Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) led a bipartisan delegation to Taiwan in late February. During their various meetings with Taiwan’s leaders, this delegation never missed an opportunity to emphasize the strength of their cross-party consensus on issues relating to Taiwan and China.
Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi are leaders of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Their instruction upon taking the reins of the committee was to preserve China issues as a last bastion of bipartisanship in an otherwise deeply divided Washington. They have largely upheld their pledge. But in doing so, they have performed the equivalent of keeping a candle lit in a hurricane. It’s quite a feat, but does it matter?
The Select Committee has generated laundry lists of bipartisan recommendations, most of which have gone nowhere. The reason is simple: The Select Committee was never given authority to legislate. Those duties remained with standing committees in Congress.
Outside of China discussions in Congress, America is deeply divided. The presidential contest is frozen at a near-tie. The coming months will be a bloodbath of negativity. Both presidential candidates will seek to scare their supporters into believing that the republic will be at risk unless they are elected.
Underneath these existential arguments, deeper philosophical fault lines are opening between both political parties. President Biden believes America is a force for good in the world. He has sought to summon America’s better angels to stand up for those under attack and push back against aggressors, nowhere more so than in Ukraine. Biden is an internationalist at heart. He sees America’s allies and partners around the world as force multipliers and assets, not liabilities.
President Trump is a throwback to a different era. As New York Times commentator David Brooks observed, Trump has returned the Republican Party to its 1930s isolationist roots. Trump and his supporters have advanced a vision of “American carnage,” a belief that the country is too broken and morally bankrupt to lead in the world. Their prescription is to put “America first.” In other words, they argue America should concentrate its limited resources on its own problems and let the rest of the world tend to its own challenges.
For the first time in 2023, a majority of Republicans said the United States should stay out of world affairs rather than taking an active part. This sentiment is informing Republican leaders’ approach to Ukraine. Republican opposition to supporting Ukraine is not tied to enthusiasm for backing Taiwan. Instead, it is an outgrowth of a belief that America should focus on its own affairs.
American foreign policy debates also extend to China and Taiwan. Behind the veneer of bipartisan unity in Congress, there are sharp disagreements over how America should deal with the China challenge, and whether or how it should strengthen its support for Taiwan. Trump himself raised questions about whether America should defend Taiwan when he was president.
In the coming months, Trump will argue that America needs to raise tariffs on China to 60 percent. At a tactical level, Trump will advocate for this approach to outflank Biden and present Biden as weak and timid in standing up to China. Even if Trump lacks conviction about 60 percent tariffs, his advisors such as Robert Lighthizer believe in them. They see such a plan as hastening decoupling of the American and Chinese economies and degrading China’s industrial capacity in the process. Their goal is to re-shore manufacturing and jobs to the United States. They are guided by nationalist and nativist spirits. Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is not their priority, and any secondary effects on Taiwan from their push to re-shore value chains are not their primary concern.
Even so, the fabric of the modern international system is held together by active American leadership. If America grows consumed by fears of its own decline and retreats inward, power vacuums will emerge. If such vacuums emerge, revanchist and revisionist powers will be the most aggressive in seeking to fill them.
To be clear, my central point is not to promote any partisan preferences for America’s 2024 election. Rather, it is to dispel any illusion that there is placid harmony between America’s two political parties on questions relating to Taiwan and China. There is not.
In the face of this uncertainty, it is wise for Taiwan’s leaders to invest in relationships with their American counterparts on both sides of the political aisle, and vice versa. It also will be important for Taiwan’s leaders to build relationships with the next generation of America’s leaders. Regardless of whether Biden or Trump wins in 2024, they both will be term-limited out of office in 2028. Just as it did with a young and little-known governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton, Taiwan should build connections with rising leaders in the United States who will carry the relationship forward.
At the same time, Taiwan will be wise to limit escalatory cross-Strait incidents to the degree it can. Taipei cannot control Beijing’s decisions to dial up pressure, but it can deprive Beijing of any justification for doing so.
Lastly, the incoming Lai administration will inherit opportunities to continue building relationships with other leading powers around the world. The more Taiwan can enmesh itself in a dense set of relationships with other key countries, the less vulnerable it will be to isolation and intimidation from Beijing.
The good news for Taiwan is that it enjoys broad and deep bipartisan support in the United States. The US-Taiwan relationship has grown under both President Trump and President Biden. Political developments in the United States are not cause for fatalism. But they are cause for clear thinking in Taipei about the fluid nature of America’s political debates, even as Congressional visitors continue to sell a soothing story about America’s bipartisan consensus on China and Taiwan.
Ryan Hass is a senior fellow, the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies, and the Director of the China Center at the Brookings Institution.
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