The US being neutral on cross-Taiwan Strait issues is more likely to trigger a war it has long hoped to avoid, Global Taiwan Institute and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) research fellow Michael Mazza said.
Washington accepting Beijing’s coercion of Taiwan while being complicit in Taiwan’s international isolation “may ultimately make war more likely,” Mazza said in an article published in the National Review on Friday.
The remark was a response to an article by Oriana Skylar Mastro, Mazza’s colleague at the AEI, published by the New York Times, in which she urged the US to “restore” a “delicate balance of deterrence and reassurance” to avoid war with China over Taiwan.
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Mazza said Mastro’s proposal entailed that the US “stand aside” while Beijing is attempting to isolate Taiwan by bullying and pressuring its diplomatic allies.
Calling on Washington to abandon attempts to create international space for Taipei and US lawmakers to refrain from visiting Taiwan “would leave Beijing emboldened” and Taipei isolated, he said.
The approach “would greenlight coercion and make a violent outcome all the more likely,” he added.
Both authors agreed that it was Beijing’s military coercion and other behaviors that are posing threats to the “status quo,” but they differed in its motivations.
While Mastro said that China stepped up military pressure on Taiwan in response to President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) of the “independence-leaning” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) being elected in 2016, Mazza considered the change in Taiwanese public opinion as the “larger context” in play.
“Three decades of public opinion polling have shown Taiwan’s people to be increasingly supportive of at least de facto independence and increasingly opposed to unification” and increasingly identifying themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese or as both Taiwanese and Chinese, he said.
Beijing’s pressure campaign against Taiwan did not begin after Tsai’s election victory, but during the latter years of former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) term in office, “when he was forced to back away from his attempt to draw closer to Beijing,” he said.
By the 2016 presidential election, China became increasingly aware that “peaceful, uncoerced unification was a pipe dream,” as its carrot-and-stick approach failed to reverse “the obvious and enduring fact of Taiwan’s separateness from the People’s Republic [People’s Republic of China, PRC],” which left China with coercion and meddling, he said.
At the same time, the balance of military power between China and Taiwan had been shifting toward Beijing, which now has advantages in air and naval power, and might launch a successful amphibious invasion of Taiwan in a few years “even with American intervention,” he said.
Mazza’s observation echoed a recently published US Department of Defense report, which said “the PRC’s multi-decade military modernization effort continues to widen the capability gap compared to Taiwan’s military.”
Taiwanese people’s sentiments in favor of independence and China’s growing military strength “make it increasingly likely that Beijing will ultimately opt for force. American reassurances, or American provocations, are a secondary consideration,” Mazza said.
“But even secondary considerations can be impactful,” he said, arguing against Mastro’s suggested approach that the US could reach a high-level agreement with China “in which Washington reiterates its longstanding political neutrality and China commits to dialing back its military threats.”
The US “has never maintained a position of true ‘political neutrality,’” but “has long thrown its weight behind Taiwan,” including the ongoing provision of arms to Taiwan based on the Taiwan Relations Act, he said.
Being politically neutral would essentially give China “a free hand” and “not a recipe for the peaceful resolution of disputes,” he said.
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