROC as the rightful government of China, something Nixon—wary of stirring up the “China bloc” in congress ahead of his reelection campaign—would only do in his second term. But Kissinger assuaged him that “the [overall] direction is obvious;” Nixon’s visit to China would leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that formal recognition was imminent. Zhou, after much flip flopping on whether the PRC would require formal recognition as a precondition to Nixon’s visit, accepted Kissinger’s timetable.
Later in the conversation Zhou expressed concern that the Japanese would seek to become Taiwan’s security custodian, filling the void left from the U.S military’s eventual exit. To which Kissinger assured him in no uncertain terms that the U.S. would “strongly oppose any Japanese military presence on Taiwan.” Kissinger also reiterated that the U.S. would not provide any support, direct or indirect (i.e. covert CIA assistance), to the Taiwan independence movement. “If you [ever] have any reliable information to the contrary, get it to me and I will see that whatever going on is stopped,” he volunteered.
By the end of their second day of meticulous discussions much of the tension inherent in diplomatic discussions—where clarifying, nuancing, and line-drawing dressed in pleasantries is the modus operandi (the transcripts read like a Martin Scorsese mafia script)—had subsided. The conversation became more sanguine. The general framework for a thawing of relations was in place. The Chinese were ready to take the next step. They were ready to welcome a U.S. president to their land after a quarter-century of virtually no official contact.
Recounting the events that took place during his secret visit in a memo to Nixon written on his way back to the U.S., Kissinger said, "We have laid the groundwork for you and Mao to turn a page in history. But we should have no illusions about the future…[there are still] profound differences and years of isolation yawn between us and the Chinese."
"The process we have now started,” he concluded, “will send enormous shock waves around the world."
In the preceding 7 months between Kissinger’s secret visit and Nixon’s own visit, a UN resolution—passed with a two-thirds vote—officially switched diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC, expelling the ROC from the multilateral body and handing the PRC the official seat on the Security Council. The world was turning its back to Taiwan. While the U.S. voted against this resolution (having unsuccessfully advanced a resolution giving both governments a seat in the UN), it too was on a path to switch official recognition. As Kissinger had earlier remarked Nixon, "[I]t's a tragedy that it has to happen to Chiang at the end of his life but we have to be cold about it."
"We have to do what's best for us,” Nixon resolved.
Nixon’s touch down on the tarmac in Beijing on February 21st, 1972, was historic. And he was sure to capture it. He brought with him dozens of journalists and broadcasters to cover every leg of the one-week long visit. To him, the pageantry and thrill of the news coverage for the American public was just as important as the substantive agreements reached with Beijing. He was looking after his reelection prospects, and he hoped the enamor over the public seeing glimpses of him in this far away land that they had only ever seen in black and white photos would overshadow any uproar in the more hawkish corners of his party for his legitimizing a communist country. By and large, it worked.
By the time he spoke with Mao and Zhou, the parameters of the relationship were already set. Nixon reiterated many of the talking points Kissinger had ironed out during his secret visit: there is “but one China,” and Taiwan is part of it; the U.S. will not support Taiwan independence movements; the U.S. will thwart any Japanese involvement in Taiwan; the U.S. will begin removing its troops from Taiwan once the Vietnam war concludes. Nixon cautioned Zhou, however, that the public record of the accommodations he had reached with the PRC had to remain muted. “Our problem,” Nixon told Zhou, “is to be clever enough to find language which will meet your need yet does not stir up the animals…[it’s] not what we’re going to do…[it’s] what we’re going to say about it.”
Language in the joint communique summarizing the understandings the two sides had come to during the visit therefore had to, in a way, disguise American concessions on Taiwan. That is, until Nixon could put full recognition of the PRC on the table once he won his second term.
And so, at the end of the two sides’ groundbreaking summit, they released the Shanghai Communique, which above all pledged that the U.S. and the PRC would pursue a formal normalization of relations, and which laid out the U.S.’ position with respect to Taiwan, albeit in an intentionally ambiguous manner in line with Nixon’s concern. This section read:
“The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves. With this prospect in mind, it affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all US forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime, it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes.”
The communique gives a façade of U.S. neutrality on Taiwan, concealing the ultimate concession that Nixon and Kissinger had promised the PRC behind closed doors was imminent: recognition that Taiwan belonged to the PRC. In it the U.S. merely “acknowledges” the notion that both the PRC and the ROC maintain there is just “one China” but does not outright ascribe that the U.S. “recognizes” this view. But again, in Nixon’s eyes, this was just a placeholder meant to placate China hawks in his party until he won reelection and their voices would no longer matter.
