The enduring logic of US Taiwan policy

Richard Bush:
This is a really interesting story. In 1942, less than a year before the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt was thinking about how to preserve international peace and security after the end of the war. His basic answer was: the great powers have a special responsibility to ensure that peace is maintained and to block any peace destroyers.

He called this scheme the “Four Policemen” [the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the Republic of China], and the idea was that the great powers would be like cops on the beat. If they saw some country arming itself beyond what it needed, that was a signal that aggression might occur. In that case, one or more of the great powers—the “Four Policemen” —would either blockade that country using naval forces, or if that didn’t work, inflict aerial bombardment on it.

So why did Roosevelt designate the Republic of China as one of the four policemen? Chiang Kai-shek’s government couldn’t even gain control of his own country. How could we expect it to play this special role in the international system? Well, Roosevelt’s ancestors were traders and did business with China. So, he exaggerated the importance of China in the world. He also had hopes that China would be a great power, though it didn’t turn out that way for a long time. So, because Taiwan had good air and naval bases—from which Japan attacked the Philippines at the time of Pearl Harbor—Roosevelt felt it should be one of the platforms from which this peacekeeping operation would be run. So, it made a lot of sense to return Taiwan to China.

He came to that decision essentially at the end of 1942. In February 1943, Roosevelt held a meeting with his advisors and proposed territorial solutions, one of which was to return Taiwan to China. Interestingly, he chose to place Korea in a trusteeship under the United Nations. The Cairo Conference in November 1943, which declared the intention of Britain, China, and the United States to return Taiwan to China, confirmed this, and it was later reconfirmed in the Potsdam Declaration in July 1945. However, this conveyed the great powers’ political intent. The idea at the time was that the actual execution of the legal transfer would take place through the peace treaty that ended the war with Japan, which was some years off. That peace conference was complicated, so the Taiwan issue wasn’t settled there. In the interim, the Korean War began, which led to a change in U.S. policy on Taiwan.

Richard Bush:
The American position on Taiwan, as we’ve stated it since June 27, 1950, was that Taiwan’s status was undetermined. We fundamentally changed our view on what was going to happen to Taiwan. We didn’t say it wouldn’t be returned to China, but we indicated that it would happen at a later time, under better circumstances. At the time of the San Francisco Peace Conference, we insisted that the treaty say that Japan renounced sovereignty over Taiwan, which had been a Japanese colony for 50 years, but the treaty did not say to whom Japan was transferring sovereignty.

The United States and its allies could not agree, moreover, on which Chinese government should attend the San Francisco Peace Conference, the Republic of China on Taiwan or the People’s Republic of China on the mainland. So, there was no Chinese government at the San Francisco Peace Conference. Instead, we engineered a separate bilateral peace treaty between Japan and the Republic of China. And in that treaty as well, Japan renounced sovereignty over Taiwan, but didn’t designate to whom it would be transferred, which was a tad annoying to the Republic of China.

So, this has been our stated position for a long time. It was essentially reconfirmed in the normalization communiqué establishing diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China in 1979, where we said, the government of the United States acknowledges the Chinese view that Taiwan is a part of China. In other words, we made clear that China’s view was not our view.

There are practical reasons why this was important. If we recognized that Taiwan was a part of China, that would mean that it really was China’s internal affair, as Beijing was saying, and that what existed between the two sides of the Strait was a civil war. According to international law, the United States shouldn’t be in the business of providing arms to one side in a civil war, nor should the United States be intervening militarily to defend one side in a civil war against another.

A late friend of ours, Alan Romberg, studied this issue very carefully and came to the conclusion that, essentially, our position still is that Taiwan’s status is undetermined. It doesn’t mean it couldn’t be resolved in some way, but it should be done through negotiations between the two sides of the Strait.

Richard Bush:
First of all, in the immediate aftermath of North Korea’s 1950 invasion of South Korea, there was a concern that this was part of a larger communist advance in East Asia. And there was concern that the People’s Republic of China and the People’s Liberation Army were going to invade Taiwan. That didn’t happen for complicated reasons. But I think it helped justify shifting this position. U.S. security planners proposed basing the U.S. position in East Asia on what is now called the first island chain, which includes Taiwan.

There was also, as I’ve suggested, disagreement between us and our allies. But it also had to do with issues of international law on what one can legally do with a part of another country.

