Strait talk: Washington
increasingly opts out By Craig
Meer
TAIPEI - It has become an article of
faith among observers of US foreign policy that US
preoccupations in the Middle East and with the
"war on terror" have diverted diplomatic and
military activities away from Northeast Asia. Leon
Sigal, a program director at the New York-based
Social Science Research Council, has coined the
term "hawk disengagement" to describe the Bush
administration's approach to the region.
This is particularly evident in the matter
of Taiwan-China relations. President George W Bush
came into office as possibly the most
pro-Taiwan president in years.
Early in his administration, he authorized a huge
weapons deal, then priced at US$18 billion, now
pared down below $15 billion. Bush stated the US
would do "whatever it takes" to defend Taiwan. But
the tune coming out of Washington has changed in
recent years.
Particularly over the past
two years, there has been perceptively less
willingness in Washington to engage with either
Taiwan or mainland China over the details of their
convoluted relationship. Since late 2003 and
Bush's now-famous call for both sides to respect
the status quo in cross-strait relations, US
policy has been distinctly passive, if not
actually hostile to Taiwan.
But this is
not because Washington's attention is focused
elsewhere. US disengagement is a function of
changes in Taipei and Beijing that the United
States is less and less able to influence. Rather
than withdrawing from the Taiwan Strait, the US is
being quietly ousted. The difference between a
withdrawal and an ejection is not just semantic.
The former implies far more energy in US policy
than the latter and places responsibility for the
current state of play in cross-strait relations
where it should be: in Taipei and Beijing.
Taiwan's part in this drama is complex, as
the island is strongly dependent on the US for its
security, and the two sides have a history of
close relations. Nonetheless, Taiwan's democratic
evolution is actually undermining US support,
despite the rhetoric emanating from Washington
about promoting and defending democracy.
Some of this was probably to be expected.
As the former head of the American Institute in
Taiwan, Nat Bellocchi, has noted, the framework of
US-Taiwan relations was imposed unilaterally by
the United States during the island's
authoritarian past, and it is increasingly
difficult to keep a democratic Taiwan in this
foreign-policy straitjacket.
But there are
aspects to this "democratic rejection" of the US
that are specific to contemporary Taiwanese
politics. On the one hand, there is the ongoing
delay in the purchase of defensive weaponry from
the US. The current package, worth $15 billion and
including Patriot missiles, submarines and
surveillance aircraft, has been struck down in the
island's legislature consistently for more than
two years. Last Tuesday, the procurement budget
was voted down for the 50th time.
In the
bad old days of martial law, the chiefs of staff
set the defense budget and a compliant legislature
produced the necessary funds. Now Taiwan has a
civilian defense minister, and the government must
ask for, not demand, appropriations.
Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian hails
from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), while
the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and its coalition
partner the People's First Party control the
Legislative Yuan. The legislative "pan-blue"
alliance is opposed to the arms package for a
variety of reasons, but primary among these is a
desire to undermine Chen's authority. Recent
assurances by KMT chairman Ma Ying-jeou during his
recent Washington trip that his party would back a
"reasonable arms budget" in the most recent
legislative review apparently fell through.
On the other hand, Taipei itself is slowly
choosing to opt out of the status quo in
cross-strait relations - that is, the implicit
agreement among Taipei, Beijing and Washington to
leave Taiwan's political status undecided, which
Bush has made a hallmark of his administration's
China policy.
Chen's DPP was defeated in
local elections last December, and he suffers from
record low approval ratings of about 18%,
according to an independent poll conducted by Shih
Hsin University in Taipei at the end of last
month. Perversely, this has made Chen even more
determined to advance his party's pro-independence
platform. It was behind his decision in February
to scrap the island's National Unification
Council, an institution most observers agree is an
integral part of the status quo and which Chen
originally promised to keep intact.
China's part to play in the ejection of
the US is certainly less subtle than its island
sibling, but no less definitive. Since the
mid-1990s, the People's Republic of China (PRC)
has spent considerable time and money turning the
cross-strait impasse, which at the start of the
Deng Xiaoping era was a diplomatic tussle, into a
military matter. This commenced with missile tests
off the coast of Taiwan in 1995-96, and includes
the current deployment of somewhere between 700
and 800 short to medium-range missiles targeted at
the island.
The PRC's defense budget has
seen annual double-digit increases for the past
decade, and this year's expenditure is expected to
hit $35 billion, nearly 15% higher than in 2005. A
report published by the Washington-based Rand
Corporation last year, however, suggests that the
official Chinese figures could understate actual
military expenditures by as much as 70%. The US
rightly believes that the target of the bulk of
this outlay is Taiwan.
The PRC leadership
is genuinely concerned about a determined push in
Taiwan to turn de facto independence into de jure
separation from China, even though only about 20%
of the population favors it. Increasingly, it sees
a military solution as the only way to prevent the
push from succeeding. The Anti-Secession Law
passed by the National People's Congress in March
2005 codified this concern, and marked the end of
a brief period in which the PRC sought US
diplomatic help to "contain" Taiwan's national
aspirations.
The increasing insecurity of
China's current leadership adds immediacy to this
realist calculation. The current generation of
communist leaders, including President Hu Jintao
and Premier Wen Jiabao, are technocrats engaged in
a Herculean task of economic transformation - but
devoid of any political reforms. Opposition is
building: by the government's own admission,
87,000 incidents of "social unrest" were recorded
in 2005, up 66% on the previous year.
The
US is disengaging from the cross-strait imbroglio,
but through no choice of its own. Only a serious
change of heart in Taipei and Beijing will reverse
the trend.
Craig Meer is a
freelance journalist based in Taipei.
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