The U.S. domestic reception to Nixon’s opening to China was largely positive. The visit in part helped him clinch that second term he so desperately sought (it turns out he was so desperate he resorted to criminal tactics). Among U.S. allies, who were completely caught off guard by the enormous geopolitical development, the reaction was mixed. For Taiwan it amounted to doomsday.
Of course, absent formal diplomatic relations with the PRC, the U.S. awkwardly remained tied to formal commitments to its “out-the-door” ally. Per these commitments, Washington continued to sell arms to Taiwan, albeit in an inconspicuous way so as not to provoke the PRC into reneging on the rapprochement.
Little did Nixon know just how long the U.S. would remain in this purgatory.
Aftermath & Significance
Nixon and Kissinger’s opening to China worked quite effectively in raising anxiety levels in Moscow. Shortly after Nixon’s announcement that he would visit China, he received an invitation from the Kremlin to meet with Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. Three months after his actual visit to China, he then became the first U.S. president ever to step foot in the Soviet Union for an official summit meeting. Of more consequence were the arms control agreements he signed during his visit— the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty 1 (SALT 1) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. These were the first arms control agreements the two superpowers had ever signed since the start of their Cold War.
The Triangular Diplomacy worked. The détente Nixon so avidly sought with the Soviets came to fruition. Better yet, his burgeoning relationship with the PRC kept the Soviets on edge. There’s something fulfilling about your adversaries feeling obliged to put a fake smile on their face for you. Nixon liked having supplicants.
For this geopolitical triumph, foreign policy elites would mythologize Kissinger as America’s seminal grand strategist. He would receive less praise for his record on Vietnam. By and large, his and Nixon’s hope that in thawing relations with both the PRC and the Soviet Union they could in turn convince the communist giants to put pressure on North Vietnam to reach a settlement ending the war did not pan out. In the process of negotiating a flawed “peace treaty” that ended hostilities for less than a day, Kissinger and Nixon secretly carpet-bombed Khmer Rouge sanctuaries in Cambodia, killing as many as half a million civilians by proxy. Kissinger, America’s eldest statesman at ninety-nine years old, remains a polarizing figure — both revered and reviled, often in the same breath.
Nixon’s fall from grace with the public as a result of the Watergate scandal and his subsequent resignation effectively stalled the full normalization of U.S.-PRC relations until 1978. The highly vocal pro-ROC wing of the Republican party was able to exploit the power vacuum left in his wake (Gerald Ford—the first U.S. president ever to hold office without having directly run for president or vice president—proved feeble and ineffectual in suppressing this wing of his party), reinvigorating popular support for Taiwan. Taiwanese-funded lobbying efforts seeking a retention of the status quo simultaneously found new lifeblood in congress. Kissinger, now Ford’s Secretary of State, tried his darndest to keep the train on track, but was hamstrung by what he called “domestic paralysis.”
As I will expand on in just a moment, Jimmy Carter would put the train back on the tracks by completing full normalization with the PRC during his tenure. Only, by the time he did so, the train looked a little different. Acknowledging the renewed animus in Congress over perceived abandonment of an ally, he would set the U.S. on the policy tightrope act it finds itself on today. That is, the U.S.’ recognition on the one hand of the PRC as the legitimate government of China, and its maintenance of “unofficial” relations with Taiwan on the other hand, under which Washington provides weapons of a “defensive character” to the island so it can protect itself. On top of that—and in maintaining the U.S.-Taiwan quasi-alliance (which is what I would call it)—Carter would adopt the intentionally vague language Nixon used in the Shanghai Communique, “acknowledging,” but not outright endorsing, the PRC’s position that Taiwan is a part of China.
An ambiguous document that Kissinger pledged behind closed doors to Zhou was just a smokescreen meant to placate a domestic audience until Nixon’s reelection, became the foundation of the U.S.’ relationship with Taiwan moving forward. Ambiguity became official policy.
Had Nixon not fell victim to his own paranoia, it’s likely Taiwan would have fallen into the grasp of the PRC by now—either under peaceful or forceful means—and the media (and me) would not be freaking out over Biden’s imprecision when talking about the U.S.’ Taiwan policy. Taiwan likely would be a nonissue today. Framed in another, more circuitous way, the Taiwanese have legendary journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to thank for the survival of their democratic state. Had these two men not broken the Watergate story, the Taiwanese could very well be living in a society where they must sing Xi Jinping’s praises or risk state security operatives labeling them “subversives.”
