News of the Trump/Tsai
Ing-wen phone convo exploded into the mediasphere on Friday night and learned
and unlearned predictions of dire consequences raged for a good four hours
until the PRC government issued an anodyne statement that characterized the phone
call as “a petty trick” by Taiwan.
By
placing the onus on Taiwan, the PRC was indulging Trump’s tweeted version of
events, which is that Tsai had called him, not the other way around.
Awkwardly, original reports out of Taiwan had characterized the phone call as
initiated by Trump through the good offices of Stephen Yates, a pro-Taiwan
hardliner in the Republican Party.
The
incident provided ample grist for the Trump outrage mill, feeding the preferred
liberal/Beltway narrative that Trump is either surpassingly maladroit in the
fine arts of governance, certifiably insane, or venally exploiting his (soon to
be occupied, if the recount doesn’t scupper him) office to advance plans for a
hotel complex in Taiyuan, in any case unfit for office The End.
For some
interesting reason, there has been little speculation on the motives or wisdom
of Tsai Ing-wen, a quite canny politician, in accepting (version 1) or
initiating (version 2) this supposedly reckless telephone conversation. Judging
by an account in
the Taipei Times, the call was a planned event developed by both
sides and not an occasion of one side impetuously drunk-dialing the other.
Tsai’s office issued a
readout of the ten-minute call, noting that her national security
advisor was also present.
Apparently
Tsai is going through
a rough patch, approval-ratings-wise, and perhaps thought of a
phone call with Donald Trump might be a neat political game-changer.
My take
is not too alarmist. Trump stirred the Taiwan pot. Not necessarily
a bad thing or a good thing. Maybe nothing. It’s a phone call.
Taiwan
indeed is regarded as a red line, since the United States honors the Shanghai
Communiques and the One China policy and ostentatiously avoids infringing on
the integrity of China i.e. encouraging Taiwan independence, even as the US
engages in various other anti-PRC shenanigans throughout East Asia and for that
matter stating a commitment to defend Taiwan against aggression under the
Taiwan Relations Act and, indeed, selling arms to Taiwan.
The PRC
is quite fanatical about restricting, well extinguishing any international
recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign state and Trump, by referring to Tsai as
the president of Taiwan, gave the PRC ample grounds for offense.
But a
realist as well as idealistic case can be made for standing up for Taiwan’s
liberal democracy and its de facto independence. A key competitor for
influence with America inside Taiwan is not just the PRC — it’s Japan, with
which Taiwan in general and the DPP in particular share a close and powerful
affinity. By sticking his oar in the Taiwan situation, Trump could
potentially make the United States a more active and positive actor in Taiwan’s
politics and diplomacy and forestall its drift into the Japanese sphere of
influence.
The most
interesting fallout from L’Affaire phonecall was, for me, the signs that
Cheney neocons are taking position at Trump’s elbows, apparently jostling aside
the Kurt Campbell pivoteers as maestros of Trump’s anti-China policy.
Reporting
on Trump’s foreign policy staffing is notoriously unreliable, but the names
bandied about include John Bolton and Michael Pillsbury. And there’s
Stephen Yates, already mentioned above.
The
generous characterization of the relationship between Taiwan and John Bolton,
the notorious mustachio’d regime-change testicle-twisting stapler-flinging
uber-hawk who represented the US at the United Nations under George W. Bush, is
“it runs deep”.
Less
charitably, Bolton took
money from a notorious KMT slush fund to write pro-Taiwan articles
without registering himself as a foreign lobbyist, thereby creating some
definite if transitory awkwardness during his confirmation hearings.
Michael
Pillsbury was, in the Bush years, the go-to alarmist on the Chinese military
buildup at the Department of Defense, as well as a frequent source for China
hawk (and Asia Times columnist!) Bill Gertz. I expect that Pillsbury’s
dire predictions about Chinese capabilities and intentions are more mainstream
and less mocked now than they were back in 2006, when The Washington Monthly published
a scathing
profile of him as a serial sensationalizer and fantasist.
Stephen
Yates, who was initially credited helping set up the Trump-Tsai call, was a key
member of Dick Cheney’s inner circle. Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff,
Lawrence Wilkerson, an inveterate foe of the neocons, supplied the dish to
Robert Dreyfuss at The American Prospect:
Two of
the people most often encountered by Wilkerson were Cheney’s Asia hands,
Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich. Through them, the fulcrum of Cheney’s
foreign policy — which linked energy, China, Iraq, Israel, and oil in the
Middle East — can be traced. The nexus of those interrelated issues drives the
OVP’s broad outlook.
