On the one hand Trump signaled less willingness to defend the interests of other countries with the US military. On the other hand he provokes the Chinese by speaking directly with Taiwanese leaders.
What are the probabilities that China will attempt to take over Taiwan during Trump’s term?
What are the probabilities that China will attempt to take over Taiwan during Trump’s term?
You say this as if China was not already preparing to do exactly this during Obama’s presidency. If anything the signals Trump is sending now is defensive of Taiwan and acting to protect Taiwan from PRC aggression.
The last time the mainland seriously threatened to invade Taiwan was the mid 90′s when the PRC conducted a series of missile tests in the waters around the island. This was Taiwan’s version of the cuban missile crisis. Bill Clinton sent two carrier groups to the Taiwan straights in the largest American demonstration of military strength in East Asia since the Vietnam war, and enough nuclear missile boats to bomb the PRC into the stone age. The point, which got across, was although the USA would go along with whatever diplomatic One China double-speak nonsense at the UN and Olympics or whatever, the US will go to war over Taiwan. If the PRC invades Taiwan, it’ll be fighting the US army, navy, and air force in what can only be described as World War 3. This was a red line never to be crossed. Officially the US agreed with the “One China” policy, but in reality the US would go to war to defend the two-China status quo. From then in ’96 though Clinton’s second term, and both terms of George W. Bush, Taiwan was secure & growing economically.
Then Obama signalled support for a One-China solution early in his first term. Not “yeah, yeah whatever” one-China policy status quo, but hints at full you’re-on-your-own-Taiwan, let’s-be-best-buddies-with-the-mainland policy. What followed over the last eight years is steady escalation on the Chinese side: artificial island expansion into the south China sea, harsher crackdowns of unrest on the mainland, direct meddling in Hong Kong electoral policy in violation of international agreements, and most recently an attempt at a diplomatic one-state solution. All this time during this escalation both the PRC and the ROC have been looking for a US response and getting basically nothing in terms of assurance of their continued support of Taiwan.
This culminated in a free-trade agreement between the ROC and PRC that was ostensibly for economic reasons, but would have set Taiwan on a Hong Kong like reunification pathway because of the unification of key financial, IT, and defence-critical industries. You can’t wage war when you opponent has backdoored your entire infrastructure. Then something happened the PRC did not expect: the Sunflower Student Movement, aka “Occupy Taiwan.” This massive student protest uprising had at its peak a hundred thousand people in the streets, stormed the executive and legislature, and ultimately led to the downfall of not just the free trade deal that would have crippled Taiwan, but the nationalist government as well. The anti-unification, pro-independence green party now holds power.
So where does that lead us with Trump? You comment makes it sound like Trump is not willing to defend Taiwan. But if anything his actions so far have indicated otherwise—Trump has been very vocally anti-China (mainland). Trump is business focused and Taiwan is a strong economic ally of the USA. Trump’s preference to speak to the pro-independence leaders of Taiwan before talking to China indicates support for the island nation.
China is reacting to this in a huge way, yes. Because it is a reversal of the pro-PRC Obama policy, and a probable reversion to the Bill Clinton policy of putting a red line across the Taiwan straights: go too far, and the US will not hesitate to fight in the defence of Chinese democracy.
The big unknown here isn’t Trump. It’s domestic Taiwanese politics. The green party is a mess and absolutely destroying the country. They’re spending more time squabbling over whether they should rename monuments and change history textbooks than actually governing the country, and the party is corrupt. Furthermore, if they actually carried through on independence and established a Taiwan that is explicitly not “China”, then that would negate the Clinton-era ideological justification the USA has for protecting Taiwan as Chinese-democracy-in-exile.
In my own humble but informed opinion, control over the future trajectory of Taiwan lies more with Ms. Tsai Ingwen than Mr. Donald Trump.
I would not upvote an anonymous account whenever possible, but this should deserve it. It’s an informed and balanced analysis, and although it’s dangerous to speculate from past intentions and words, it’s not the first that I hear about how Trump actually is defending Taiwan more than Obama did.
The main flaw with the argument presented is that it makes a huge leap from ‘Obama shows support for the One-China policy’ to ‘China uses this as evidence that it can do whatever it wants’.
The far greater change within China was the ascendance of Xi Jinping, not anything that America does (ironically, exactly what the user ends up suggesting you look at for Taiwan)
I don’t really follow official statements from the US government, but can anyone who does say that the statement linked in the argument represents some major departure from US policy? Could it not simply be standard diplomacy talk? I think it’s a major stretch to go from that statement to ‘Obama’s Pro-PRC policy’.
It was reported on at the time as unusual, and created a bit of a row between Taiwan and USA. The critical part of the white house statement is this:
President Obama on various occasions has reiterated that the U.S. side adheres to the one-China policy, abides by the three Sino-U.S. joint communiqués, and respects China’s sovereignty and the territorial integrity when it comes to the Taiwan question and other matters.