I return to Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, who captured this issue best when she wrote, “The place of Taiwan in the calculus of the American China initiative illustrates the problem of relating to and dispensing with U.S. client states, given the dynamic ways democracy may intervene in foreign policy making.”
Threading the Needle
President Jimmy Carter wanted to complete the circle that Nixon started and that his predecessor, the impotent Gerald Ford could not (sorry for beating up on you so much, Gerald. Nothing personal. In your defense, you were dealt a pretty bad hand – a hand apparently so shaky it rendered you unable to complete the circle). That is, he wanted to officially normalize relations with the PRC. Beijing was unwavering in the preconditions the U.S. needed to meet for this to occur. They were:
The severance of official diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Taiwan (i.e., closure of the U.S. Embassy in Taipei and any other official U.S. government presence on the island).
Abrogation of the U.S.-ROC Mutual Defense Treaty.
Withdrawal of all the U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait.
The dilemma Carter faced was how to give in to these demands, while ensuring the continued security of the Taiwanese people. While Carter was more of a humanitarian than his predecessors, his calculus here was less about looking out for the Taiwanese and more about securing congressional approval for normalization and the attendant dissolution of the Mutual Defense Treaty.
And it didn’t help that even within his own administration there were major disagreements on how to go about this, no less between his two most trusted foreign policy advisors — Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (the latter being of Polish, not Russian, descent. Though as the ignorant American I am, I always wondered how Carter was able to pull off having such a close advisor with a Slavic name like that at a time when Russia in the American psyche was still ten feet tall, but I digress). Both men ultimately saw normalizing relations with the PRC as a strategic necessity, but they disagreed on how soon they should secure this normalization, how firm they should stand vis-à-vis Taiwan in the face of Beijing’s demands, and what the contours of the U.S.-PRC strategic relationship should look like post-normalization.
Vance favored exercising patience with the normalization process. He was fearful that moving too fast would spook the Soviets, whom he was in the middle of negotiating a news arms control agreement with. He saw continued U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s security as a moral imperative and worried that the U.S. would lose credibility with its other allies in Asia (and Europe) if it abandoned the island. He thought the U.S. should approach negotiations over normalization with the PRC from a maximalist position—namely a proposal to retain some level of official U.S. government presence in Taiwan post-normalization—then negotiate down from that (you might note that this is the opposite approach that Kissinger took). And, since the PRC was still a developing country with a third-rate military, he was skeptical of the practical dividends any future military-to-military relationship between the two countries would bring.
Brzezinski, a Soviet hawk, was more one-dimensionally focused on the strategic advantages closer U.S.-PRC ties would portend with respect to countering the Soviet Union. He was more open to compromising on Taiwan to see this strategic dynamic come to fruition. Taking Nixon and Kissinger’s Triangular Diplomacy a step further, he sought to turn the burgeoning relationship would turn into a quasi-alliance. Unlike Vance, he was bullish on the PRC’s military potential. And he felt it was necessary to conclude normalization sooner rather than later.
As declassified correspondence between Brzezinski and Carter reveals, Brzezinski was also worried that if the U.S. reneged on what he called Nixon’s “Secret Pledges”—chief among them the secret U.S. recognition that “there is but one China and Taiwan is part of it”—negotiations on normalization would be dead on arrival. Writing back to Brzezinski in the margin of his memo, Carter resolutely endorsed a continuation of those pledges as a matter of U.S. policy, as well continued secrecy of these assurances.
Brzezinski: “The record raises several profound questions we now must address: (1) Should the secret pledges remain in force? Without these commitments, the Sino-American relationship could not have evolved to their present state. To retract them would destroy the “spirit” behind the Shanghai Communique.”
Carter: Yes.
Brzezinski: (2) Should the pledges be kept secret? If they are made public prior to normalization, the Taiwan lobby would raise a political storm.
Carter: Yes.
Vance’s point of patience and posture of negotiating from a maximalist position, however, won out, at least initially. Carter dispatched him to Beijing in August 1977 to meet with Deng Xiaoping, the pragmatic successor to Mao who would later implement a series of political and economic reforms that would propel China to the place of prominence it occupies today on the world stage. His instructions to Vance: “go for it,” meaning Vance should present a maximalist position that the U.S. could only normalize relations if the PRC allowed it to retain some measure of official relations with Taiwan (i.e. the retention of diplomatic liaison offices; a poor man’s embassy). Carter’s rationale was that in the unlikely event the PRC took the bait and conceded on this, it would be a major diplomatic success; if not, he could go back to congress and prove he at least tried to stand up for the Taiwanese.
