This month marks 45 years since the enactment of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) by the United States Congress. A bipartisan effort, longtime Taiwan allies within that august body felt that then-President Jimmy Carter, in choosing to derecognize Taipei in favor of Beijing, was throwing a historical ally under the bus for the dubious advantage of establishing diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Even today, Carter is a figure not much loved in Taiwan, despite the fact that the seeds of his betrayal were sown almost a decade earlier by two far more disliked figures, Richard Nixon and the recently deceased Henry Kissinger. At 45, it is worth revisiting the TRA, and examining why this oft-misunderstood document has been so crucial to Taiwan’s continued existence.
In delineating just what the TRA does, it is important to first explain what it doesn’t do. Contrary to popular belief, the TRA does not guarantee U.S. protection from attack, or compel U.S. forces to intervene in an assault on the island by the forces of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The closest it comes is to compel the U.S. government to “maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.” The key words here are “maintain the capacity.” This is perhaps the source of what has come to be called “strategic ambiguity.”
It is arguably this strategic ambiguity that has kept the peace, fragile though it is, in the decades since the world’s diplomatic abandonment of Taiwan. Chinese military history reveals a cultural predisposition to avoid engaging in kinetic action, until and unless success against the enemy is all but guaranteed. This tendency to seek certainty goes back at least as far as Sun Tzu, with the admonition “If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight.” This cultural predisposition toward certitude dovetails nicely with the U.S. concept of strategic ambiguity, making the latter an ingenious policy bulwark against military adventurism across the strait.
In fact, strategic ambiguity only emerged as an enunciated concept relating to the Taiwan Strait in the mid-1990s, when political scientist Joseph Nye Jr., then serving as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, told CCP officers that, on the issue of what the U.S. would do in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, “We don’t know and you don’t know; it would depend on the circumstances.” Many years later, Nye revealed that the reasoning behind his vague formulation was to avoid repeating the error made in 1950 by Secretary of State Dean Acheson who, in stating that Korea was outside the American defensive perimeter in Asia, essentially gave an inadvertent green light to China and North Korea to kick off the Korean War.
Having said that, the wording of the TRA is arguably more robust in terms of the U.S. defense commitment than even bona fide defense treaties that Washington has with other nations. The wording in these states that, in the event of an attack on the ally, the party not attacked will take “such action as it deems necessary,” and moreover that it will do so only “in accordance with its constitutional provisions and processes.”
Unfortunately, this commitment to Taiwan has often been misconstrued as a unilateral U.S. guarantee of defense, and for that reason has been used as the pretext to deny Taipei sufficient defensive weapons, most recently the State Department’s refusal to grant it participation in the F-35 program. This would seem to run counter to the spirit of the arms sale policy systematized by the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who established a mechanism that linked the U.S. willingness to reduce arms sales to Taiwan directly to Beijing’s commitment to a peaceful solution to cross-strait differences. In other words: the more China demilitarizes; the more Taiwan will be demilitarized.
In an August 17, 1982, memo to Secretary of State George Shultz and Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger — a memo only recently declassified, in August 2019 — Reagan made it clear that “the linkage between these two matters is a permanent imperative of U.S. foreign policy.”
Given how far the current administration of Xi Jinping has drifted away from seeking a peaceful solution, both in terms of inflammatory rhetoric as well as in military muscle-flexing over and around the island of Taiwan, the refusal to sell Taiwan F-35s (and many, many other weapons systems over the years) serves only to encourage Xi’s revanchist tendencies, and illustrates how far subsequent U.S. administrations have strayed from The Gipper’s insight and directives on this principle.
Reagan’s “Six Assurances,” along with the U.S.-PRC joint communiques of 1972, 1978 and 1982, as well as the TRA itself, are the guiding documents behind Washington’s “one-China policy.” Unfortunately, there are nearly as many misunderstandings — or at least misrepresentations — about the meaning of the one-China policy as there are about the TRA. For one thing, it is not synonymous with the “one-China principle,” which is Beijing’s notion that Taiwan is part of China, though the two are often conflated by duplicitous diplomats and uninformed journalists.
According to the wording of the document, Washington merely “acknowledges” Beijing’s position that “there is one China, and Taiwan is part of China.” It doesn’t endorse it, agree with it, concede to it, or any other verb besides “acknowledge.” This nuanced position has to be explained in detail every few years by a State Department spokesman, who needs to clarify to reporters (and, all too often, to administration officials as well) that the United States “take no position on the status of Taiwan. We neither accept nor reject the claim that Taiwan is a part of China.” Despite how often this is misrepresented as the U.S. “opposing” (a word that is a world of meaning away from the seemingly similar, though pedantically more accurate, “not supporting”) Taiwan independence, it does nothing of the sort. It merely notes Beijing’s deep feelings on the matter.
The TRA emerged as a result of Washington trying to leverage the Sino-Soviet split, playing nice with Beijing in an effort to jointly weaken Moscow. But it was folly to try to out-united front the CCP: Looking back, it is obvious that Beijing has been playing Washington, extracting concession after concession for the past four and a half decades, dangling — just out of reach — the carrot of Chinese political liberalization and assimilation into the U.S.-led liberal international order.
Having said that, the TRA itself, though often misunderstood and misrepresented, has been a boon to the continuance of peace in the Taiwan Strait, perhaps even because of its ambiguities. Indeed, given the change of tenor in Beijing’s global aspirations since the ascension of Xi Jinping, it should, now more than ever, be the ambition of every democratic nation that has a one-China policy to enact a homegrown version of the TRA, to help guide that policy and to disincentivize a Communist takeover of Taiwan, which would have devastating effects on global peace and security.
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