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The Bush Administration heads into its first major foreign policy decision, a bit wobbly, showing signs of internal fissures: how to arm Taiwan against a potential threat from Communist China.
This week the Administration is by law consulting with Congress. And in the nature of things, it will force a review of that most emotional of all issues, the U.S. relationship to China.
Behind the rhetoric are hard, basic issues: Taiwan's defenses, secure since the 1958 showdown when Washington threatened to use nukes, are eroding in the face of China's growing military power. Like all military equations since the first caveman hit the second caveman over the head with a bat, the balance is hard to draw.
At China's paper tiger national assembly, Premier Zhou Rongzhi announced an 18 percent increase in China's military expenditures. But as Zhou admitted semipublicly a few months ago Chinese statistics are fictitious. China's military expenditures remain hidden. And with a ragtag army of 2.5 million, often wagged by its commercial interests, these figures are less than meaningful.
What is certain is China is shortening the distance between its military potential and Taiwan's ability to resist. Massive transfers of U.S. technology, some of it dual use, civilian and military, some stolen through espionage, some mindless collaboration by greedy American entrepreneurs, has increased China's capabilities. Russian sales of two aircraft, hardly yet in Moscow's own inventory, prejudice Taipei's traditional dominance of Taiwan Straits airspace.
Beijing's intentions toward Taiwan are as cloudy as her military capabilities.
Logic dictates Beijing's massive campaign to force accommodation is all talk. Why destroy the goose that lays the golden egg Taipei's business community's huge transfers of capital and technology to the Mainland? Nothing is more important to "reformers" in their drive to modernize China, including its military. And the growing importance of Mainland investments to Taiwan is leverage. Only this week Mainland plants of one of Taiwan's ruling DPP party's biggest donors were closed as a warning against the Party's traditional independence stand.
But with China's Communist mandarinate facing tougher and tougher decisions, chauvinism is increasingly a weapon of a corrupt and faltering leadership. The Taiwan issue could become an important sideshow drawing attention away from a recent violent Shanghai strike, localized peasant revolts, the threat of the Falun Gong's organization skills, the perennial conundrum of rationalizing bankrupt state industry with the most politically potent labor in China, problems ad infinitum.
The U.S. role in this complicated plot is equally torturous. Washington has no interest in as some have argued turning China into THE enemy. But Bush seems determined to back away from sloppy collaboration with China which Clinton, and even some U.S. military and thinktankers at CINCPAC, naively proposed as a solution.
Obviously, China must play a role in all U.S. decisionmaking in East Asia and beyond. But securing a Taiwan with its model for China's first democratic and market oriented society must be a high priority. Reality in the world political jungle suggests only a Taipei both able to defend itself and make a military takeover too expensive will preserve peace.
Taiwan strategists apparently worry most about a Mainland naval blockade as one of the world's leading traders. Its first priority is conventional powered submarines, its own fleet outnumbered 65 to four. These cannot be bought on the world arms market as Beijing proved when the Dutch welched on selling military naval craft. Beijing can always use its powerful Marco Polo's Markets Dream to wheedle and seduce Europeans from violating its prohibition on arms sales to Taipei. [Even should the submarines be supplied by the U.S., outfitting them in a U.S. naval fleet gone nuclear-powered will require collaboration with European manufacturers.]
With China's growing air power, the American "dumbing down" restrictions on earlier fighters sales and other weapons will be an issue. Taiwanese air defenses are in relatively good shape. But Taipei will need sea-based anti-missile defenses and presses for U.S. Aegis missile destroyers.
Taiwan's armaments problem for Washington policymakers reaches beyond the Beijing-Taipei confrontation. Japanese strategists, quietly plotting as Tokyo tries to find its moorings [see Sense of Asia: Japan on Auto Pilot], have considered the security of Taiwan essential since the mid-19th century. South Korea, smarting under Bush's rebuff to President Kim for what Washington now sees as his overly enthusiastic North Korean accommodations, will also be watching. And, Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew, that old ham who refuses to leave the stage, has cautioned that Southeast Asia, too, worries about Taiwan as a flashpoint even as Singapore opens its new naval base to the U.S., attempting to prop up deteriorating security in Southeast Asia with Indonesia falling apart with its implicit threat to the world's most important sealanes.
Sol W. Sanders is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.