Vance did not come back from his talks yielding a diplomatic miracle. Deng didn’t budge one inch on Taiwan. In fact, he described the U.S. proposal as a step backward. “We [the PRC] hope that you do not misunderstand this [our patience] and take it as meaning that the Chinese will tolerate unlimited procrastination with regard to this issue [Taiwan],” Deng warned Vance at the end of the talks.
Now enter Brzezinski, who in the succeeding months from Vance’s visit had become Carter’s foreman on administration efforts to advance the normalization process with the PRC (not because Vance’s visit “failed” pursue, as the reductive historical record often claims, but rather because he became embroiled in slew of other foreign policy priorities, namely negotiations with the Soviets on SALT II and with Panama over continued U.S. access to the Panama Canal). Carter, now feeling a greater urgency to conclude normalization, dispatched him to Beijing in May 1978 to meet with Deng.
As the transcript of the meeting suggests, Carter had determined it necessary that Brzezinski reiterate Nixon and Kissinger’s secret pledges on Taiwan in order to get momentum rolling toward full normalization. “I was instructed to confirm to you the U.S. acceptance of the three basic Chinese points and to reaffirm once again the five points that were made to you by the previous U.S. Administration,” Brzezinski told Deng. He added, “we will remain guided…by the principle that there is only one China and that the resolution of the issue of Taiwan is your problem.”
Not so ambiguous, huh?
Deng took the bait; negotiations were back on track. He had even conceded a bit by stating for the record that he would allow the U.S. to retain “non-governmental and commercial contacts” with Taiwan post-normalization. But the question remained. How could Carter heed Deng’s three demands, while at the same time virtue signal to the U.S. public that the deal did not jeopardize the Taiwanese peoples’ security?
At every engagement since Kissinger’s secret meetings with Zhou in 1971, the Chinese had objected to U.S. petitioning that, as a condition of normalization, they promise in writing to subsume Taiwan only through “peaceful means.” The PRC maintained that since Taiwan was merely a “breakaway province” under its sovereignty (something Washington secretly acknowledged), the U.S. had no right to dictate how it handle its “internal affairs.” The best Beijing could promise was that it would exhaust all diplomatic means before resorting to force to “liberate” Taiwan.
Unable to get the PRC to concede on this position, the last remaining option was for Washington to somehow convince the PRC to tacitly agree—or at least not outright object—to continued U.S. arms sales to Taiwan post-normalization.
That the U.S. was able to achieve this aim in the following months of negotiations leading up to the normalization agreement in December 1978 is largely a result of diplomatic trickery and luck on the side of the U.S. in my thorough reading of the historical record. U.S. negotiators made a point during talks with their Chinese counterparts to enter into the record a vague trope that even after normalization the U.S. would continue the “full range of commercial relations” with Taiwan. By full range, the U.S. was implying the provision of military hardware on top of trade of commercial items. When the Chinese did not expressly object to this statement, U.S. negotiators generously interpreted it as their tacit approval of the continued flow of arms by the U.S. to the Taiwanese.
By the time the Chinese had come to realize the slick game the U.S. had been playing over months of negotiations, Deng’s hands were tied. The two sides had already set a target date for completion of negotiations and Carter had just invited him to Washington for a state visit to commemorate the normalization – a major inducement for the leader of a self-proclaimed “third-world” country that faced a hostile Soviet Union to its north and a Soviet-backed Vietnam to its south.
While he fought tooth and nail on continued U.S. weapons sales to the very last moment—summoning Leonard Woodcock, a chief U.S. negotiator, to the Great Hall of the People just fifteen hours before the U.S. was due to publicly announce the normalization—he ultimately relented. After excoriating Woodcock for over an hour, he looked up from his chair—the same chair he had just moments earlier banged his fist on in frustration—and said one word. “Hao.” Okay. He would suspend further debates over the U.S.’ arming of the Taiwanese for a later date. Agree to disagree for the moment. Normalization was the immediate priority.
In a televised address to the nation, Carter announced the decision to establish full diplomatic relations with the PRC. Reading the Joint Communique on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations to the camera, Carter declared the U.S. would now recognize the PRC as the sole legal of government of China, but promised the U.S. would “maintain cultural, commercial, and other unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan.” Other meaning the U.S. supply of defense articles, of course. He then recited that hallowed line of ambiguity in the Shanghai Communique, “the United States of America acknowledges (but does not ascribe to) the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.” Carter had thereby institutionalized the schizophrenic policy on Taiwan that Nixon had set in motion. That is, the U.S.’ private recognition that Taiwan belongs to China and its publicly eschewing that this is the case.