Yates …
had an important impact on Asia and Middle East policy. Says Wilkerson:
“Generally Steve was quiet. But when there came a time for him to speak, the
room grew very silent, and that did it. We weren’t going any further in that
discussion item if Steve said that the vice president didn’t like it. And it
didn’t take too long to understand that the real power in the room was sitting
there from the vice president’s office.”
Today,
Yates denied the Taipei Times report that he set up the phone
call. But he said he thought it was a good idea. So there’s that.
It
appears quite likely, therefore, that Trump is not winging his foreign policy
based on how he’s digested his last taco bowl, but instead has chosen to
surround himself with acolytes of Dick Cheney.
The
defining characteristics of Cheneyite neocons included a contempt for
transparency, consensus, and strict notions of legality, a love of virtuous
conspiracies, and infatuation with the direct wielding of unilateral American
military power. Their signature legacies were the disastrous invasion of
Iraq, torture, and Guantánamo.
The
highly legalized, alliance-based soft power incrementalist approach to foreign
affairs of the Obama administration was to a significant extent regarded as a
repudiation of the brutal US cowboyism of the Bush/Cheney years.
If the
Cheney revival does play out under Trump, his China policy will be in the hands
of unilateralist hard-power neocons who scorn the painstaking legal parsing,
coalition-building and soft-power incrementalism of the pivoteers. They
also, I will imagine, be eager to seek out opportunities to wield America’s
military might in concert with the uniformed military personnel, like Michael
Flynn, James Mattis, and possibly John Kelly, with whom Trump has decided to
stock the White House security and defense apparatus.
I predict
interesting times ahead for Kim Jong Un, since North Korea was a notorious
target for neocon regime change shenanigans during the Bush administration,
well, make that serial fiascos, and John Bolton probably feels he’s got some
unfinished business up there.
As for
Taiwan, the neocon history is, to put it mildly, interesting.
I daresay
it is a little-known fact that during the George W. Bush administration, when
PRC ability to project power across the Taiwan Strait, though growing, was still
rather limited, anti-China hard-liners were encouraging Taiwan’s Chen Shuibian
to declare independence, presumably on the theory that this would draw the PRC
into a catastrophic confrontation with the United States and probably bring
down the regime.
Lawrence
Wilkerson told the
story to The Hill in 2007:
“The
Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz Rumsfeld, was dispatching a
person to Taiwan every week … essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian … that
independence was a good thing.”
Wilkerson
said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every
time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security
apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”
“This
went on,” he said of the pro-independence efforts, “until George Bush weighed
in and told Rumsfeld to cease and desist told him multiple times to
re-establish military-to-military relations with China.”
Today things
are a little different and how to fight a Taiwan war with a massively bulked up
PRC military is a matter of anxious discussion in Washington. The
conventional deterrence façade is crumbling, there is, I hope, a deficit of
enthusiasm for entering into a nuclear exchange, limited or otherwise, with the
PRC, over Taiwan. Shared, I expect, by Taiwan itself.
The Trump
team may still be in thrall to the dream of exterminating Chinese Communism by
severing its Middle East energy lifeline — the anti-Iran obsession of the
current outfit probably harks back to the Cheney Clean Break strategy — but I
expect they will find Taiwan considerably less eager to roll the dice with
independence and help precipitate an existential crisis for the CCP.
Don’t
expect Taiwan independence, in other words, but expect some Trump
blame-fingering at the pivoteers for letting America’s window of military
opportunity in the Taiwan Strait slide shut during the Obama era.
And there
will be limited coddling of the PRC’s sensitivities when it comes to supporting
Taiwan.
I think
the old-school China hawks who are reportedly gathering around Trump will be of
the opinion that it’s up to Taiwan to decide what risks it wants to take in the
relationship, not for the United States to discourage it. If Tsai wants
to talk to the US president, good for her and to heck with China. It’s
her country and her neck. In fact, from their perspective, there’s no harm in
encouraging Taiwan to push the envelope, and see how far it can take things in
its dealings with the PRC and the United States.
And if
the PRC wants to make something of it, well — in the immortal words of George
W. Bush when he dared the Iraq insurgency to slug it out with the US occupying
forces — “bring it.”
By Peter Lee
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