In the terms of China/Taiwan relations, this is effectively carte blanche for China to do as it pleases. “Respects China’s sovereignty and the territorial integrity” means “we won’t intervene.” And it calls out Taiwan specifically.
Under the old status quo this might have been phrased as “concurs that Taiwan is a province of China” or some such. The key words here are “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” which means interference would be interpreted as an international incident.
By using the anon account you choose not to connect your own account to this comment. So the usual reason to upvote presumably doesn’t apply. But if the common account gets a lot of karma somebody will use it for mass downvoting.
I don’t know if that’s the norm, but the code behind this site doesn’t give karma to a comment, but to an account also. Whenever you upvote something, you’re giving two points: one to the comment and one to the author. Since I’m not able to separate the two, I prefer to abstain in the case of a throwaway account, while I’m usually very liberal in the upvote I give.
When I upvote a comment I’m enabling the identity connected to that account. Obviously, if there’s nobody behind an account, I don’t feel the need to enable him or her.
So opinion and arguments don’t matter if there isn’t a name attached to them? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by ‘enable’ which isn’t very clear.
Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by ‘enable’ which isn’t very clear.
On sites like StackOverflow, and to some extent LessWrong, what actions an account can take is determined by its karma, and so upvoting an account is saying “this account should be able to do more,” which is problematic if it’s an open account. There’s also an implicit version of this, where people check out an unknown account’s karma to influence how they think about it.
I just changed username2 to have a 0x vote multiplier, so it can be used for anonymous commenting but not anonymous voting.
Trump’s preference to speak to the pro-independence leaders of Taiwan before talking to China indicates support for the island nation.
If he would be the usual politician that would be true. On the other hand he isn’t.
He’s a person who said that Japan and South Korea should not count on the US defending them but maybe develop their own nukes.
Trump builds up a bargaining position. It’s not certain how much consists of bluffing and what’s serious. It’s not clear what he wants from China or from Taiwan.
Officially the US agreed with the “One China” policy, but in reality the US would go to war to defend the two-China status quo.
Um, this is emphatically not what ‘One-China’ is about. The Taiwanese leadership agrees that “there’s only one China”; they just disagree about what the ‘One-China’ principle means! You’re ignoring all sorts of nuances here. This by the way is also why Trump’s statement was so puzzling in the first place, and why the PRC leadership found it so easy to dismiss it as pointless and childish.
“One China” is purposefully and diplomatically vague. I cover at least three different interpretations in my post.
While getting hung up on definitions, you missed the point I was trying to make in that Clinton and Bush administrations had a de facto two Chinas policy while paying lip service to the one China idea.
“One China” is purposefully and diplomatically vague. I cover at least three different interpretations in my post.
Sure, but what seemed to be missing in your comment is any acknowledgement that the Taiwan leadership itself has agreed and even insisted on the “One China” principle in the past—or at least, some version of it. Of course, this may or may not change in the future, given that the political party now leading Taiwanese internal politics is known to lean towards some sort of ‘independence’ for the island, but even then, we’re still quite far from any kind of real shift.
I took it as assumed background information, and it was implied by the fact that the nationalist government was moving into a one-state solution with the free trade deals. However only the now-deposed nationalist party in Taiwan held a one China policy. The current government is pro-independence (which isn’t quite the same thing as two Chinas). They don’t lean towards independence, they ARE the independence party. They pretty much let themselves be fully defined by their stance on this one single issue. And it’s a dangerous stance to take given that all it does is provoke an aggressor while simultaneously giving up justifications for allies to come to its aid.
How had the topic become different in any way from what ChristianKI asked about? If this is an actual rule (is it?) it seems to be selectively applied here.
The signal sent by Trump is that he will take a call from whomever he wants; the Chinese don’t get to dictate with whom he speaks. The idea that it makes China more likely to attack Taiwan is ridiculous.
The signal sent by Trump is that he will take a call from whomever he wants
That doesn’t change anything about the fact that it creates strong internal pressure on Chinese decision makers to answer the action in a way that doesn’t result in them losing face in front of their citizens.
If true that’s mainly an argument against making pointless precommitments you can’t possibly enforce. As it happens, I doubt Chinese pay all that much attention to these kinds of diplomatic bugbears.
As it happens, I doubt Chinese pay all that much attention to these kinds of diplomatic bugbears.
Why do you doubt it?
The fact that they took a US military drone in tit-for-tat, suggests that they do pay attention.
If the Chinese wanted it they could leak all those background checks for the US security clearances to Wikileaks or do any number of actions to retaliate more forcefully than just taking a drone as a symbolic action against the symbolic action of a phone call.