As part of this normalization of relations, the U.S. of course would move it embassy from Taiwan to the PRC and extricate all official U.S. government presence from the island; abrogate the U.S.-ROC Mutual Defense Treaty; and withdraw all U.S. military from garrisons on the island and navy patrollers out of the Taiwan Strait. In return, Washington would receive a new strategic partner in its global contest with the Soviet Union and burgeoning commercial access to the most populous country on earth (cheap labor, anyone?).
Mutual excitement over the newfound U.S.-PRC relationship would crescendo with Deng Xiaoping’s highly publicized continental tour of the America (a coming out party of sorts), where he would meet with leaders of America’s largest companies—such as Coca Cola, Ford, and Boeing—who saw, in the short and affable Deng, flashing green money signs.
Carter had completed what Nixon could not. A new relationship between the most prosperous and most populous nations was upon us!
Not so fast, Jimmy.
Enter stage right an outraged congress (of which a far younger Joe Biden was part of) powered by a tenacious Taiwan lobby and vexed that Carter had kept the normalization under wraps and out of their preying eye. The sellout of Taiwan would not stand. And, to the White House’s surprise, this was a bipartisan attitude. Carter’s draft legislation the “Taiwan Enabling Act,” which offered a legal framework for how the U.S. government would maintain commercial and cultural ties with the island in the absence of formal diplomatic ties but was—in Congress’ eyes— muted on how it would continue to look out for Taiwan’s security, was not going to cut it.
Congress’ retort: the “Taiwan Relations Act” (TWA). Passed with overwhelming support in both the House and the Senate, then signed into law by Carter, the legislation establishes the “American Institute in Taiwan” (AIT)—a U.S. nonprofit organized under the auspice of the federal government—to oversee and implement the “continuation of commercial, cultural, and other relations” between the U.S. and Taiwan.
This was sleight of hand. AIT, which still exists today and is based in Taipei, was and is, for all intents and purposes, an embassy in everything but name (hell, it’s staffed by State Department foreign service officers and employees of other U.S. government agencies).
The TWA flouts Brzezinski & company’s intimations to Deng of limited arms sales to Taiwan post-normalization, also establishing, as a matter of U.S. law, a congressional requirement for the U.S. president to provide “arms of a defensive character” to Taiwan for a virtually indefinite time horizon. It codifies an enduring U.S. security interest in ensuring that “the future of Taiwan…be determined by peaceful means.”
And, most famously, it injects an abundance of head-spinning ambiguity as to whether the U.S., by mandate of this law, would be required to intervene military if the PRC were to invade Taiwan (the TWA puts the ambiguity apparent in the U.S. “One-China” policy to shame). It neither guarantees nor relinquishes this possibility but dictates any decision by a U.S. president to defend, or not defend Taiwan must be made with consent from Congress. These highly scrutinized sections of the TWA lay bare this ambiguity:
[It is the policy of the United States]:
“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;”
“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;”
“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.”
“[That] the President is directed to inform the Congress promptly of any threat to the security… of the people on Taiwan and any danger to the interests of the United States arising therefrom. The President and the Congress shall determine, in accordance with constitutional processes, appropriate action by the United States in response to any such danger.”
The TWA, in effect, codifies an enduring U.S. security interest in maintenance of the status quo, even as Washington recognizes the PRC as the official government of China. Not specifically called out in the act, but implied, is that Taiwan, for its part, will refrain from declaring independence from—or initiating hostilities against—the mainland. Yes, the TWA also does not censure the potentiality of a peaceful resolution (i.e., a negotiated settlement between the PRC and Taiwan) of the dispute. But let’s not kid ourselves. With a seemingly never-ending supply of U.S. weaponry and a heap of deterrence manifest in the vagaries of the TWA, Taiwan would feel no real pressure to enter into negotiations with the PRC over its future. For all intents and purposes, the island still fell under the protection of the U.S., even if in words only.
The TWA, in this respect, was a contemporary recrafting of the U.S. Seventh Fleet’s Taiwan Strait neutralization mission set in motion by Harry Truman in 1950 (Harry, my man, you’re vindicated – yet again). It discourages any change to the status quo. It deters Beijing from launching an invasion of Taiwan. It gives the U.S. continued leverage over Taiwan to prevent it from declaring independence and provoking an invasion by the PLA. It disinclines Taiwan from reaching across the strait and negotiating an accommodation with Beijing (if a viable diplomatic solution ever were to present itself). It ensures the island that sits smack dab at the center of the U.S.’ string of military bases in the “First Island Chain” (remember this?) remains in friendly hands, guaranteeing continued U.S. military freedom of action in the Western Pacific. It freezes the dispute.