Richard Bush:
This is an important set of distinctions, which not all observers understand.

The entity “China” is, as you suggested, a member of the international community, a sovereign state, and a member of the United Nations, among other things. By the time of 1949, when the communists are militarily victorious on the mainland of China, and Mao Zedong, on October 1st, 1949, declares the creation of the People’s Republic of China, you now have two separate governments, each claiming to be the rightful occupant of the China seat in the United Nations and in other international organizations. That argument essentially continued until 1971, when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) replaced the Republic of China (ROC) in the United Nations, because it had gained broad support in the international community.

The issue of whether Taiwan is part of the sovereign territory of that “China,” not the PRC, not the ROC, but “big China,” is a separate one and has to do with defining what the sovereign territory of that China is. It happens that for many years, both the PRC and the ROC asserted vigorously that Taiwan was a part of China. But Taiwan’s main supporter, the United States, took a different view for its own reasons.

This is not to say that at some point in the future, this issue can’t be resolved. But it does mean that this issue will continue. It’s fair to say that on Taiwan, there are now different views as to whether the territory of Taiwan is part of “China’s” sovereign territory, whichever the government of that China may be, and different parties have different views.

Richard Bush:
Simply put, the nationalist party, the Kuomintang, maintains the view that the Republic of China is the government of all of China and that Taiwan is a part of that China.

People in the green camp [the DPP] have thought in different ways about this question. Some place a lot of emphasis on the fact that Japan only divested itself of Taiwan but didn’t vest it in anybody else. One can interpret an initiative by then-President Lee Teng-hui’s statement in 1999, which said most famously that the two sides of the Strait are in a special state-to-state relationship. But read closely, it also seemed to suggest that the territory of the ROC was limited to that territory where the government had been selected in free elections: Taiwan, the Pescadores Islands (or the Penghu Islands), and the Kinmen and Matsu Islands.

In recent years, this issue has not received too much discussion on Taiwan—that may be a good thing.

Richard Bush:
Well, the “One China” principle states that there’s one China in the world, that the PRC is the sole legal government of that China, that Taiwan is a part of China, and the Taiwan issue is an internal affair of China. Therefore, the ROC and the PRC are in a suspended civil war.

The United States’ view, the “One China” policy, is that we recognize that the government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government of China. Moreover, the PRC should have the seat in the United Nations, and we agreed to establish diplomatic relations with it.

However, as I indicated before, we only acknowledge the PRC position that there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. So, it’s clearly not our position that Taiwan is a part of that China. That is up for future discussion.

Also, we believe that Taiwan is an issue of international peace and security. It’s not China’s internal affairs. And we unilaterally stated our strong expectation at the time of normalization with the PRC, and many times thereafter, that, however the division between the two sides of the Strait is resolved, it should be done peacefully.

Richard Bush:
2017 was a long time after the core of our “One China” policy was formulated in earlier decades, and we were looking forward to the visit of President Xi Jinping to Mar-a-Lago. An Asia official in the Trump administration asked me if I could recommend something good on the history of the “One China” policy.

I agreed to do it. I looked around, but nothing particularly satisfied me, or I thought what I found would be too scattershot to be meaningful. So, I just decided to write it myself. I got the draft done before the Mar-a-Lago visit and sent it to my friends in the administration. I included a list of do’s and don’ts on Taiwan. It’s still out there, it’s available on the Brookings website.

Richard Bush:
Oh, well, I’m glad I did it. I actually learned some things that I didn’t know.

Richard Bush:
I can understand why people might think this, but I think that they fail to recognize that our policies actually evolved over time to adjust to changes in circumstances.

The things that haven’t changed are recognition of the government of the People’s Republic of China as the government of China, our maintenance of diplomatic relations with the PRC, the existence of an embassy in Beijing and a Chinese embassy here in Washington, and, according to our pledge at normalization, the continuation of unofficial relations with Taipei.

Finally, there is President Jimmy Carter’s public statement at the time he announced the normalization of relations with the PRC: the United States expected the differences between the two sides of the Strait to be resolved peacefully. That has been a core element of U.S. policy ever since. But a number of things have changed. For example, Taiwan became a democracy in the 1990s, and for a time, it seemed that Taiwan leaders were leaning toward changing Taiwan’s legal status in ways that Beijing would regard as so provocative that it would have to go to war to reverse them. In that period, it wasn’t just Beijing that might unilaterally start a war. Taiwan might create the conditions where Beijing felt it had to go to war.

