US’ Taipei Act is a needless provocation aimed at China, even if unintended
- The Act’s unanimous passage in Congress and a study of its provisions make clear the legislation is largely symbolic. But will Beijing see it as such?
- The people of Taiwan need to ask themselves: if Beijing reacts muscularly to the US move, what is the US actually prepared to do?
This development has proceeded with little or no public commentary. One could be forgiven for thinking the absence of discussion is deserved. When anything passes both houses of Congress by unanimous vote, one can rightly suspect that zero thought has gone into the move and that it is intended to be largely symbolic.
That is, members of Congress (along with the president) believe that they can satisfy domestic sentiment and incur little or no cost internationally – a “freebie”. Someone on the Hill must have stayed up all night dreaming up a name for the Act that, when put in acronym form, spelt out the name of Taiwan’s capital Taipei.
What if Beijing believes that in a Sino-American confrontation, Washington would have little support from its allies? Or, what if Beijing decides to call Washington’s bluff? Concisely, this allegedly symbolic legislation will remain symbolic only as long as Beijing plays along.
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This legislation has more escape hatches than a set in a Houdini show. Consequently, if Beijing focuses on the Act from this perspective, serious trouble for now could be avoided.
On the other hand, if Beijing chooses to view this legislation from another point of view, it could perceive an underlying and disconcerting set of objectives, intentions and departures. By “departures”, I mean inclinations away from the underlying policies that have guided eight prior US administrations of both parties in managing the Taiwan issue.
Take the example of “official relations” with Taiwan. Every country that has established formal diplomatic relations with Beijing since the early 1970s has done so only after promising, in some form or other, to only have “unofficial relations” with the people of Taiwan, as opposed to official relations with the government of Taiwan. Indeed, current and long-standing declaratory US policy is precisely that.
Throughout this Act, however, the impulse to boost the official character of Washington’s (and other countries’) interaction with Taipei is apparent by calling for: encouraging other states in the Indo-Pacific region to strengthen, enhance or upgrade relations with Taiwan; calibrating Washington’s economic, security and diplomatic relations with other nations on how they treat Taiwan; and a ratcheting-up of high-level visits by US officials to Taiwan.
Or take another example in the Act – weapons sales to Taiwan. This has been a fraught issue since then US president Richard Nixon’s opening of relations with China in the early 1970s.
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The Act breaks some new and potentially perilous ground in setting a new standard for calibrating weapons sales (“existing and likely future threats” to Taiwan) and in determining the character of the weapons sold (“supporting the efforts of Taiwan to develop and integrate asymmetric capabilities, as appropriate, including mobile, survivable, and cost-effective capabilities, into its military forces”).
Beijing will see this as an effort to increase the offensive, and possibly pre-emptive, character of what is transferred to the admittedly increasingly pressurised island. One can only speculate about Beijing’s reactions.
To be sure, many of the Act’s impulses and provisions exist in prior legislation and congressional policy expressions. This law, however, has a high concentration of such expressions at a particularly precarious time. Further, in prior US presidential administrations, we generally could count on the executive branch to moderate congressional exuberance.
Now, we have a US president who tests limits in all directions and who observes few domestic or international norms. Is it prudent to count on this president to act as a balance wheel to an impulsive Congress? It is as if Congress delegated responsibility for brain surgery to a surgeon whose behaviour is increasingly erratic.
Moreover, Taiwan is not an inert bystander. It could act in ways that would stabilise or destabilise the situation. Thus far, Taiwan’s leader President Tsai Ing-wen has been more cautious than some of her predecessors.
Given their understandable and long-standing frustrations with US policy and Beijing’s threats, will the people of Taiwan and their government seek to seize this seeming window of opportunity to advance their desires? Will a White House operating on tweets and sound bites in an election-year context be unusually receptive to Taipei’s frustrations?
Taiwan’s people need to ask themselves, as they generally have: “In the event Beijing reacts muscularly, what is the United States actually prepared to do?”
And finally, the world is engulfed in a pandemic that has produced a global economic catastrophe. To manage either, much less both of these unprecedented challenges, at least minimal Sino-American cooperation is required. Does anyone seriously think such legislation enhances the prospects for that?
In short, the Taipei Act is provocative when provocation is the last thing needed. It weakens credibility when credibility is essential. And it delegates power where power should not be delegated.
David M. Lampton, former president of the National Committee on US-China Relations and Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins-SAIS, is currently Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow and Research Scholar at Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Centre