And the real kicker here — the TRA is U.S. law, impervious to the partisan inter-administration flip flopping that is characteristic of much of the U.S.’ foreign policy (think the Iran nuclear deal). It’s durable. And it’s a document of immense stature – one of the rare of examples of congress actually weighing in on foreign policy.
At some point after Carter left office, national security practitioners articulated an official grand strategy based on the ambiguous declarations in the TWA over whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan in a military contingency. The nomenclature they landed on: “strategic ambiguity.” Bound by the TWA and the U.S.’ vague “One-China” policy (defined in the U.S.-PRC Communiques), each successive U.S. administration would uphold this strategy as the cornerstone of their Taiwan policy. Indeed, it is the bedrock of the U.S.' Taiwan policy today – that is, when Biden is not publicly flubbing at press conferences by suggesting the U.S. would defend Taiwan.
And as U.S. military and intelligence officials love to point out when pressed by congressmen on whether the U.S. should move to a policy of strategic clarity (i.e., the U.S. clearly stating what Biden gaffed – more on this later), strategic ambiguity has by and large kept the peace for over forty years now and allowed Taiwan to blossom into a vibrant democratic society.
Gut Check
In examining the historical record, I was incredibly perplexed by the relative lack of outrage by Deng at congress’ passing of the TWA. I mean, the scope and lack of a time horizon of continued weapons sales was an annoyance for him. This he vocalized firsthand to a young Joe Biden who, ten days after the TWA passed, traveled to Beijing with a cadre of other senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a fact-finding mission to feel out the new communist partner and promote U.S. exports. Deng argued continued arm sales would make the Taiwanese more “stubborn” and less apt to negotiate with his government toward a peaceful resolution.
But, beyond the weapons sales (of which Deng would continue to make a stink, leading Reagan, Carter’s successor, to negotiate a third communique with Deng in 1982 to allay his concerns, which he promptly contradicted with his Six Assurances to Taiwan), did Deng just fail to grasp the full gravity of what the TWA presaged for his hope to reunify Taiwan?
Perhaps. But then again, there were bigger fish for Deng to fry in the near term.
As a nineties baby who grew up knowing China as a rising economic powerhouse then twenty years later ended up working at the very military command responsible for making sense of its unprecedented military buildup, it’s hard for me to imagine a time when the PRC was anything but ten feet tall. But there was a time (Deng himself was a puny “5’2”).
With one-fifth of the world’s population, the PRC had only the eleventh largest economy in 1979 (behind that of even the Netherlands, with its tiny population of fourteen million). Around ninety percent of its citizens lived below the poverty line. Eighty percent of China’s able-bodied population worked in agriculture. Normalization with the U.S. and opening to the west was an absolute necessity from an economic perspective. Not even Taiwan could get in the way of this.
The PRC also found itself in a tough neighborhood, with hostile neighbors in all directions — the Soviet Union proper to its north, Soviet satellite states to its west (the “Stans” – Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and soon a Soviet-invaded Afghanistan), an unfriendly India to its southwest (whom China had a major border dispute with), and a Soviet-backed Vietnam to its southeast that had just invaded and deposed a friendly Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia. Not to mention a powerful United States with its forward-deployed military scattered among strategic chokepoints to its east.
The PRC needed to stabilize its periphery (a major tenant of its geostrategy to this day). And Deng knew he would have to make some tradeoffs for this to occur. He would have to pick and choose his battles. And the most immediate threat in his eyes was the Soviet Union and its affiliates. Improved U.S.-PRC ties were necessary to counterbalance this threat.
To this aim, and as Kissinger points out in On China, Deng was eager to complete the normalization process so he could confront Vietnam for its invasion of PRC-backed Cambodia with at least the appearance of U.S. support. Just weeks after his visit to the U.S., Deng sent PLA troops into Vietnam on a limited military operation (it lasted only three weeks) into its southern neighbor’s territory in an effort to coerce the Vietnamese government to retreat its forces from Cambodia. While the operation ultimately failed in this aim, it did convince Moscow— who was fearful of getting dragged into conflict with the PRC that had at least tacit support of the U.S.— to lessen its support to the Vietnamese. That was a win in Deng’s book (in his memoirs, Brzezinski also suggested the operation served U.S. interests).
