Predicting or avoiding war with China?

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We had an Editorial Board meeting last week with representatives from the Taiwanese consulate - er, Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles - and one of the consular officers noticed that I had this book with me. He suggested kindly that "America's Coming War With China" was a little exaggerated.

The title may be a bit exaggerated but the book itself, by Cato Institute vice president for defense and policy studies (and someone I am pleased to call friend) Ted Carpenter, is a sober and dispassionate analysis of the ongoing dispute between China and Taiwan, a situation that has been papered over with clever diplomacy but that still could prove intractable. The title is more warning than prediction, and Carpenter offers a plausible way out.

The book explains the history, going back to 1895 when Japan took Taiwan from China, that led to the impasse, and trends on both sides of the Taiwan Straits that look ominous. The history is even-handed and heavily documented, but sometimes almost breezy (Carpenter isn't shy about calling a diplomatic move or course of action "bizarre" or U.S. policy "muddled").

The conundrum, in brief, is this. After World War II, China expected to get Taiwan back from Japan, but the revolution that led to Mao Zedong's communists winning in 1949 saw Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists retreat to Taiwan and set up what they declared to be the legitimate government of China (Republic of China) in Taipei, the capital. Through the 1950s Chiang's government, and many U.S. backers, talked bravely of invading the mainland and retaking China, but it didn't happen. The United States and Taiwan did have a mutual-defense treaty that obligated the United States to defend Taiwan.

When Nixon went to China in 1972 (more to counterbalance Russia than to legitimize mainland China, but legitimization happened), both the Nationalists and the Communists officially believed there was one China and they were the legitimate ruler. In 1979, President Carter decided to recognize the mainland and cobbled together the Taiwan Relations Act, which allows Taiwan to have representation in the United States but on an "official-unofficial" basis. The act is ambiguous as to U.S. defense-of-Taiwan commitments, allowing the sale of U.S. "defensive" weapons to Taiwan. The issue of whether there is one China or two is fogged up in carefully crafted language of "strategic ambiguity."

Since 1980 Taiwan has flourished economically and become a democracy. In 2000 an opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, which had walked right to the edge of calling for outright Taiwanese independence, won for the first time, electing Chen Shui-ban president. Chen has been circumspect enough, but he represents a growing (though back-and-forth) sentiment in Taiwan that it is a de facto independent state and it might as well become de jure.

Meanwhile, Beijing still claims Taiwan as a province and vows eventual reunification, sometimes talking ominously of military means. Beijing doesn't have the military capability to take the island now, but it is beefing up its military and may see, in Taiwanese trends, a reason for acting sooner rather than later.

U.S. policy under Bush has zig-zagged so much that it's more a set of attitudes than a policy - and ironically destabilizing. Cato's Carpenter suggests that the United States should announce that it will not come to Taiwan's defense, but will continue to sell it whatever military hardware it wants. That would put the decision squarely in the hands of the Chinese and Taiwanese. With the United States out of the picture both sides would be more likely to avoid miscalculation, and chances for a peaceful resolution might even improve.