Freedom Isn't Free: Taiwan Edition

And diplomacy isn't easy either

On Saturday, the people of Taiwan voted for continuity. They voted to give a third term to the current governing Democratic Progressive Party, voted to make the current vice president, Lai Ching-te, the next president, and voted for a platform of continuing to defend Taiwanese sovereignty, avoid negotiations over Taiwan’s status with the government in Beijing, deepen Taiwan’s ties with the United States, Japan and other friendly states—but avoid taking the provocative step of declaring independence.

The allied world also reacted with calls for continuity. The United States stressed that we did not favor Taiwanese independence but that we also rejected any attempt to interfere in the island’s elections or to intimidate its people, or to resolve the status of Taiwan by force. Multiple American allies reacted similarly: Britain called for resolving outstanding cross-straits differences without coercion, France hailed Taiwan’s democracy and called for preserving the status-quo, Germany called for continuing strong ties within the context of a One-China policy, and Japan called for peace, dialogue and stability.

But whether there will actually be continuity is up to the People’s Republic of China.

Beijing made no secret of their contempt for president-elect Lai during his candidacy; even if he has moderated his previous support for formal independence, the DPP’s official stance—that Taiwan already has its own sovereignty which should be respected by China on the basis of equality—is already anathema to Beijing, and if Lai were to take the party in any direction it would presumably be further down the road toward independence. China had a dog in this election, and that dog lost. How China chooses to respond over the next several months is still unknown, but it’s safe to assume that they will be looking for ways to punish Taiwan for their choice in some way or other.

That’s a price the Taiwanese people are presumably willing to pay, or they wouldn’t have voted as they did; China’s views and likely response was hardly a secret. But out on the tails of the distribution of possible outcomes (and those tails are considerably fatter than they used to be), those costs are not borne by the Taiwanese alone, not by a long shot. The United States has not formally committed to defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack, but we have repeatedly sent American ships and planes in response to Chinese provocations in the Taiwan Strait, and have given Beijing ample reason to assume that an America would defend the island directly if war broke out. The economic costs of war could be staggering regardless of how much fighting America engaged in directly simply because of Taiwan’s centrality in the semiconductor ecosystem. But the costs could be much higher than that. There’s really no assurance that the United States would even win a war with China over Taiwan. Indeed, as I argued three years ago, it’s entirely possible that both America and China could lose such a war: China could inflict devastating losses on the American navy while still failing to conquer the island.

For very good reason, America doesn’t want war with China. Therefore, we don’t want Taiwan to do anything that might provoke war. But we also don’t want Taiwan to be cowed into drifting toward China’s orbit, much less for it to come under formal Chinese control. We want to maintain the status quo—which is what Taiwan voted for. But what sustains the status quo is China’s conviction that war isn’t worth the risk, both because its costs are too high and because it sees reasonable prospects for achieving its aims by peaceful means. The DPP’s victory predictably reduces Chinese confidence about the latter, and therefore raises the importance of the former. It does so, moreover, while the United States is already stretched by Ukraine’s and Israel’s need for arms, by our escalating naval engagement in the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, and the possibility of a larger war breaking out with Iran. Notwithstanding America’s substantial investment in the outcome, though, the DPP’s election was Taiwan’s business—indeed, America called it a core principle that the election be free of interference.

I’m not entirely naïve. I’m aware that the United States has been quite hypocritical in its support for democracy—and I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. Promoting democracy can reasonably be a goal of our foreign policy without it being a binding principle. Supporting the coups against Allende, or Mosaddegh, or Morsi can have been both crimes and mistakes without proving that America is in fact inherently hostile to rather than supportive of democracy. We don’t have to be “inherently” anything.

But there is something troubling about telling ourselves, as well as others, that out support for democracy entails writing blank checks and indulging perverse incentives. It doesn’t. It can’t. We shouldn’t say that when it will make the situation worse—we need to be cognizant of the domestic political dynamics our own allies are dealing with, and calibrate our communications to achieve our desired result and not to please critical pundits. But we should be grownup enough to tell ourselves the truth, and be willing to say it when necessary.

As it happens, the Taiwanese elections were not an unambiguous endorsement of the pro-sovereignty DPP. The DPP lost its parliamentary majority, and it won the presidency with a mere 40% plurality, with the remainder going to two parties seen as more accommodating of China: the Kuomintang, which favors eventual reunification with China and won over a third of the vote, and the Taiwan People's Party, a center-left party positioned between the DPP and KMT on relations with China which won over a quarter of the vote. It’s likely that this somewhat ambiguous result reflects disenchantment with the DPP’s domestic policy record more than with its stance on sovereignty—but that fact only underlines the dilemmas for America. Hostile actions by China would likely boost the DPP’s popularity, which gives Lai an incentive to be defiant and even provocative so long as he believes America is in his corner.

How America counteracts that incentive is a difficult diplomatic problem. It’s a problem in Taipei, it’s a problem in Jerusalem, it’s a problem in Kyiv, it’s a problem even in dealing with non-democratic regimes because they are also sensitive to the opinions of their populace in certain ways. It’s the kind of problem that encourages the impatient to prefer either inflexible principles or the abjuring of alliances entirely. But in reality, just as freedom isn’t free, diplomacy isn’t easy. Not even for a one-time world-girdling hegemon.