Deng’s angst over China’s perceived geopolitical vulnerability was also apparent in that very same Senate delegation visit Biden was a part of. In the same breath that he expressed agitation over Taiwan’s “stubbornness” and the U.S.’ continued support for the island, Deng also reportedly asked the senators to consider selling arms to the PRC just as they were doing for the Taiwanese (something the U.S. agreed to three years later amidst the Soviet’s war in Afghanistan – a development that spooked Beijing just as much as Washington). Deng really viewed the burgeoning U.S.-PRC relationship as a quasi-alliance. And Washington, for a time, saw it that way too.
In fact, Biden himself during that visit had broached a proposal to Deng for the CIA and the PRC’s equivalent spy agency to establish joint “listening posts” in western China to collect seismic data on Soviet nuclear tests in nearby Kazakhstan (this did ultimately come to fruition, according to press reporting). The relationship, for all its friction points, held considerable promise vis-à-vis advancing China’s security interests, as far as Deng was concerned.
This is all to say that Deng decided to overlook the fact that the TWA contravened private U.S. assurances about Taiwan, exercising a whole lot of self-restraint by focusing instead on how the normalization would advance his efforts to remedy the PRC’s more immediate economic and geostrategic woes. The Taiwan issue could wait, for now. He would take the long game. But this patience would not last forever…
“Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time…”
-Deng Xiaoping, 1990
A Critical Juncture
The 1990s would prove a pivotal decade for the U.S., the PRC, and Taiwan — one which set all three players on the respective paths they occupy today. For the U.S., the collapse of the Soviet Union, which began in 1988 and ended in 1991, was a seminal moment. Gone were the days of “spheres of influences" and power jockeying on the global chess board. It was now a unipolar world, of the U.S.’ making and shaping.
With its unparalleled power and influence (Madeline Albright famously dubbed the U.S. the “Indispensable Nation” ), the U.S. had the great geopolitical luxury of being able to consider a foreign policy that was not based purely on the oft cold and calculating realpolitik that its competition with the Soviet Union had so frequently required. It could more freely weigh a foreign policy based on values and ideology. Idealism, not realism.
For Washington this meant a foreign policy oriented around human rights, democracy promotion, and the strengthening of international norms and laws that it had helped put in place post-WWII (fashioned of course in a way that served ‘Murica’s interests). Thus, countries that acted in relatively distasteful ways that the U.S. had courted for largely strategic purposes during the Cold War were now at a real risk of U.S. lecturing.
The PRC was not safe from this scrutiny. They got their lecturing (and some) following the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, which involved the slaughter of hundreds of pro-democracy protestors at the hands of PLA troops on Communist Party orders to break up the demonstrations. The U.S.—buoyed by an outraged domestic populace (Tiananmen was CNN’s breakout party) and highly vocal human rights advocacy groups—responded by ending U.S. military sales to the PRC and imposing economic sanctions.
Tiananmen was a wake-up call for the Chinese, who were incensed that the U.S. had meddled in yet another internal affair. While both sides would continue to see incredible value in their relationship from an economic perspective, the fiasco marked the end of their quasi-security alliance. The PRC had to begin to approach the relationship with more caution. With a weakening Soviet Union on the verge of collapse on its northern and western borders, the PRC now had the bandwidth—and the impetus—to start devoting the bulwark of its attention to China’s eastern flank.
The Gulf War, yet another U.S. foreign policy action rooted mostly in idealism (i.e., America and its allies showing the world that Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked invasion of a sovereign neighbor—Kuwait— would not stand), added to Beijing’s trepidation. PRC military leaders were shocked to their core at how quickly and definitively the U.S., with its integrated joint air and ground operations and use of modern technologies (GPS, Synthetic Aperture Radar, laser-guided munitions, night vision, etc.) was able to rout Iraqi forces and retake Kuwait.
The U.S. victory laid bare the obsoleteness of the PRC’s own military, which consisted largely of just a behemoth of a ground force—the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—whose primary strength lied in its sheer size. The Gulf War was the gut punch that set China about on the massive military modernization effort that continues to this day. A modernization effort initially focused on bolstering its moribund air and naval forces, developing long-range precision strike capabilities, and acquiring advanced command/control, intelligence/reconnaissance platforms and technologies that could support joint operations and give the U.S. a run for its money if anything ever came to blows.
