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Taiwan Has Good Reason to Worry about Biden’s China Policy | Roger Liu

蘋果日報 2020/12/20 09:56


In the past few weeks, the Biden-Harris team has announced several key figures of national security. To many’s surprise, the hawkish Michele Flournoy was dropped, as Lloyd Austin III replaces her as the next at the helm of Pentagon. The former commander of CENTCOM, if approved by the Senate, Austin will be the first African-American Secretary of Defense ever in U.S. history.
While the progressives of the Democratic Party is cheering for the victory of identity politics, the U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific region are more concerned about the future of U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, whether the quadrilateral security arrangement of QUAD will still survive, and, most importantly, what is at the core of the new administration’s China Policy. To the disappointment of many analysts of America’s Asian allies, not only China has not been mentioned in the nomination speech by Biden, “Indo-Pacific” was as well replaced by Asia-Pacific—a term used to refer to the region and the U.S. strategies in the Obama administration.
Biden’s “Asia Pacific” is not a slip of the tongue; instead, it reflects the true color of his national security team in the next four years. To many in his future national security team, China is never the enemy or the rival but the competitor with whom the U.S. can cooperate on a variety of issues such as climate change. Tony Blinken’s WestExec has helped many U.S. companies enter China’s market. Jake Sullivan is known by many in Taiwan for sharing Paul Kane’s “Taiwan-ditching” NYT article to Hillary Clinton. John Kerry said it is important not to paint China to the corner when talking about the coal-fired power plants in the Belt and Road Initiative. And Bob Iger, the Disney CEO who has refused to criticize Chinese Communist Party policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, is considered to assume the ambassador position to China.
Biden’s nominations could be an olive branch to China, but they could possibly reflect his deep beliefs in restoring the Liberal International Order that has dictated the U.S. foreign policy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991.
In his speech at the World Economic Forum (WEF) of 2017, Biden stresses the importance of the Liberal International Order, which is built upon three main pillars. First, democratic systems help eliminate wars. To achieve the goal major democracies should promote democracy by spreading it peacefully or with force. Second, international organizations created upon a set of universally recognized rules, norms and regulations are a key to the good governance of international politics. Third, free trade and globalization are at the core of economic development and welfare for all in the world.
The liberal order has prevailed in the post-Cold War era. It has also been taught in countless classrooms in U.S. universities and colleges in other parts of the world, where generations of leaders, scholars, and experts have been exposed to the theories. The liberal values are the core of Washington’s international strategy. For decades, bureaucrats, think-tankers and politicians on either side of the aisle have attempted to incorporate China into the U.S.-made world order, so that the dragon could hopefully be tamed at last.
However, the prerequisite for success lies in the fact that the U.S. still has global dominance with its unrivaled military and economic power. With the decline in the overall U.S. strength, if the United States still wants to sustain its leadership in the international system, it has to transaction with other powers—China, Russia, India, or others—to maintain the leader of the system. To be more realistic (if not more of a realist), the U.S. leaders should consider the option of “sphere of influence” that has been avoided intentionally by U.S. politicians: by dissecting the world into different regions of protection and control, the U.S. can indeed better keep its credibility and to reduce the likelihood of conflicts with other great powers.
This is actually what Graham Allison, the founding Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, proposes in his Foreign Affairs article this year. Allison gives two scenarios: one is that when the unhappy Russia decides to invade one Baltic states, and the other is when the unhappy Taiwan decides to move more towards independence to avoid being another Hong Kong, and it invites the military invasion from China. The U.S. would not be able to keep its promise to defend smaller nations in either scenario. Allison’s suggestion is that the U.S. should re-examine its global commitments and alliances: ditch some and keep the really essential ones for whom the U.S. interests are as important as theirs.
Allison’s prescription can’t help but remind us of the Defense Perimeter speech given by Dean Acheson in the spring of 1950, which finally invited the attack from Kim Il-sung and his People’s Army. But Allison is not the only liberal scholar of international relations who proposed the sphere of influence. In 2015 Amitai Etzioni wrote an article defending the U.S. “hand-off” stance on the occupation of Crimea by Russia, arguing that the United States should acquiesce to emerging powers in drawing spheres of influence, which would eventually help the avoidance of major power wars.
According to Paul Roast of the University of Chicago, the choice of words to describe China is not merely about lexicology. While “competitors” suggest the possibility of cooperation, tags on China and other powers such as “adversaries” and “enemies” can be dangerous since enemies are to be “defeated” as “[a]ny ‘compromise’ could be sneered at as ‘appeasement’.”
It is indeed too early for now, or even within the first year of administration, to tell what Biden’s China policy actually is. But Taiwan has good reason to worry, since if the declined U.S. wants to go back to lead “by the power of examples” of the liberal order, it will need the support of the secondary powers in its alliance and not the challenges from its competitors and rivals. Major key international issues on Democrats’ campaign agenda, such as climate change, COVID-19 and trade will definitely need Beijing to nod. How will Taiwan be treated this time in the Biden administration in such settings, with people like Sullivan in the government and the changed power distribution between Washington and Beijing? Will Taiwan (again) be considered a quid pro quo for the promotion of U.S.-China relations in the mindset of Democrat decision-makers?
When expressing their reservations regarding a specific country’s policy, the CCP leaders like to use a quote that China would “judge the country not by its words but by its actions.” And it is what Taipei should do regarding Biden’s administration now. A cautious Taiwan should closely watch the patterns of the United States and China in their first-year interactions, as well as how much the two sides are willing to adjust for further cooperation at the expense of their self-claimed core interests. For the U.S., it could be the maintenance of leadership in the liberal system, but for China, it is Taiwan.
(Roger C. Liu
Associate Professor, Department of Social Sciences
Chair for the Center of South and Southeast Asia Studies
FLAME University
Pune, India)
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