With Trump Gone, Taiwan Seeks Assurances From Biden Administration
But Biden and his team are likely to resist using
Taiwan as a cudgel against China the way Trump did.
| JANUARY
22, 2021, 2:29 PM
Personnel with Taiwan's chemical corps stand in formation during a
demonstration as Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen inspects troops in Tainan,
southern Taiwan, on Jan. 15. SAM YEH/AFP VIA
GETTY IMAGES
Taiwanese officials and lawmakers have
been playing out the same worst-case scenario in their head for years now:
China attacks the island across the Taiwan Strait, and officials in Taipei call
for backup from the United States and other allies. With Joe Biden now sitting
in the Oval Office, Taiwan wants to know: How would the United States respond?
Wang Ting-yu, who co-chairs the foreign
affairs and defense committee in Taiwan’s parliament, told Foreign
Policy that the island’s military would not be caught off guard if
China prepped for an attack. Taiwanese satellite and radar systems would be
able to spot a buildup of People’s Liberation Army forces in Guangdong or Fujian
province, across the strait, and it could take as many as 60 days for China to
mass enough troops for an amphibious assault, he said.
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“Those 60 days will be a precious time for
international society to stop a war or to send a clear signal. ‘This is a red
line you cannot cross,’” he said. “The question is, Taiwan will be prepared to
protect our home. What will the world, especially the United States, what will
you do?” The message that Biden should send to Chinese President Xi Jinping is
simple, Wang said: “‘Don’t even try it.’”
Lloyd Austin, who was confirmed Friday as
Biden’s defense secretary, told lawmakers during his confirmation hearing
this week that he would “make sure” the United States was living up to its
commitments to help Taiwan defend itself.
Biden is taking power at a low ebb in
U.S.-China relations and after a transition where the outgoing administration
took big strides to solidify Washington’s relationship with Taipei—often with
an eye toward antagonizing Beijing—from even before Donald Trump took office,
starting with his controversial December 2016 call with President Tsai Ing-wen,
the first time that a U.S. president or president-elect had ever directly
spoken with a Taiwanese head of state. Just days before Biden was sworn in,
former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lifted restrictions on official
communications between the two countries and was set to follow up by sending
outgoing U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft to the region,
before the trip was scuttled at the last minute. Trump, in his final months,
also approved billions of dollars’ worth of arms sales to Taipei, and Pompeo
declared the treatment of Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang region to be a
genocide—two major public rebukes of China. These moves enraged Beijing,
with state media calling the outgoing
administration’s actions the result of a “last-ditch madness … likely to bring
them annihilation.” As a parting shot, China placed sanctions on almost 30 outgoing
Trump administration officials, including Pompeo, Craft, and National Security
Advisor Robert O’Brien.
Biden is under pressure from allies,
including Japan, to draw a red line to prevent any Chinese crossing of the
Taiwan Strait and has staffed his national security team with China hawks, most
notably Kurt Campbell, who served as the State Department’s top Asia official
during the Obama administration. But that doesn’t mean an antagonistic line:
Campbell, whose experience on Taiwan dates back to his time in the Clinton-era
Pentagon, called for the Biden administration to
foster cross-strait dialogue between Taipei and Beijing at a think tank event
last month.
Many experts expect Biden to hold off on
the public saber-rattling and use of U.S. policy toward Taiwan as a way to push
back at China that typified the Trump approach.
Biden’s objectives are likely to include
“viewing Taiwan as a card to be valued, not a card to be played in competition
with China,” said Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who
served as the director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia on the National Security
Council during President Barack Obama’s second term. “I think that there will
be a focus on helping Taiwan gain confidence and its own security, control of
its own economic destiny, and dignity and respect on the world stage.”
Wang, the Taiwanese lawmaker, said that
while officials had been speaking to the Biden team during the transition, they
would leave the interpretation of Trump’s upgrading of official communications
to the Biden team. (Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter severed all formal
diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1979.) Some former U.S. officials also
think that both sides will take time to suss out the newly upgraded
relationship.
“I think it’s going to be important to ask
our friends in Taiwan that question: What are they comfortable with?” Hass
said. “Where do they want to see the relationship [going]?”
In recent years, the Trump administration
has redoubled U.S. military support for the island, extending over $5 billion
in arms sales last year, including drones,
coastal defense systems, missiles, and artillery. Wang, who said China has
buzzed Taiwan’s air defense identification zone almost every day over the past
year, also hoped for the United States to sell Taiwan sea mines to deter
against a possible Chinese invasion and wanted to see Taipei improve its
domestic submarine production. Wang also said he would like to see Biden invite
Taiwan to the big Rim of the Pacific military exercise that is held every two
years, which it has never been invited to. China received an invitation to the
exercise in 2018 before it was rescinded over the militarization of artificial
islands in the South China Sea.
While Wang and others have hoped to see
Taiwan’s representation in Washington upgraded, the relationship is likely to
remain more low-key.
“My guess is the Biden administration just
decides to go back to the practice of being less public. And that is because
there is no perceived need to use Taiwan as a weapon against China—that’s
harmful to Taiwan’s interests,” said Bonnie Glaser, a senior advisor for Asia
and the director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, a Washington think tank. “I think that using Taiwan as a
card or weapon to poke Beijing in the eye … that practice will disappear.”
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