President Donald Trump recently told Bloomberg News that if Taiwan expects military protection in the event of a Chinese attack on what China considers a renegade province, “it should pay for Taiwan’s defense.”
Trump also said Taiwan, which has “enormous wealth,”Did not do anything” onto the United States and ignores Taiwan’s role as a vital manufacturing base. High-performance semiconductor chips And it suggests that the United States has no strategic reason to care about the fate of the island polity. 23 million soul.
These comments may sound like the usual Trump bombast, and because they were uttered a few weeks ago, they may already be largely forgotten in the course of American politics.
But in Asia they will not soon be forgotten.
Former President Trump has frequently criticized NATO member states for not paying their fair share for defense costs, as well as Criticizing South Korea (The latter case is rather unfair.) But the comments about Taiwan are even worse.
Preventing a Chinese attack on Taiwan is arguably harder than preventing a Russian attack on NATO territory or a North Korean attack on South Korea. Nearly all of NATO’s frontline states closest to Russia are Spending Because they are committing their pledged spending to the military (at least 2% of gross domestic product), the countries most exposed to a hypothetical Russian attack are not guilty of free riding.
Moreover, Russian troops are currently stuck in Ukraine. In the case of South Korea, the U.S. Approximately 30,000 people Given the presence of U.S. troops forward deployed on the Korean Peninsula, it is unlikely that North Korea would doubt Washington’s willingness to help its ally fend off any attack.
But when it comes to Taiwan, the United States has long sought to strike a delicate balance — what some call “strategic ambiguity,” others “dual deterrence.” Either way, it’s a difficult and fragile one.
united states of america Do not recognize Taiwan As an independent nation There is no longer a treaty It has not delivered on its promise to defend Taiwan, but China still seeks to discourage any attack that would reunify Taiwan with mainland China. Might be In any war, we would come to the defence of Taiwan if China were to launch an unprovoked attack.
President Biden said, In four partsHe made off-the-cuff comments to the effect that as president (presumably after seeking approval from Congress) he intended to defend the island, but his official policy has been left deliberately unclear.
The reason is that we don’t want Taiwan to feel like it can declare independence and force its own issues. We are trying to deter both Beijing and Taipei with the same policy.
In these circumstances, a US president downplaying US quasi-commitments to defend Taiwan could confirm what Beijing’s leaders already suspect: China’s interests in Taiwan are much greater than those of the US, and the US may not be able to act decisively in a crisis after all.
History teaches us that this is an extremely dangerous way to operate on the international stage: wars often result when leaders send conflicting messages about their commitments and then deliver on those promises. rear Attacks where people feel so strongly about a particular interest or ally that they actually stand up to defend it.
The result is often war that could have been avoided. Given Trump’s frustration and anger toward China (sentiments shared by many other Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. today), it is hard to imagine him turning a blind eye to a Chinese attack on Taiwan, no matter what he has said before.
Let’s look at four potentially similar examples from the past century or so.
1914Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany believed that Britain would not help France after all if Germany attacked its western neighbors (and Belgium along the way). Britain was vague about its intentions, but the warmongering Kaiser saw his opportunity. Of course, he was ultimately wrong about Britain, and four years of carnage ensued.
Early in World War II, Adolf Hitler believed that Britain and France would let him commit crimes in places like Austria and Czechoslovakia, and that he would rearm his country in violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I. As a result, the famous Munich Appeasement Autumn 1938.
However, Hitler later overestimated this opportunity and expanded his ambitions, ultimately drawing Britain and France into the war (though of course in this case Germany was initially victorious against France).
Just before the 1950-1953 Korean War, the United States committed two significant events that North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and leaders in Moscow and Beijing misinterpreted as signs of American indecisiveness.
First, we withdrew our occupying forces from Korea, leaving the country militarily defenseless. Then, in early 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson said: speech In it, he declared that South Korea was outside the core of American security interests.
He meant it at the time, and most American leaders agreed with him. attack The June 1950 presidential election saw virtually all the candidates, most notably President Harry Truman, change their minds and war break out.
And finally, when the US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, told Saddam Hussein that the US had no official position on border disputes between Arab countries, Saddam took that as a green light to invade. Of course, he did more than redraw the borders: He occupied all of Kuwait in August 1990.
After several days of deliberation, George H. W. Bush decided that this act of aggression could not be tolerated, sowing the seeds of more than 30 years of American military operations in and around Iraq.
In matters of war and peace, words matter. Donald Trump needs to be more careful.
Michael O’Hanlon is the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategic Studies at the Brookings Institution and author of Military History for Modern Strategists: America’s Major Wars Since 1861.