So, the United States made an adjustment, and most famously, President George W. Bush in December of 2003 said that the United States opposes any unilateral change in the status quo by either side. At that time, the person who seemed to be disturbing the status quo was Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian, so this statement was directed at him. But it’s a dual deterrence formula that can be directed at whoever is causing the problem at any point in time. It’s clearer than the so-called “strategic ambiguity,” which I don’t think has ever been part of U.S. declaratory policy.

We never said what the status quo was. But we did say what we opposed, and I think people in Taipei and Beijing understood perfectly what sorts of actions we were opposing. So that created a new context for thinking about America’s role in maintaining peace and security in the Taiwan area.

At the same time that we made this major statement, there were a lot of other “secondary points” about our policy that were initiated to address the situation as it was developing. In the early nineties, there had actually been discussions between Beijing and Taipei about the future of their relationship. And we saw this as a very good thing. Then, President Lee Teng-hui went in a different direction, and Beijing got rather upset and refused to talk to him. So, we pretty quickly started advocating that the two sides should engage in dialogue. I don’t know how many times I stated that phrase while serving as Chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan, the institution created at the time of normalization with China to conduct substantive relations with Taipei. And we’re saying it now because the circumstances require it.

There was another change that we made. It was one thing to talk about our relationship with Taiwan and Taiwan’s relationship with China when it had an authoritarian government. Once it becomes a democracy, the game changes in another way. The people of Taiwan, through their democratic system, actually get a seat at the negotiating table for the first time.

For a while, as part of our declaratory policy, we didn’t take note of that, but late in the second Clinton administration, we decided it was time to acknowledge the importance of Taiwan becoming a democracy and of the need for the PRC to shape its offers to Taiwan about unification with the aspirations of the Taiwan public in mind. That even became tied to our declaratory policy on security issues. Most famously, in the spring of 2000, President Bill Clinton gave a speech at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies across the street from Brookings. Among the things he said was that the Taiwan Strait issue should be resolved peacefully (nothing new there) and with the assent of the people of Taiwan. That’s the big change.

Moreover, there were other things that we did in the Clinton administration. It was decided that it was time to work hard to bring Taiwan into the World Trade Organization. Truth to tell, we were doing this to pressure China to get its act together and start negotiating. But we were the ones who took the lead on getting Taiwan into the world’s most important trade and economic organization at the time. We may not be moving fast enough for some people, we may be moving too fast for others, including the PRC.

Additionally, for a long time after we terminated relations with Taiwan and ended the mutual defense treaty, we only had an arms sales relationship with them. All the negotiations about security issues were about what weapon systems to transfer. In the mid-nineties, when there was a crisis in the Taiwan Strait over things that President Lee Teng-hui had done, and that we had done too, the PRC fired missiles with dummy warheads into target zones not too far from Taiwan. We realized at the time that we really didn’t have good communications channels with the Taiwan military. We just talked to the arms sales guys; we didn’t talk to the policy and operations guys. So it was decided to begin whole new channels of dialogue, not only with the top civilian leaders who saw Taiwan presidents every day, but also with senior military leadership. Those contacts have gone on ever since, and they’re very useful.

And Beijing may actually be happy that we have those channels available, if we choose to use them. Moreover, the more sophisticated our arms sales became, the more there was need for U.S. military experts to train Taiwan on how to use them. So, there are trainers in Taiwan all the time on temporary duty doing training operations with their Taiwan counterparts—a big change from 30 years ago.

Richard Bush:
First of all, the United States government pledged in a set of assurances that we conveyed to Taipei in 1982 that we would not mediate the cross-Strait dispute. In my view, it is almost impossible to mediate a dispute as complex as that without getting involved in the substance. We prefer that it really is the two sides of the Strait that negotiate some sort of arrangement, because then they’ll own it. We should only be in a mediation role if the two sides we were mediating between agree to it, not only at the beginning but at the end as well.

Secondly, we actually have post-World War II experience in trying to mediate between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government and the Chinese Communist Party. General George Marshall did his best to expand common ground between the two sides. But their mutual mistrust was so deep that he soon recognized that this mission was going to fail. He came home and then became the secretary of state. So, we have a sort of genetic allergy to mediating this dispute.

