Trump is the most pro-Taiwan president in American history
WASHINGTON >> Donald Trump is arguably the most pro-Taiwan president in United States history. On Trump’s watch, U.S. warships routinely sail through the Taiwan Strait — the international waters separating Taiwan from China — something done just one to three times a year under Barack Obama. While both Obama and George W. Bush refused Taiwan’s requests to buy U.S. F-16s for fear of provoking Beijing’s ire, Trump approved the fighter-jet sale — the first since 1992. And after the 2016 election, Trump became the first U.S. leader to speak directly with a Taiwanese leader since the U.S. broke diplomatic relations in 1979 when he accepted a congratulatory call from President Tsai Ing-wen.
That’s good news, because Taiwan has never needed America’s support more. Last week, the people of Taiwan delivered a stinging rebuke to China when they defeated the pro-Beijing Nationalists and reelected Tsai in a landslide. More than a year ago, Tsai appeared to be finished after her Democratic Progressive Party suffered huge losses to the Nationalists in local elections. But last week, despite massive Chinese efforts to bolster her opponent, Tsai won a record 8.2 million votes, more than any Taiwanese leader since the start of direct presidential elections in 1996.
What changed? China’s crackdown in Hong Kong. Beijing claims Taiwan as a province and wants it to accept Chinese sovereignty under the same “one country, two systems” principle by which it rules Hong Kong. After watching Beijing trample over Hong Kong, the Taiwanese people want nothing to do with it and decided to send China a clear message.
China’s Communist leaders only had to leave Hong Kong alone, continue to collect its riches and watch as the Nationalists in Taiwan took power. Instead, with their brutality, they created a wave of anti-China sentiment in both places.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is unlikely to learn from his mistakes and back off. Instead, China will probably seek to punish Taiwan. Beijing might seek to coerce Taiwan economically by scrapping trade privileges under the economic cooperation pact it signed with Tsai’s Nationalist predecessor. Like its crackdown in Hong Kong, such a move would backfire on China — pushing Taiwan to diversify its economy and become less dependent on trade with the mainland. The Trump administration has a strategic and economic opportunity to help Taiwan do that by negotiating a new U.S.-Taiwan free trade agreement — a deal that would bolster the U.S. economy, increase U.S. exports and raise pressure on China.
The more worrisome possibility is that China will respond militarily.
To keep the peace, the U.S. must enhance its deterrence with China. One way would be to deploy new conventional intermediate-range ballistic missiles to East Asia. China is aggressively deploying such missiles, but the U.S. couldn’t under the IntermediateRange Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. This put the U.S. at a strategic disadvantage in any military standoff, because China knows our only response option is to target the mainland with intercontinental ballistic missiles — an unacceptable escalation. Thanks to Trump withdrawing from the INF Treaty, we can now do so — and it’s a move that would restore U.S. military supremacy in the Pacific and improve our ability to deter Chinese aggression.
As we learned from our recent standoff with Iran, totalitarian regimes tend to miscalculate. It took a military strike to restore deterrence with Iran; we shouldn’t wait to restore deterrence with China.