Georgia=Taiwan, Saakashvili=Chen...

Richard Bush and Kenneth Lieberthal, both probable future advisors to future President Obama, have another piece on the Georgia-Taiwan comparison, this time in the Wall Street Journal. The fundamental premises of this piece are similar to those of the Jeff Bader/Douglas Paal essay that I looked at a week ago, but WSJ has finally taken the important step of noting that one of the writers, Ken Lieberthal, has business interests in China, something the media almost never does. Kudos to WSJ for doing that! Please note that I have no objection to people having business interests in China, just to that fact being left out of their background when they comment on US-China policy.

The underlying premises of this article are the bogus ones of Mad Chen^©, provoker of worlds, the great bogeyman of US foreign policy. Bush and Lieberthal argue that if the US had not restrained Chen, he might have provoked a war with China. Yeah, my Dad used to hang garlic on the trees when we went camping, saying it would keep the bears away. And we never saw a single bear in our campsite, either.....

Yet in recent years, the basic dynamics of the two countries have been remarkably similar. Both have had politically skillful, democratically elected heads of state who were determined to consolidate the independent identity and sovereignty of the territory they ruled. Each confronted a major power -- Russia for Georgia and China for Taiwan -- that felt it had legitimate historical rights to curtail the full exercise of sovereignty by the feisty smaller government. And each appealed to the United States for support. The leaders of Taiwan and Georgia had reason to believe they had a strong ally in President George W. Bush, who had declared a robust agenda of promoting democracy and freedom. They were acting, they said, to realize the democratic aspirations of their people.

The problem is that the Georgia-Taiwan comparison is spurious -- Taiwan is a lot more like South Ossetia than Georgia itself. No one disputed the sovereignty of Georgia itself, at issue was the sovereignty of the breakaway region of South Ossetia --just as what is at issue here is whether Taiwan can enjoy its own sovereignty. Just to keep playing that game, South Ossetia even held a referendum on independence that was condemned by the western democracies, just as Chen Shui-bian had referendums that were (shamefully and cravenly) condemned by the western democracies. Onward and upward....

.....Georgia has become the scene of the most serious post-Cold War great-power conflict, while recent political change in Taiwan has greatly enhanced cross-Strait stability and provides reason for optimism about the future.

There is no reason for optimism about the election of Ma Ying-jeou -- unless your policy is to annex the island to China. But that is not the worst part of this piece.... first comes a substantial misrepresentation of US behavior:

But over time Mr. Bush moved to a more tempered approach that increasingly took into serious account Beijing's concerns as well as Taiwan's pleadings. He recognized that the most serious threat to Taiwan was conflict through miscalculation, as an independence-leaning political initiative by Taiwan's president Chen Shui-bian might provoke a Chinese military attack, whether justified or not. The Bush administration therefore developed a nuanced American policy that publicly put the United States squarely in opposition to any unilateral change to the status quo by either Beijing or Taipei.

Read that last statement carefully. The Administration's actual policy (nuanced policy, mind you!) was not opposition to unilateral change in the status quo by either side -- it was loud opposition to Taiwan's democracy on one side, and quiet acquiescence in China's military build up in other. This produced the obscene picture of US spokesmen using the same language to condemn Taiwan's democratic referendum on the UN -- which could never succeed -- as it did to condemn the Anti-secession Law, and more importantly, to scream at Chen Shui-bian in unseemly, exaggerated ways, while only whimpering now and then as China's military build-up made radical revisions to the status quo.

In other words, Bush's policy was not a preservation of the status quo but a response to China's change of it, and that response was to serve China's interests by hacking on Taiwan. But that is not the worst of this piece:

In Taiwan, by contrast, 2008 has witnessed the election of a moderate leader, Ma Ying-jeou, whose electoral prospects were bolstered in part by America's clear indications of its displeasure with the willingness of former president Mr. Chen to provoke China. Under President Ma we are seeing hopeful initiatives to stabilize cross-Strait relations in ways that hold out the prospect for improving Taiwan's economy, reducing the military threat from China, preserving Taiwan's democratic system of governance, and increasing America's capacity to work with China on the North Korea nuclear issue and other serious international concerns.

Here Bush and Lieberthal brag about how the US helped get a longtime democracy activist, independence advocate, and friend of the US removed from office, to be replaced by a pro-China, lifelong anti-democracy politician who patronizes the US, despises our regional ally Japan, and wants to see Taiwan annexed to China. In the topsy-turvy world of US Establishment China policy, progress is when you blow a hole in the security system you spent 50 years assembling and nurturing. And just this week China announced that it was beginning to train carrier pilots....

Skipping over the pro-forma claim "Chen provokes China," look at the other claims Bush and Lieberthal make:

Under President Ma we are seeing hopeful initiatives to stabilize cross-Strait relations in ways that hold out the prospect for improving Taiwan's economy, reducing the military threat from China, preserving Taiwan's democratic system of governance

What is there to say? The "initiatives" that Ma is taking in cross-strait relations are almost all DPP initiatives, though they were negotiating from a much stronger position than President Regional Administrator Ma. The ideas that Ma has offered independently, such as the diplomatic truce, have been failures to the present and appear likely to fail permanently - indeed, from what I have heard from individuals interacting with Chinese officials and scholars, there has been a uniform hardening of the Chinese position since Ma was elected. The Chinese simply do not see any reason to give Ma anything, and it appears likely that they will not. Perhaps things will change, but at this point there is no reason to suspect China will mature (see the recent letter on participation in UN special agencies from the Chinese government smacking down Ma). Mayhap the US will put pressure on it to make some cosmetic concessions, which will be trumpeted by one and all as progress.

In other words, political change here has not enhanced stability in the Taiwan Strait as Bush and Lieberthal claim -- instead it has introduced new instabilities and uncertainties by giving China the upper hand and sacrificing the interests of US allies Japan and Taiwan, as well as introducing the new and ominously opaque uncertainty: how far is Ma willing to go? But as we all know, the greatness of a realpolitik decision is measured by the number of friends it betrays....

Moreover, Ma is not the one running the KMT talks with China -- those appear to be in the hands of other politicians within the KMT who have long been negotiating through back-channels with China. Thus "stability" is an illusion -- no one really knows what is being said in the private KMT-Beijing talks, or what the limits are. Scary, eh? But at least there won't be any more of those dangerous and provocative referendums, which are so much like shelling civilians.

UPDATE: One thing I wanted to draw attention to is the tone of these recent pieces on Georgia and Taiwan. There's almost a defensive flavor to this stream of writing with its attacks on Chen and justifications for the Establishment's we've-brought-order-to-the-galaxy position -- as if, deep down, people know that what was done was not right.

[Taiwan]