Third, even before Taiwan became a full democracy in the mid-1990s, American officials probably understood in their hearts that the United States had made a series of decisions about Taiwan’s future without being able to consult with the people of Taiwan about their views of those changes, because it was an authoritarian system. I think that our officials, whatever they would say publicly, understood that it’s really not proper for us to be negotiating over the heads of the people who were going to be affected by whatever we come up with.

And now, since Taiwan is a democracy, the Taiwan public really should have a say in any effort to resolve the cross-Strait dispute. The United States should not be involved in defining their future. It’s really up to the PRC government to formulate an offer that is Taiwan-friendly and appeals to the public, because they’re the ones that are going to have to live with it, and their children and their grandchildren, forever.

Richard Bush:
A few guesses. First, Beijing might ask Trump to say, as a matter of U.S. policy, that Taiwan is a part of China, setting aside decades of policy that was devised for good reasons. Second, Beijing might ask Trump to publicly say that we oppose Taiwan independence. China got President George W. Bush to say it privately, but they were never able to get him to say it publicly.

Richard Bush:
Yes. Third, President Xi Jinping might ask him to publicly promise to show restraint on arms sales. Finally, he might ask Trump to express support for unification. All of these things tip the scale in China’s direction.

Richard Bush:
Some of these statements would have substantive consequences. To say that Taiwan is a part of China does make it an internal affair. And it has implications, at least as far as our lawyers are concerned, about arms sales policy and intervention policy. I don’t think we should be promising restraint on arms sales while Beijing continues its military buildup. That’s just exacerbating the asymmetry that already exists between the two sides. Whatever responsibility Taiwan may have for the impossibility or the difficulty of resolving the dispute, China bears a lot of responsibility as well.

Other statements change the balance of power within Taiwan politics in favor of China. To say that we oppose Taiwan independence would be understood as opposition to any DPP government, because Beijing believes (incorrectly, I believe) that independence is the goal of the DPP now and forever. To say that we support unification will be seen by the Taiwan people as limiting their freedom of choice, that we are biased in favor of something China wants, not in favor of their desire to have a say in their own future. I don’t think we should oppose unification in theory if it were achieved in the proper way. But we shouldn’t publicly support it.

I think that all these statements, in one way or another, would be read in Taiwan as a degree of abandonment by the United States.

Richard Bush:
First, I would advise him not to make any changes in declaratory policy that I’m guessing that Beijing might ask him to make. Second, I would advise Trump to remind Xi that the Taiwan public is strongly opposed to Beijing’s long-standing formula for unification, “one country, two systems.” It’s really the Taiwan people that he should be talking to.

Third, I would suggest to Trump that he encourage Beijing to be prepared to talk with whichever party Taiwan voters put in power. It should eschew the temptation to interfere in Taiwan politics, and it should recognize that Taiwan’s main political parties have conformed to the status quo preferences of the population. I think Beijing would like us to believe that this is a dangerous situation and it’s somehow our responsibility. I think the responsibility is on their foot, not ours.

Fourth, I think Trump should tell Xi that Beijing’s current suite of actions toward Taiwan, what you and I have called “coercion without violence,” is not a good or effective way for China’s leaders to get the Taiwan people to trust their intentions. And that’s what they really should be working on.

And fifth, I think Trump should simply decline to discuss arms sales or promise to do so in the future.

Richard Bush:
I personally can vouch for the fact that the conduct of our policy has not been perfect. I made mistakes; others made mistakes. On balance, however, I think we have been quite successful. At the time that we established diplomatic relations with the PRC and terminated them with the ROC and ended our mutual defense treaty, there were some analysts here in Washington and I suspect in Beijing who believed that the Taiwan government at the time (which was an authoritarian government) would conclude that it could not preserve Taiwan’s de-facto independence and thus would have to seek the best deal it could from Beijing. However, Taiwan proved to be far more resilient than these people thought.

The government was pleased that the United States declared that it would continue to sell arms. The Reagan administration displayed a lot of strong support for Taiwan, both publicly and privately. Washington has shown flexibility in how it conducted its “unofficial relations” with Taiwan. One of the reasons for this was that the American Institute in Taiwan has proved to be an incredibly effective implementer of U.S. policy. I’m proud to have been associated with it.

