From the Editor's Desk: Musings on Taiwan and the threat of war

On August 2, 2022, flight tracking website Flightradar24 tweeted that over 700,000 people were tracking a US Air Force C-40 Clipper, callsign “SPAR19.” The reason? SPAR19 was seemingly headed from Malaysia to Taipei International Airport, and more importantly, carrying Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi aboard. Within hours, Reuters was able to report that Speaker Pelosi was indeed on board SPAR19, and that she had set foot on Taiwanese soil, the first such visit by a senior US official to Taiwan since the Nixon administration.

When the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, China was ripped in two. The mainland, controlled by the Communists, came to be known as the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The Chinese Nationalist Party (中国国民党, anglicised as Guomingdang or Kuomintang), was driven out of the mainland, and fled to the island that was then known as Formosa – which would later be called Taiwan. This island, and a host of smaller islands adopted the pre-Communist name of the Republic of China (ROC) and maintained themselves as the legitimate government of China. The ROC would continue to hold the Chinese seat at the United Nations until 1971, when the PRC was recognised as the sole legal China by General Assembly Resolution 2758. In 1972, the United States, in the Shanghai Communiqué officially declared a One China Policy, by which it recognised that there was only one China, of which Taiwan was a part – and laid the foundations for the normalisation of relations between the United States and the People’s Republic.

What the Shanghai Communiqué strategically failed to communicate, which China was the one which the United States officially recognised as the legitimate China. To date, the United States does not officially recognise either the PRC or Taiwan as the legitimate China, the sovereignty of Taiwan, or the sovereignty of the PRC over Taiwan. Like a number of countries, the US maintains unofficial relations with Taiwan with a de facto embassy in Taipei through the American Institute in Taiwan. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act commits the United Statesto significant relations with Taiwan, as well as to helping Taiwan to defend itself, albeit in the vaguest possible terms and with no explicit mention of a US military intervention in the case of an invasion. What has since resulted are extremely productive relationships with both the PRC and ROC, as well as a productive working relationship between the two Chinas. Though the importance of the Taiwan question has waxed and waned over the last forty years, the US presently remains committed to a One China policy and official diplomatic recognition of the PRC. The US has not directly confronted China over Taiwan, though it has intervened forcefully in the Third Taiwan Straits crisis (1995-96), prompting a rethinking in Beijing of the US commitment to defend Taiwan, and forcing the PRC to concede, at the time, that it did not have the military means to force Taiwan into conceding its position.

From the 1990s to the mid-2010s, the US and China maintained reasonably warm relations, with significant cooperation on economic issues, and surprisingly, security issues – particularly the issue of combatting Islamist terror groups. Relations even warmed to the point whereby China’s People Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) participated in the US-hosted biennial Exercise RIMPAC in 2014 and 2016. Throughout these decades, the United States enjoyed a certain degree of flexibility on their Taiwan stance – selling weapons technology and armaments to Taiwan amid protests from China, in essence ignoring those protests but nevertheless maintaining a constructive working relationship with the PRC. Arguably, even China’s protestations were simply to pay lip service to their Taiwan stance, but the practice of a working relationship with the US indicated a preponderance for pragmatism in the Chinese foreign policy establishment. Relations would deteriorate as of about 2016, when the PRC redoubled its efforts to acquire territories in the South and East China seas – naturally, it became an issue of much debate in the 2016 presidential election in the US, with relative antagonism from all candidates. It was around this time that the US Department of Defence officially classified China as a strategic competitor and potential threat. With the onset of the Trump administration, the United States’ stance towards the PRC hardened considerably, with President Trump declaring extensive tariffs on Chinese goods, resulting in a trade war by 2019. Though many had expected that this attitude would change during the Biden administration, the mood in Washington following the pandemic and increasingly aggressive Chinese “wolf-warrior” diplomacy has remained frosty towards the PRC. Indeed, between Chinese cyber-attacks on the US, the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wangzhou (and the subsequent hostage diplomacy crisis), and an increasingly wary foreign policy establishment in the United States, US-China relations have hit a new low, to say the least, with a decidedly pessimistic outlook for at least the near future.

Which brings us back to August 2022.

Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is the first of its kind by a high-ranking US official, particularly one so high up in the Presidential Line of Succession. Though the PRC threatened to shoot down SPAR19 should it enter Taiwanese airspace, the consensus amongst observers was that the threats were idle posturing, intended to reflect President Xi’s need to project a strongman image. With repeated Covid-related lockdowns (including a recent one in Shanghai), and unpopular economic and travel policies during the pandemic, President Xi’s power and legitimacy is being actively threatened. To retain his position as president, it is essential that he shore up support from all wings of the Chinese Communist Party ahead of the Party Congress in November 2022.

So what does one do, when your greatest competitor is egging you over an island that is sovereign in practice but you nevertheless claim as a renegade province? You up the ante of course, with bluster and diplomatic protests, stage military drills and a de facto blockade, fire missiles all across their airspace, move infantry fighting vehicles and long range missiles to the nearest coastal border, and deliberately provoke the little island’s air force. Oh, and blame it on the other guy for disturbing the peace and violating international law. That last bit is crucial for securing the support of the ideologue base within your party that is crucial to your staying in power for years to come.

To the casual observer, it might appear that the US and China are playing a very fast, very loose, very high-stakes game of chicken over Taiwan, despite it being abundantly clear that the maintenance of the status quo is the most favourable solution for all parties involved. To a degree, they would be correct. Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong cautioned Singaporeans about a looming conflict in the region in the not-too-distant future, without explicitly mentioning Taiwan, China or the US – though considering Singapore’s quite close ties with all parties involved and a vested stake in the preservation of peace in in the Indo-Pacific, PM Lee is likely to be in the know, and the warning is not to be taken taken lightly. Needless to say, given how vital both the US and China are to the economic survival of the world at large, war between the two, even on a small scale, would be extremely disruptive – far beyond the conflict in the Ukraine – at best and immensely destructive at worst.

Though the system of international interdependence is functioning at least semi-optimally and staving off the impulse to resort to war as a means of resolving differences, the smart money suggests that the risk of military confrontation between the United States and China is at an all-time high (even if still far less likely than a somewhat peaceful resolution). The fact that the probability is this high, is in and as of itself a threat, and one that ought to be feared. As the situation seems at risk of plummeting into a deadly escalation, it will be vital – for the survival of the (already-imperilled) modern rules-based international order that the US and China, will move forward, with prudence and acting judiciously. If that should fail, middle power states in the region must do their best to intervene and mediate a settlement that, at the least, would preserve the status quo, and might even attempt to enshrine it in international law. If there is one thing that the previous century has taught us, it is that when complex political questions are determined through war and the conviction that might is right the cost is unsustainable, and that therefore ultimately, political questions require political solutions in the modern world.