US-China relations: don’t let Taiwan fall prey to madness of war from either side of the Pacific
- A Taiwan embroiled in war would pump uncertainty into the world economy as it is an important exporter of semiconductors and other products
- Wrap it up in war and you choke the global electronic supply chain just as the world is starting to see signs of economic recovery from the pandemic
Perhaps no gloomier assessment of the China-US relationship can be made than to note that, were it to sink yet another notch or two, there would be no relationship at all. Like a Japanese garden so minimalist that removing one stone might vitiate its existence, the bilateral Sino-American relationship seems unnervingly close to bouncing off rock bottom.
Decades after the Cold War with Moscow, with the shimmer of a potential conflict with Beijing over the horizon, the Pacific Ocean’s current calm might well be nothing more than a deception just before the big storm crashes.
Taiwan is without question a treasure in many respects. That treasure is also very many miles away, though, as was Vietnam and as is Iraq. America, still recovering from the Donald Trump presidency and with pressing problems at home in addition to fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, will not easily be sold yet another foreign rescue mission.
By contrast, for US President Joe Biden, a war averted because of deft diplomacy that broke the momentum towards flying off the cliff and into the abyss would earn much more than some mere peace prize. It would earn global gratitude.
What is more, a strike by Beijing against Taipei might well risk snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. From a geopolitical perspective, China is ahead in the game. Taiwan is hardly the 51st state of the US or a new prefecture of Japan, despite the deep history among the three.
In private, the US government should say what its president, diplomats and generals think best, but on the public stage the Biden administration might consider showing more respect to China. The US should be sufficiently self-confident not to seek significant reciprocity.
The more it pits itself as the saviour of Taiwan, the more Chinese nationalists overvalue the island as the master key for completing a 21st century middle kingdom.
Why was the PLA at the China-US talks in Alaska?
Wrap it up in war and you choke the global electronic supply chain just as if you planted a mega-container ship in the middle of a key merchant vessel waterway. The mainland, its economy these days simmering rather than roaring, would cool off even more.
So why not? The American writer Henry Adams, great grandson of founding father John Adams, reminds us that politics has always been “the systematic organisation of hatreds”.
History’s largest evils flourish when given an egomaniacal push to the hell of war by mad men puffy with rectitude.
And so the dark clouds grow even thicker. To the celebrated British humanities academic Jacqueline Rose – a noted student of Sigmund Freud as well as Sylvia Plath – the human death drive is the subterranean magma of history.
It is a grave mistake to dismiss the validity, she wrote in an essay, of an “unconscious demonic principle driving the psyche to distraction [that] could be said to sabotage once and for all the vision of man in control of his mind”.
That thought just about sums things up. Sorry to be so depressing, but what can be observed at the moment is anything but inspiring.
Prof Tom Plate is an American university professor and career author and journalist. His first book was “Understanding Doomsday” published in 1971; his latest, on the US-China relationship, is “Yo-Yo Diplomacy”