And finally, Taiwan’s democratization gave the public a seat at the negotiating table with China. As a result, I think U.S. policy has contributed to the preservation of peace for the past 47 years. It has bought Taiwan that same amount of time to become a stronger, more prosperous, more civilized, and rambunctious democratic society.

Richard Bush:
That’s a really tough one. But I certainly hope for an outcome that is not the result of war or prolonged PRC coercion of Taiwan designed to sap the confidence of Taiwan’s leaders and people. It would be an outcome where Taiwan democracy is genuinely preserved. Beijing used the same formula for Hong Kong that it’s proposing for Taiwan, and all it was willing to offer Hong Kong politically was partial democracy. So, under “one country, two systems,” would Taiwan have to go back, rather than continue the system that it has?

I hope for a future outcome that occurs through gradual convergence based on the shared interests of the two sides—a process where different ultimate outcomes are considered instead of just focusing on one that is defined by one of the parties to the dispute. And it’s an outcome where neither side fears that the other is threatening its fundamental interests.

All of this is easy for me to suggest. I understand it’s very hard to bring about. I do think there are a few things that should probably happen in the near term. On Taiwan, I think that political leaders need to perform better. They have a good democratic process, but their performance is sometimes wanting. Political leaders on different sides of issues need to work harder to forge a degree of consensus on difficult policy choices that the island faces, including the challenge from China.

Second, at election time, I would really like to see the political parties and their candidates present voters with a clear choice between substantive policy alternatives. Too often, we’ve seen election campaigns focus on side issues, on scandals, and so on. (Unlike the United States, where we always discuss substance, right?) [sarcasm]

I think that the basic choice regarding China concerns: what is the proper balance for Taiwan between engagement, on the one hand, and deterrence, on the other? Whichever administration is in power, there are elements of both. I understand that this is a really difficult choice, but it does need to be addressed.

There should be some consideration of mandating that any significant changes in Taiwan’s legal identity should occur through constitutional amendments. I think that would be stabilizing. It would make almost impossible outcomes that either leaders in Beijing or people in Taiwan would fear.

China, at the same time, will have to make some adjustments. First, end the practice of playing favorites among Taiwan’s political parties. Stop interfering in Taiwan politics. I don’t think that helps Beijing’s cause. Second, reduce the level and proximity of military drills directed at Taiwan.

Third, accept that Beijing needs to be willing to talk to and coexist with any government that the Taiwan voters select. And fourth, most importantly, accept that “one country, two systems” will never have a market in Taiwan as the formula for unification, and that China needs to come up with an approach that the Taiwan public is willing to even consider.

It is said that Beijing is working on a Taiwan model of “one country, two systems,” and we have some details on some of its nonpolitical issues. But I haven’t seen anything that identifies how Beijing conceives Taiwan’s legal relationship with the PRC and the parameters of its constitutional democratic system. I think that’s something that the Taiwan public will want to know about before it makes any decisions at all.

Richard Bush:
I am going take the easy way out and say I’m in the four to six [laughs]. On the one hand, I don’t believe that there’s a cataclysm in our near-term future. There’s been a lot of talk about when China is going to war to seize Taiwan. A lot of that talk is ill-informed. Our military leaders have now made clear that what they’re talking about when they think about the future is when China would have the capabilities to take Taiwan, not whether it will or not, and that’s good.

Also, I think that a lot of analysts do not recognize what China’s actual policy is right now. It’s not simply to prepare for war and to go to war when they think they’re ready, or when Taiwan so provokes them that they need to. They are pursuing a policy of coercion that doesn’t involve violence. It involves different aspects of Taiwan society. It’s not just a military strategy; it’s a political one. It’s a cyber policy. It has the virtue of being low risk but also has the potential for succeeding in getting Taiwan people to decide, “we can’t continue sort of living in this situation, let’s just try and get the best deal we can.”

On the other hand, I think that a formal agreement between the two sides that resolves all the issues between them is unlikely, partly because they are so far apart on some fundamental issues, including the nature of the political system and the status of the Republic of China government.

Moreover, I think that the level of mistrust between the two sides is so great that, if that were going to be remedied, it would take a long time to do so. So, I think it may be some version of the status quo, hopefully where leaders on all sides play their hands smartly, don’t exaggerate the danger, but don’t underestimate it as well.

Richard Bush:
Happy to do it.