Tuesday, May 01, 2018

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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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your assumption is so racist in this. Only america has the capability to punish? What is it the lord of the universe?

China can do so much damage if it is truly pissed. China can help north korea build nukes, help iran build nukes, can even give any country nuke if it wants. China can pressure countries to remove us bases from them, china can sanction countries to stop trading with taiwan.

Endless things china can do with its 13 trillion gdp. Sure these things are not cost free. But so is punishing china. America is too weak to "punish" china anymore.

Brodie68 said...

This is the best summation of the US - China relationship you’ve ever written - Bravo!

Anonymous said...

Michael, why would you or Kastner assume that the US is in a position to punish or reward China for anything? Why would you
or Kastner assume that the US is in a position to "guide" China anywhere? The words you attribute to Kastner as well as your own words smack of a unipolar western superiority complex, a hymn to the ideology of American epxceptionalism, a tired old myth that needs to take its rightful place on the rubbish heap. I've lived in and loved Taiwan for over three decades now, and I must say that it's a mistake to allow that love to cloud your vision of reality. Did you actually say the the US allowed China to build military with no punishment? I didn't realize that the US had been granted the powers to decide which sovereign nations were allowed to build their militaries and by how much! Have you morphed into a neoconservative? Have you recently undergone a mind-meld with John Bolton?

Michael Turton said...

I didn't realize that the US had been granted the powers to decide which sovereign nations were allowed to build their militaries and by how much

*sigh*

Michael Turton said...

Your assumption is so racist in this. Only america has the capability to punish?

This is some really excellent trolling.