Is US relationship with Taiwan worth more than ‘a scrap of paper’?

When it comes to documents referencing Taiwan, the cadres of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have a habit of examining the texts very carefully — even some remarkably obscure ones. 

Earlier this year, Regis Jesuit High School in Denver experienced Beijing’s scrutiny when it applied on behalf of its students  to join the United Nations Commission on the Status of  Women. Incredibly, the U.N. office vetting the application forwarded an official Chinese demand that the school edit a year-old reference to Taiwan on its website, changing it to “Taiwan — Province of China.” The school needed to make the switch before the U.N. bureaucrats would endorse the application.

If the regime’s pettiness compels it to scour the world in search of such perceived slights, there is one document they have no doubt examined very carefully: The Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) of April 1979. It specifies exactly what the people of Taiwan can and cannot expect from the United States should the People’s Republic infringe on their sovereignty. The “strategic ambiguity” that today clouds America’s commitment to Taiwan dates from the text of that legislation, drafted during the Carter administration.

President Carter’s legacy has been tarnished by the Iran hostage crisis; but often overlooked are the foreign policy initiatives undertaken early in his term. By the end of 1978, he had prevailed in a bruising fight with Congress to pass the Panama Canal treaties, persuaded Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to sign the Camp David Accords and launched a global campaign for human rights. 

Buoyed by those successes, Carter resolved to accelerate progress in relations with communist China, which had moved slowly after the 1972 Shanghai Communique. On Dec. 15, 1978, he surprised the world by announcing the end of the “Two China” policy and the recognition of the People’s Republic as the sole government of China as of Jan. 1, 1979.

Hawks in Congress – notified only hours before the announcement – and the Taipei government, known as the Republic of China, were furious. But, like disco, China fever was in the air. The PRC’s newly emerged leader, Deng Xiaoping, had announced major economic reforms and would be named Time’s Man of the Year in 1978. Carter had history on his side.

The agreement with Deng required that the U.S. abrogate the guarantee of Taiwan’s security enshrined in the 1954 U.S. – Republic of China Mutual Defense Treaty. That text offered little ambiguity; the parties shared “a common determination to defend themselves against external armed attack, so that no potential aggressor could be under the illusion that either of them stands alone in the West Pacific Area.”

But in the normalization talks, the PRC had refused to rule out the use of force in future efforts to annex Taiwan. U.S. negotiators made no attempt to request that Beijing make such a declaration. In a spirit reminiscent of Camp David, Carter would only state on Dec. 15 that the U.S. “expect that the Taiwan issue will be settled peacefully by the Chinese themselves.” 

Pushing back, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) and five other conservative Republican senators filed a lawsuit on Dec. 22 challenging Carter’s right to unilaterally terminate the 1954 treaty. (The suit was dismissed a year later by the Supreme Court.) Even the New York liberal Jacob Javits, ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, would later write that the administration “had given very little thought to the shape and substance of our future relations (with Taiwan).”

In February 1979, when the administration finally got around to submitting a draft agreement governing relations with Taiwan, Democratic Foreign Relations Chair Frank Church termed it “woefully inadequate.” It was left to the committee to draft what became the Taiwan Relations Act.  

America’s posture toward Taiwan’s security is reflected in two of the Act’s “Declarations.” Recognition of Beijing “rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means” (b3); and any action to the contrary would be “of grave concern to the United States” (b4).

Sen. Charles Percy (R-Ill.) unsuccessfully urged stronger language specifying that any coercion of Taiwan be seen as a threat to the “security interests” of the United States. Majorities in Congress and the administration saw that echo of 1954 as a violation of the breakthrough agreement with Beijing. But left unsaid in the final draft was exactly how America’s “grave concern” might translate to action in a crisis. 

The only concrete security pledge was to “make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary” to defend itself. 

Even following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, a member of the State Department team that drafted the TRA observed that “the possibility of a Chinese invasion or blockade of Taiwan seems even more remote than in 1979. The PRC has neither the will nor the capability to subdue Taiwan by force.” From the beginning, the limits of U.S. commitment inherent in the Act have been justified by optimism.

Today, both former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President’ Biden’s director for China on the National Security Council have likened the U.S. – China relationship to the economic and strategic competition between the U.K. and Imperial Germany in the years before World War I. So it’s worth recalling that the tipping point in the British decision to enter that war was the August 1914 German invasion of Belgium, which violated a security guarantee the British had signed in 1839. The German Chancellor dismissed that 75-year-old pledge as no more than a  “a scrap of paper.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his regime have both the will and the capability to subdue Taiwan. Having read carefully the text, and the congressional debates surrounding its passage, will Beijing take a similar attitude toward the 42-year-old Taiwan Relations Act — seeing it as a scrap of paper with little relevance then and none in circumstances today?

Paul C. Atkinson, a former executive at The Wall Street Journal, is a contributing editor of the New York Sun.