Viewing Taiwan from the Beltway Bubble

Two bikes collide on the bike path, resulting in serious injuries. 

Scott Kastner has a solid piece in WaPo -- he even gets US policy on Taiwan correct -- good until point 5:

A final point is that Taiwan itself benefits from a stable U.S.-China relationship. As I argue in a recent International Security article, good U.S.-China relations give Beijing a stake in a stable status quo. Even if the United States were to stay out of a cross-Strait military conflict, such a conflict would be disastrous for the U.S.-China relationship. Good relations with Washington, then, give Beijing more to lose by initiating war in the Taiwan Strait — and that’s a good thing for Taiwan.

The problem here is that Kastner has a hidden assumption that governs his thinking: that Washington will guide Beijing's behavior in the status quo by rewarding it when it behaves and punishing it when it doesn't. That is wrong: for Beijing the SQ is meaningless because Washington never punishes Beijing. Whenever it might contemplate punishment, a whole chorus of Beijing shills and Explainers howls that Washington is disrupting stability and hurting the US-China relationship. (To understand their thinking, just delete "US" and "relationship" from that phrase, and consider that the majority of these people gain access, status, and money from their China relationships. That is why so many of these people are upset with Trump Administration China policy.)

A "stake in the SQ" is only possible when there is some risk of it disappearing. Otherwise the SQ is merely a recurring gift from Washington to Beijing.

There's a word for that: tribute.

IR thinkers join this chorus because for so many of them, "stability" and "US national interest" are coterminous. It seems like a generation has forgotten that "stability" is a means to an end, not the end in itself. This lesson has not been forgotten in Beijing.

Practically, this means that stability benefits Beijing, not Washington. Under cover of "stability" Beijing then has opportunity to poach tech (with no punishment), build military (with no punishment), grab the South China Sea and threaten US allies Manila and Tokyo (with no punishment), and suppress Taiwan (with no punishment).

Indeed, because "stability" is the end, Beijing in practice has enormous leverage over the US. It knows that if it ramps up tensions and makes loud grumbles, the US will sacrifice Taiwan (and Phils and possibly even Japan, never mentioned in analyses of Taiwan-US relations) for "better" relations. Hence, "stability" lacks many of the benefits for Taiwan that Kastner argues it does, because maintaining it gives Washington the incentive to ignore or suppress Taiwan, while making Taiwan look like it is the provocative threat to regional "stability".

Even worse, from they way people like Kastner write, it is obvious that they think maintaining a stable relationship with Washington is its own reward. This existential assumption about the nature of international reality undergirds the Beltway Cosmology. With China rapidly becoming the world's dominant trading nation, this assumption is as obsolete as Ptolemaic astronomy.

Because stability is the goal, the US is constantly being called upon, not only by the China Explainer crowd, but by IR thinkers, to reduce its freedom of action and leverage over Beijing to maintain "stability".

A "stability" that, for Beijing, is just a temporary means to its end of overturning the current order and replacing the US.
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