Asia Times Online :: Quest for Peace

Part 1: Two nations, a world apart
A stable East Asia is essential to global peace and prosperity, and US-China relations are the fulcrum for enduring peace in the region. Yet how can two nations so fundamentally different achieve harmony? Henry C K Liu seeks the answers in history, beginning with the disasters of the Crusades and the promises of the US constitution.

Part 2: Cold War links Korea, Taiwan
Decades after the Korean War, the US posture on Taiwan is basically the same - to prolong China's technically ongoing civil war with a no-war, no-peace status quo and prevent a united China from challenging US hegemony in Asia.

Part 3: Wrong war, wrong place, wrong enemy
The Korean debacle was unfolding despite the fact that Korea was not considered strategically important to the US at the end of World War II. It was "a small outfit in a distant part of the world". Other issues came into play, like the Cold War and containing global communism.

Part 4: 38th Parallel leads straight to Taiwan
Besides 3.5 million military dead, wounded and missing on both sides, more than 2 million civilians died in Korea. In the end, the border between the countries remained exactly where it was before the war started. But the scene was set for a further - avoidable - US-China confrontation over Taiwan.

Part 5: History of the Taiwan time bomb
To defuse the crisis over Taiwan independence, the tension between Taipei and Beijing and the dire straits of US-Taiwan ties, it is necessary to realize that Taiwan is but a province of China, its "democracy" a joke and provincial autonomy the best possible strategy. Self-determination is out of the question.

Part 6: Forget reunification, nothing to reunite
Taiwan is a de facto and de jure part of China, so there is nothing to reunite. The Taiwan issue is the product of a civil war between two political parties, not two governments. What is needed is not reunification of Taiwan with China, but a new political accommodation to end the civil war.

Part 7: The referendum question
Taiwan's illegal, illegitimate government is moving inexorably toward an illegal, illegitimate "defensive" referendum that ostensibly asks voters about Chinese missiles aimed at the island. But it contains ominous implications for relations among Taiwan, China and the United States. The next referendum could ask about independence.

Part 8: Avoiding another no-win war
China is willing to sacrifice millions of lives to regain Taiwan. The US has no stomach for lives lost in distant wars and China calculates that the US will not actually come to Taiwan's defense. China wants the US to know that the price of lives to defend Taiwan will be far too high for America.

Part 9: Potential tragedy of miscalculation
Recent US policy is based on egregious misunderstanding of China's determination on the Taiwan issue, and this wrong-headed reckoning could lead to a military conflict with no winners - and Japan would be drawn in through its US military bases.

Part 10: Taiwan a deal-breaker for US security
China, not Taiwan, is vital for US security interests in Asia and for its "war against terrorism". US support for Taipei is therefore waning, and it's time for the US to exercise the best of superpower diplomacy and statesmanship by yielding to China on the Taiwan issue.

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