What’s going to happen to Taiwan?
On the one hand Trump signaled less willingness to defend the interests of other countries with the US military. On the other hand he provokes the Chinese by speaking directly with Taiwanese leaders.
What are the probabilities that China will attempt to take over Taiwan during Trump’s term?
You say this as if China was not already preparing to do exactly this during Obama’s presidency. If anything the signals Trump is sending now is defensive of Taiwan and acting to protect Taiwan from PRC aggression.
The last time the mainland seriously threatened to invade Taiwan was the mid 90′s when the PRC conducted a series of missile tests in the waters around the island. This was Taiwan’s version of the cuban missile crisis. Bill Clinton sent two carrier groups to the Taiwan straights in the largest American demonstration of military strength in East Asia since the Vietnam war, and enough nuclear missile boats to bomb the PRC into the stone age. The point, which got across, was although the USA would go along with whatever diplomatic One China double-speak nonsense at the UN and Olympics or whatever, the US will go to war over Taiwan. If the PRC invades Taiwan, it’ll be fighting the US army, navy, and air force in what can only be described as World War 3. This was a red line never to be crossed. Officially the US agreed with the “One China” policy, but in reality the US would go to war to defend the two-China status quo. From then in ’96 though Clinton’s second term, and both terms of George W. Bush, Taiwan was secure & growing economically.
Then Obama signalled support for a One-China solution early in his first term. Not “yeah, yeah whatever” one-China policy status quo, but hints at full you’re-on-your-own-Taiwan, let’s-be-best-buddies-with-the-mainland policy. What followed over the last eight years is steady escalation on the Chinese side: artificial island expansion into the south China sea, harsher crackdowns of unrest on the mainland, direct meddling in Hong Kong electoral policy in violation of international agreements, and most recently an attempt at a diplomatic one-state solution. All this time during this escalation both the PRC and the ROC have been looking for a US response and getting basically nothing in terms of assurance of their continued support of Taiwan.
This culminated in a free-trade agreement between the ROC and PRC that was ostensibly for economic reasons, but would have set Taiwan on a Hong Kong like reunification pathway because of the unification of key financial, IT, and defence-critical industries. You can’t wage war when you opponent has backdoored your entire infrastructure. Then something happened the PRC did not expect: the Sunflower Student Movement, aka “Occupy Taiwan.” This massive student protest uprising had at its peak a hundred thousand people in the streets, stormed the executive and legislature, and ultimately led to the downfall of not just the free trade deal that would have crippled Taiwan, but the nationalist government as well. The anti-unification, pro-independence green party now holds power.
So where does that lead us with Trump? You comment makes it sound like Trump is not willing to defend Taiwan. But if anything his actions so far have indicated otherwise—Trump has been very vocally anti-China (mainland). Trump is business focused and Taiwan is a strong economic ally of the USA. Trump’s preference to speak to the pro-independence leaders of Taiwan before talking to China indicates support for the island nation.
China is reacting to this in a huge way, yes. Because it is a reversal of the pro-PRC Obama policy, and a probable reversion to the Bill Clinton policy of putting a red line across the Taiwan straights: go too far, and the US will not hesitate to fight in the defence of Chinese democracy.
The big unknown here isn’t Trump. It’s domestic Taiwanese politics. The green party is a mess and absolutely destroying the country. They’re spending more time squabbling over whether they should rename monuments and change history textbooks than actually governing the country, and the party is corrupt. Furthermore, if they actually carried through on independence and established a Taiwan that is explicitly not “China”, then that would negate the Clinton-era ideological justification the USA has for protecting Taiwan as Chinese-democracy-in-exile.
In my own humble but informed opinion, control over the future trajectory of Taiwan lies more with Ms. Tsai Ingwen than Mr. Donald Trump.
I would not upvote an anonymous account whenever possible, but this should deserve it. It’s an informed and balanced analysis, and although it’s dangerous to speculate from past intentions and words, it’s not the first that I hear about how Trump actually is defending Taiwan more than Obama did.
The main flaw with the argument presented is that it makes a huge leap from ‘Obama shows support for the One-China policy’ to ‘China uses this as evidence that it can do whatever it wants’.
The far greater change within China was the ascendance of Xi Jinping, not anything that America does (ironically, exactly what the user ends up suggesting you look at for Taiwan)
I don’t really follow official statements from the US government, but can anyone who does say that the statement linked in the argument represents some major departure from US policy? Could it not simply be standard diplomacy talk? I think it’s a major stretch to go from that statement to ‘Obama’s Pro-PRC policy’.
It was reported on at the time as unusual, and created a bit of a row between Taiwan and USA. The critical part of the white house statement is this:
In the terms of China/Taiwan relations, this is effectively carte blanche for China to do as it pleases. “Respects China’s sovereignty and the territorial integrity” means “we won’t intervene.” And it calls out Taiwan specifically.
