In the wake of her visit to Taiwan last week, U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn appeared to make a mistake. First, she tweeted, innocuously enough: “We cannot back down to authoritarian leaders,” a standard jab likely aimed at contrasting Taiwan’s democracy with China’s authoritarianism. But then she followed that tweet up with a photograph of herself captioned: “Enjoyed my visit to National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei that remembers the work of [former Taiwanese] President Chiang Kai-shek.” Chiang Kai-shek was, of course, a brutal, authoritarian leader. Admiring his work contradicts with the previous commitment to anti-authoritarianism so directly that it hollows out that sentiment entirely, and makes Blackburn look ignorant, at best.
And yet there is another way of seeing this. The apparently ignorant contradiction actually makes for an instructive artifact, helping locate some of the real sentiment behind U.S. policy on Taiwan, if one channels historian Perry Anderson in American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. “Since the Second World War,” Anderson writes, “the ideology of American foreign policy has always been primarily Wilsonian in register (emphasis added) — ‘making the world safe for democracy’ segueing into a ‘collective security’ that would in due course become the outer buckler of ‘national security.’ In substance (emphasis added), its reality has been unswervingly Hamiltonian — the pursuit of American supremacy, in a world made safe for capital.”
Blackburn’s tweets fit this framework so well they appear a little on-the-nose. Anti-authoritarian rhetoric is conjured, but then revealed to be either insincere or superficial, with a celebration of a former authoritarian leader. Furthermore, though, the tweets recall an even deeper iteration of the same idea. The specter of U.S. intervention over Taiwan now religiously cites democracy as being at the heart of its cause, but the original version of U.S. support came in the form of support for authoritarian Chiang Kai-shek, whose Republic of China government fled to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. After the start of the Korean War in 1950, U.S. destroyers entered the Taiwan Strait, effectively sealing off Taiwan from invasion by the Chinese Communist Party, and again, during the Taiwan Strait crises beginning in 1954 and 1958, more U.S. Navy vessels were sent, backed by veiled nuclear threats in the second instance. Economically, too, Taiwan was granted a host of support in its pre-democratic days. These actions were evidently not in support of a democracy, they were in support of creating a bulwark against the communist People’s Republic of China.
In current circumstances, of course, as in 1996, the U.S. is backing the democratic version of Taiwan. But while, through Anderson’s lens, this is useful in appealing to the U.S. population for buy-in, the common thread between support for pre-democratic and democratic Taiwan remains its position in relation to the challenge of China to U.S. supremacy. This doesn’t mean that no-one involved in U.S. foreign policy decision making believes in Taiwanese democracy — or is as half-hearted about it as Blackburn’s tweets appear to be. Nancy Pelosi was at least savvy enough to visit Taiwan’s National Human Rights Museum on her trip and has been consistent in opposing Chinese authoritarianism for a long time. But it means, taken as a whole, U.S. interests ultimately trump stated values in determining the U.S. establishment’s commitments to Taiwan.
For government officials in Taiwan this isn’t news. They themselves justifiably wield Taiwanese democracy to uphold Taiwan’s claim to nationhood, separating it definitively from China. And while the U.S. support may not be value-led, this alone would not make it unwelcome, necessarily. A steady majority of its 23 million people does not want to be ruled by China, a vastly more powerful neighbor: This may not allow them to pick the terms on which their allies support them.
The distinction is still useful to clarify, though. On a case by case basis, it has to inform the kind of approach Taiwan takes to U.S. support. You ask different questions of a deal that comes out of shared principle than one that is pitched out of apparently mutual interest. Blackburn’s tweets are a reminder of that imperative.
Image: Sunil Targe, Unsplash
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