You Attack Them, You Attack Us
The risk is greater if we don't stand firmly with Taiwan against China.
For six months now, since its unconscionable attack against Ukraine, we’ve been asking, what should we do, what can we do, about Russia?
Now the question is, what should we do, what can we do, about China?
It’s a question we must ask because after Nancy Pelosi paid a visit last week to China’s anti-Communist nemesis, Taiwan, China ignored international rules of conduct, not to mention safe military protocols, and in a perilous pique of fury, fired missiles not just into the waters around Taiwan (and also frighteningly close to Japan), but even— in a greater show of hostility than ever before— directly over the island. Not because anyone had declared war, but because a leading politician from the United States made a stop there during an Asia tour.
She didn’t have an AR-15 strapped over her shoulder, her plane didn’t have bombs strapped to its wings. Yet for the sin of her support for Taiwan, missiles flew.
As with Ukraine, it puts the United States in a tough place.
Just as Russia went over the line— over every line— with its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, China went over it last week with Taiwan. The missiles were an unjustified and unprecedented escalation of a decades-long dispute: China says Taiwan is part and parcel of its nation, the U.S. recognizes its autonomy and, to varying degrees, vows to help defend it against attack.
There have been shows of force by Beijing before, but never like this. A strategic miscalculation by Chinese leaders or a simple mistake by a Chinese gunner could be the start of a superpower shooting war.
What’s more, just as we’ve been hearing Russia’s bald-faced lies all year about Ukraine being to blame for the war, now, as if the 82-year-old pastel-clad Nancy Pelosi is an existential threat to China’s place on the world stage, the Chinese foreign minister asserts that “it is the United States that created the crisis.”
Interesting, isn’t it, how these two autocratic nations fire the first shot, then blame someone else for making them do it.
They might have superpower status on the world stage, but by their words and actions, they are nothing more than thugs. I, for one, don’t think we should let them get away with it. I don’t think we can afford to let them get away with it.
It’s not just about us being policeman to the world. In the short term it might sound nice to turn over the baton to someone else. That would be fine if there were no consequence to forsaking our leadership. But there is. If we aren’t out there as a superpower walking the beat, we’re not going to like the superpower that replaces us.
It’s not just about American nationalism. Nationalism means pride in your nation— in its history, in its culture, in its power, in its achievements. I’ve been in both Russia and China, and the people there have as much pride in their nations as we have in ours. As well they should.
It’s not even wholly about standing up for the principles of democracy, in which citizens have the right to choose their leaders and speak their minds. In so much of the world where I’ve covered news, democracy is nothing but a pipe dream, which shaped my own views about defending it. Ukraine and Taiwan have their own histories with authoritarian leaders, but today, when you compare them to Russia and China, their predators, they are paradigms of democratic principles. If we truly believe that of all the systems of government on the planet, none is better than democracy, then however shaky it occasionally appears to be, I think we have an obligation to defend it where it is under assault, for our own sake and for our allies’, using the strengths and resources with which we are blessed.
What it comes down to is, if we relinquish the leadership of the Free World— a role we’ve played since World War Two— it’ll be Russia and China calling the plays instead of us. If we let that happen, as history is our guide, there could be no stopping them. That’s the risk of letting these two authoritarian nations get away with whatever they want and take whatever they want.
This helps explain why in Europe, two historically neutral nations, Sweden and Finland, are scared enough of Russia now to join NATO. And why nations in the Pacific— from Australia to Japan, Singapore to South Korea— are scared of a war-mongering China.
Which leads me to a distressing but necessary conclusion: despite the risks, we have to stand by Ukraine and Taiwan both. At least almost to the max. Call it the lesser of two evils.
Which leads me to American policy on Taiwan.
For decades our policy has been based on “strategic ambiguity” which translates to “leaving our options open.” Now though, I think the time for any ambiguity has passed. I think we’re at the point that our message now ought to be absolutely unambiguous: “You attack them, you attack us.”
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, calls for strategic clarity. “Washington needs to make it clear to Beijing,” he has written in the past in Foreign Affairs, “that the cost of aggression would vastly outweigh any potential benefits.” Furthermore, he says, the danger of ambiguity on Taiwan is that it is “unlikely to deter an increasingly assertive, risk-tolerant, and capable China. The playbook that worked when Taiwan and the United States had a military edge over China is unlikely to keep at bay a People’s Liberation Army that has spent the past two and a half decades preparing for a Taiwan conflict.”
Not surprisingly though, some say that abandoning strategic ambiguity is a bad idea. Steven Goldstein, director of the Taiwan Studies Workshop at Harvard, writes, “Such a change would not serve the two essential national interests of the United States in the area— sustaining a peaceful status quo and maintaining working relationships with both China and Taiwan.”
I’m sorry, but after China’s missile storm, “peace” is no longer the status quo.
And after China said Friday that dialogue with the U.S. about everything from drugs to military relations to climate change would be “cancelled,” that “working relationship” already is on thin ice. Revealingly, China did not call off talks on trade. American purchases fortify China’s economy and China knows it.
Which leads to another key reason to stand by Taiwan: for the time being, Taiwan fortifies our way of life. It is the world’s biggest maker of microchips, we are the biggest importer. Eventually, thanks to the CHIPS bill that President Biden just signed today, we’ll be making more of our own, but that’s not on the near horizon. If we let China subsume Taiwan, that includes Taiwan’s microchips. Do we want China putting its imprint on those chips?
China’s policy toward Taiwan is enshrined in its constitution: “One country, two systems.” If only. Maybe we would have confidence in that promise if not for one shift in recent history: China’s relationship with Hong Kong. “One country, two systems,” is how it started out. It’s one country, one system today.
My thinking about an unambiguously firm stance on Taiwan is not because I’m hawkishly offensive. It is because I’m heedfully defensive. There is risk in every direction, but as with Ukraine, in the long-term the risk is greater if we don’t do all we can to ward off an all-out attack and ensuing absorption by an uninvited aggressor, than if we do.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Thank you, Greg. Agree that ambiguity is no longer a viable option if the goal is to strongly discourage China from invading Taiwan. However strong, unambiguous words are also not sufficient. The US needs to strongly engage with allies in the region (Japan, S. Korea, Australia, etc) in order to put force behind the title of your article.
Stephen Dowdle
We have entered a new era with China, and you have laid out the scenario succinctly. We can no longer have “ambiguity,” as it means weakness to Chinese leadership. We lived ambiguously with Putin, and look where it ended.