Tensions between the United States, China and Taiwan have increased since Biden took the White House. At this time, Niall Ferguson, a historian who has advocated for a “binational” relationship between the U.S. and China (Chimerica), once again made the alarming statement that the Taiwan crisis could end U.S. hegemony.
Ferguson’s March 21 Bloomberg News article, “A Taiwan Crisis May Mark the End of the American Empire He argued that if the United States were to let Taiwan fall into China’s hands, the United States would not only lose its dominant position in the Indo-Pacific region entirely, but could also surrender its global supremacy to China. He disagrees with the comparison of present-day Taiwan to Belgium at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, or to Poland at the outbreak of World War II in 1939. He argues that for the United States, Taiwan is more like the Suez Canal that led to Britain’s loss of global leadership and its reduction from an imperial lion to a paper tiger. The title of Ferguson’s article is used by some Chinese media as a reference to “the one who has Taiwan has the world”, which is not very accurate but does convey some of the spirit.
Ferguson also said that when Kissinger secretly visited China in 1971, he brought six goals with him, including the hope of facilitating U.S. President Nixon’s visit to China, helping the U.S. get out of the Vietnam War quagmire, joint U.S.-China pressure on the Soviet Union, and slowing down the nuclear arms race. China had only one goal: to cling to the Taiwan issue, which eventually forced Kissinger to concede and expel Taiwan from the United Nations, after which the U.S. and China established formal diplomatic relations. When diplomatic relations were formally established in 1979, a law in the U.S. Congress simply stated that “any move to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means” would be “of grave concern to the United States. The law contained no commitments or assurances as to how the United States would respond if China attacked Taiwan by non-peaceful means. This policy has been described as “strategic ambiguity.
This “strategic ambiguity” between the U.S., China and Taiwan has operated for about 40 years, and the many Taiwan Strait crises that have occurred during that time have been resolved with or without incident under this framework. The U.S. side hopes that this careful balancing act will avoid both angering Beijing and encouraging Taiwan to declare independence. Between mainland China and Taiwan, the U.S. always acts like an arbiter and mediator. If mainland China provokes Taiwan, the U.S. will step up arms sales and use diplomatic rhetoric or even military exercises to force the Communist rulers to back down; if Taiwan independence ventures, it will knock twice to force the tendency to cool down. It should be said that it has been largely successful in resolving the conflict between the mainland and Taiwan.
However, everything has changed since Xi Jinping came to power. Xi Jinping’s ambitions far exceed those of Mao. Back then Mao and the CCP were like the hedgehog mentioned in Ferguson’s article, defeating the multi-targeted U.S. fox with a single Taiwan issue by blocking six with one. At that time, Mao or Zhou Enlai did not necessarily have the vision of “the one who wins Taiwan wins the world”, they only saw Taiwan as a legacy left by their ancestors, which had to be ceded when the country was weak and would never be lost again after the CCP came to power. Even if Mao had the idea of “winning the world” at that time, he only wanted to be the boss of the third world. Xi Jinping now has a far more ambitious view of the world than Mao did, which is to replace the United States as the world leader and change the U.S.-dominated world order.
The United States sees Xi’s ambition and China’s aggressive moves over the past few years very clearly, and this is a clear and present danger to the United States. If you lose Taiwan, you lose the world, and then Taiwan has never been more important to the United States than it is today. So, is the “strategic ambiguity” that was derived from the Mao era and used to work effectively no longer applicable to today’s U.S.-China-Taiwan triangle?
Yes! The first major article to point out that “strategic ambiguity” no longer applies to the current U.S.-China-Taiwan relationship was in the September 2 Foreign Affairs article “U.S. Policy Toward Taiwan Can’t Be Unambiguous Anymore” ( American Support for Taiwan Must Be Unambiguous,” by Richard Haass, now chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. He argues that strategic ambiguity is “dead” and that it is time for the United States to introduce a policy of strategic clarity, i.e., a clear commitment that the United States will respond to China’s use of force against Taiwan, because a clearer commitment would be safer for the Taiwan Strait and more in line with U.S. interests.
Following Haas’s article, a number of mainstream media outlets, both left and right, ran analysis and discussion articles on U.S. strategy toward Taiwan. Not only that, but U.S. political circles, the Department of Defense, the diplomatic field and academic think tanks are also involved in the great discussion. A strategic shift in U.S. policy toward Taiwan is clearly in the making.
Recent Comments