John L. Thornton China Center

We experienced an anomalous period when Ma [Ying-jeou], Obama, and Xi were in office where relations between Taipei, Washington, and Beijing were largely constructive. Some of the muscle memory in Washington atrophied a bit. With the elections of Tsai [Ing-wen] and Trump, things have reverted back to the historical mean of increased sensitivity around Taiwan.

There might be some kind of a broad document signed in Singapore, we don’t know yet, that would mark at least, on paper, the formal end of the Korean war, the formal end of hostilities on the Korean peninsula. But the problem with that is that hostilities have not ended on the Korean peninsula. North Korea is armed to the teeth, South Korea also has very substantial capabilities of it’s own, the United States has a very significant presence, so none of those things have changed and that is not even getting into the question of the long-term status of North Korea’s nuclear weapons capabilities.

We’ve been in situations like this before where the North and South [Koreas] have made momentary accommodation with one another, [but] right now the stakes are much higher, because you now have nuclear weapons deployed in North Korea, you have long-range missiles, you have a variety of threats to the region. Unless and until those issues can be meaningfully addressed, we…may be in a cessation of hostilities, but the possibility of war would be ever present.