Opinion | Why an increasingly confident US is baiting Beijing over Taiwan

As talk in Washington links Ukraine with Taiwan, a sense of hubris is returning to the US, which now appears confident of not being sucked into a war if China were to seek to reunify Taiwan by force

Rather, Washington would look to use devastating sanctions while assisting Taipei from afar

Reading Time:4 minutes

Published: 3:30am, 26 Apr 2022

Back in December, I voiced my fear in a column that some in Washington believed Beijing could be baited into attacking Taiwan, which would allow the United States to dust off its Cold War toolkit and apply comprehensive sanctions and decouple – tactics that secured victory in the US rivalry with the Soviet Union.

That ominous prospect looms large now, it seems. Russia is under just such pressure for its attack on Ukraine and the US Treasury has said the Biden administration is prepared to use all its sanctions tools against China too, if Beijing were to move aggressively towards Taiwan. Talk in Washington is increasingly linking Ukraine with Taiwan.

On April 6, US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said at a House committee hearing that Beijing should “take away the right lessons” for the coordinated Western response over Russia’s war on Ukraine – that any moves to reunify Taiwan by force would be unacceptable. This only served to anger Beijing.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen echoed Sherman’s position in a speech to the Atlantic Council on April 13. She warned: “China cannot expect the global community to respect its appeals to the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity in the future if [it] does not respect these principles now when it counts.” She means Taiwan, of course.

By calling for a “friend-shoring” of supply chains to “trusted countries”, she firmly linked economic issues with broader national security concerns, leaving unsaid the consequences of an economic decoupling for China.

And then there was the provocation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s reported plan to visit Taiwan after an official trip to Japan earlier this month. The visit was never confirmed officially, and has not materialised – Pelosi contracted Covid-19 and postponed the Japan trip. At the time, however, given Pelosi’s stature in American politics, the sudden disclosure by the media on April 7 of her planned visit to Taiwan on April 10 immediately stirred waves in Beijing.

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