The final conflagration moment of the decade came in 1996 when Taiwan, after nearly fifty years of authoritarian rule by Chiang Kai-shek and his hand-picked successors, had its first true democratic election. The island was becoming freer. Gone were the days of martial law and single-party rule. In the months running up to their election, President Bill Clinton, who had earlier intimated that it would only be a matter of time before “the forces of democratic change” came for the PRC, had flirted (Clinton flirting? Go figure) with Taiwan in a way that, in Beijing’s eyes, threatened to breach the uneasy cross-strait status quo. For China, his most admonishable offense was his government’s granting Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui a visa to visit the U.S. so he could attend a reunion at his alma mater, Cornell University. Seeking to isolate Taiwan’s “international breathing room,” the PRC had long opposed visits by its leaders to foreign countries, no less to Taiwan’s primary benefactor: the United States.
Taiwan, for its part, had resisted PRC entreaties of reaching a peaceful settlement under a “one country, two systems” model (i.e., Beijing treating the island like a “special administrative zone” under its purvey that could retain some—just some—of its autonomy) of the sort that it had extended to Hong Kong. In the run up the Taiwanese elections, President Lee, Taiwan’s ruling Kuomintang party candidate, had also hinted that he didn’t count out a future declaration of independence from the mainland. The PRC needed to do something to show the U.S. and Taiwan that their toiling with the uneasy status quo would not stand. Beijing’s preferred instrument to achieve this: a massive show of military force.
In March 1996, just days before the Taiwan’s first direct presidential election, the PRC deployed some 150,000 PLA troops to its coast opposite Taiwan, kicking off what would become known as the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. The troops engaged in a raft of live-fire military drills and amphibious landing exercises (the sort of military operation the PLA would turn to in a Taiwan invasion scenario). The PLA Rocket Force (PLARF; perhaps the goofiest sounding acronym) conducted short-range ballistic missile “tests” across the strait. Some of the missiles impacted in the ocean less than fifty miles off Taiwan’s busiest ports. One missile reportedly flew over the Taipei before landing some fifteen miles off the island’s eastern coast.
Clinton responded by—you guessed it—deploying the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet to sail into the Taiwan Strait and cause Beijing to think twice about shifting the “training exercises” into no-shit kinetic strikes on Taiwan. Only this time it wasn’t just some destroyers and patrollers. He sent the whole damn fleet — and some. Two aircraft carrier battle groups headed by the USS Nimitz and USS Independence joined the show of force.
It was largest gathering of naval firepower in the region since the 1958 Quemoy and Matsu crisis. The U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry warned his Chinese counterparts behind the scenes of “grave consequences” should their provocations escalate to military strikes on Taiwan.
The PRC backed down. It had proven its point. Theirs was an exercise in coercive diplomacy. The U.S. was happy to deescalate too. Wary to provoke a repeat scenario, Clinton moderated his statements on the PRC, opting to highlight the two powers now-buzzing economic relations instead of their intractable differences over human rights and Taiwan. When asked by reporters about his Taiwan policy, he publicly recited lines in the Three Communiques and the Taiwan Relations Act like scripture passages. During his state visit to China in 1998 he added another maxim of his own conceiving. The “Three No’s”: (1) No two Chinas; or one China, one Taiwan, (2) No U.S. support for Taiwan independence, (3) No U.S. support for Taiwan membership in the U.N. or any other organization for which statehood is required.
Lee Teng-hui, who won the presidency in the Taiwanese election (many contend the PRC’s show of force helped him garner more votes than he would have gained otherwise), so too began to moderate his statements on independence. In the ensuing years, he would focus on strengthening Taiwan’s nascent democratic institutions and growing its economy.
While the PRC was satisfied with its success in pushing the U.S. and Taiwan back within the guardrails of the delicate status quo, the U.S.’ counterdemonstration of military force was humbling. Nearly fifty years since its first Taiwan Strait neutralization mission, the U.S. Seventh Fleet remained a harbinger of humiliation for Chinese leadership — a visible symbol of its own military inferiority.
The PLA had lot of catching up to do if it wanted to ever retake Taiwan. And—as the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis reminded them—in a Taiwan invasion scenario, there was a very real possibility they would have to defeat not just the Taiwanese military, but also U.S. forces in the region. (That’s a damn high bar for a military equipped with 1950s-era military equipment hand-me-downed from the Soviet Union). But it would be prudent to plan for that, and many other eventualities.
Let the military buildup begin.
Road to War
Coming soon folks, bear with me. (supply chain issues; can’t build a house without the materials)
What to do About it
Ditto what I said in the preceding placeholder. This is where I’ll wrap this all up in a pretty bow.