Under the old status quo this might have been phrased as “concurs that Taiwan is a province of China” or some such. The key words here are “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” which means interference would be interpreted as an international incident.
That’s a strange rule. Why?
By using the anon account you choose not to connect your own account to this comment. So the usual reason to upvote presumably doesn’t apply. But if the common account gets a lot of karma somebody will use it for mass downvoting.
The usual reason for upvoting is to promote the comment and not provide the commenter with resources in the form of karma.
I don’t know if that’s the norm, but the code behind this site doesn’t give karma to a comment, but to an account also. Whenever you upvote something, you’re giving two points: one to the comment and one to the author.
Since I’m not able to separate the two, I prefer to abstain in the case of a throwaway account, while I’m usually very liberal in the upvote I give.
Both are usual. (Which doesn’t necessarily means both are equally useful.)
When I upvote a comment I’m enabling the identity connected to that account. Obviously, if there’s nobody behind an account, I don’t feel the need to enable him or her.
So opinion and arguments don’t matter if there isn’t a name attached to them? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by ‘enable’ which isn’t very clear.
On sites like StackOverflow, and to some extent LessWrong, what actions an account can take is determined by its karma, and so upvoting an account is saying “this account should be able to do more,” which is problematic if it’s an open account. There’s also an implicit version of this, where people check out an unknown account’s karma to influence how they think about it.
I just changed username2 to have a 0x vote multiplier, so it can be used for anonymous commenting but not anonymous voting.
The account username2 can only vote once in a poll.
What other permissions? The ability to make new top level posts? That seems like something you want an anonymous account to do.
If he would be the usual politician that would be true. On the other hand he isn’t.
He’s a person who said that Japan and South Korea should not count on the US defending them but maybe develop their own nukes.
Trump builds up a bargaining position. It’s not certain how much consists of bluffing and what’s serious. It’s not clear what he wants from China or from Taiwan.
Um, this is emphatically not what ‘One-China’ is about. The Taiwanese leadership agrees that “there’s only one China”; they just disagree about what the ‘One-China’ principle means! You’re ignoring all sorts of nuances here. This by the way is also why Trump’s statement was so puzzling in the first place, and why the PRC leadership found it so easy to dismiss it as pointless and childish.
“One China” is purposefully and diplomatically vague. I cover at least three different interpretations in my post.
While getting hung up on definitions, you missed the point I was trying to make in that Clinton and Bush administrations had a de facto two Chinas policy while paying lip service to the one China idea.
Sure, but what seemed to be missing in your comment is any acknowledgement that the Taiwan leadership itself has agreed and even insisted on the “One China” principle in the past—or at least, some version of it. Of course, this may or may not change in the future, given that the political party now leading Taiwanese internal politics is known to lean towards some sort of ‘independence’ for the island, but even then, we’re still quite far from any kind of real shift.
I took it as assumed background information, and it was implied by the fact that the nationalist government was moving into a one-state solution with the free trade deals. However only the now-deposed nationalist party in Taiwan held a one China policy. The current government is pro-independence (which isn’t quite the same thing as two Chinas). They don’t lean towards independence, they ARE the independence party. They pretty much let themselves be fully defined by their stance on this one single issue. And it’s a dangerous stance to take given that all it does is provoke an aggressor while simultaneously giving up justifications for allies to come to its aid.
China is testing the US’s interpretation of the south china sea situation:
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/16/politics/chinese-warship-underwater-drone-stolen/index.html
Wrong forum for discussing current political hot topics.
How had the topic become different in any way from what ChristianKI asked about? If this is an actual rule (is it?) it seems to be selectively applied here.
LW doesn’t have many “actual rules”, but discussing current politics is discouraged (for these reasons). As to ChristianKl, he should know better.
The signal sent by Trump is that he will take a call from whomever he wants; the Chinese don’t get to dictate with whom he speaks. The idea that it makes China more likely to attack Taiwan is ridiculous.
That doesn’t change anything about the fact that it creates strong internal pressure on Chinese decision makers to answer the action in a way that doesn’t result in them losing face in front of their citizens.
If true that’s mainly an argument against making pointless precommitments you can’t possibly enforce. As it happens, I doubt Chinese pay all that much attention to these kinds of diplomatic bugbears.
Why do you doubt it?
The fact that they took a US military drone in tit-for-tat, suggests that they do pay attention.
If the Chinese wanted it they could leak all those background checks for the US security clearances to Wikileaks or do any number of actions to retaliate more forcefully than just taking a drone as a symbolic action against the symbolic action of a phone call.
I meant the Chinese public. The actual public of most countries is not all that engaged in the ins and outs of these things.
The Chinese public knows what the Chinese media tells them. It’s also very nationalistic.