E-Notes

U.S. Policy Toward China: Try for the Best, Prepare for the Worst

by Avery Goldstein

March 30, 2001

This essay is part of a special series of articles by FPRI scholars offering foreign policy recommendations for the Bush Administration. All of the articles will be posted on our website (www.fpri.org) in the near future.

Avery Goldstein is Director of FPRI’s Asia Program and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. For another point of view, see the recent E-Note, “U.S. Policy Toward China: Judge China By Its Deeds, Not Its Words,” by June Teufel Dreyer, Senior Fellow at FPRI and Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami/Coral Gables.

Despite some missteps, the Clinton administration’s track record in the Asia-Pacific was on balance impressive. Over the past eight years several of the most difficult questions about the U.S. role in Asia at the end of the Cold War have been answered. Absent a superpower rival, would the U.S. retrench and leave Asia to the Asians? Would the U.S. maintain regional commitments that had been fashioned to contain the now-defunct Soviet bloc, or would the network of bilateral alliances be allowed to languish? It is worth remembering the level of uncertainty about these questions in the early 1990s.

By 1995, however, the U.S. had begun to demonstrate its continued attentiveness to Asia by:

announcing its intention to maintain a sizable troop presence in the region;
updating American alliances with Australia and Japan to better suit a post-Cold War era of ambiguous international dangers and shifting national capabilities;
negotiating agreements with several Southeast Asian countries concerning visiting forces, which provided both political symbols of involvement and practical military arrangements in the event military contingencies required access;
responding to military tension in the Taiwan Strait with clear evidence of continuing U.S. interest in a peaceful resolution of the lingering dispute; and
undertaking active diplomacy and planning military adjustments to cope with the changing nature of the potential threat posed by North Korea.

Bearing these accomplishments in mind, any adjustments to American policy toward Asia should begin from the premise that the current regional posture has fundamental features worth retaining. The U.S. remains the preeminent military power in Asia by a wide margin; no potential adversary believes that the U.S. would back down from challenges to its political commitments; and perhaps most importantly, the U.S. presence in the region continues to receive broad support in Asia.

Even so, the Bush administration faces challenges maintaining the achievements of the past decade and will have to address problems that remain unresolved. Principal among these is the complicated relationship between Washington and Beijing.

Relating to China After the Cold War

Stripped of the Cold War considerations that had made China clearly either an adversary or an ally, the Sino-American relationship has become inherently more uncertain. While there is broad agreement that China’s military and economic strength is increasing, the implications of this trend are contested.

How does the United States view the prospect of China emerging as a great power and, in so doing, challenging American preponderance? On this question, analysts tend to fall into two camps. On one side are those who believe that the transition to a world with multiple centers of power is inevitable. Consequently, the goal of US policy should be to ensure that China’s greater role does not threaten American interests. Those who endorse the approach broadly dubbed "engagement” expect the United States to facilitate and perhaps accelerate changes in the way China manages its domestic affairs and pursues its international interests. Economic self-interest and growing networks of international involvement, the argument goes, will impose their own constraints on China and help to ensure its emergence as a responsible power.

By contrast, those who believe that the goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve American preponderance are likely to seek to prevent or at least delay China’s emergence as a peer competitor. Concerned that present disagreements and competition for influence presage more serious challenges to American leadership and interests, those who adhere to this view generally emphasize a policy of “containment.” They assert that the United States best ensures its interests by erecting barriers designed to limit China’s influence until the changes in its foreign and domestic policy that engagement advocates seek are already evident.

In this oversimplified sketch, engagement and containment represent two endpoints on a policy continuum. Polemics notwithstanding, mainstream debate has rarely argued for either naive engagement or obstinate containment. To wit, President Clinton’s policies could be seen as engagement to the extent he promoted a robust economic relationship with China; or containment to the extent he firmed up alliances with Japan and Australia (against an unnamed adversary that was obviously no longer the Soviet Union), demonstrated U.S. resolve in the Taiwan Strait by sending aircraft carriers, and supported the development of theater missile defense.

The balance to be struck between the two policy extremes must be determined by the persuasiveness of the logic behind each of them. Do present disagreements between China and the United States indicate that China is determined to challenge American interests and will become more dangerous as its power grows? Or do they instead reflect China’s concern with ensuring its own vital interests in the face of what it sees as U.S. efforts to limit its legitimate international influence?

There is room for principled disagreement on these big questions. Under the best of circumstances it is difficult to anticipate capabilities and assess intentions. In the case of China, the usual difficulties are compounded by relatively limited access to the leadership’s foreign policy debates. Therefore, a prudent U.S. China policy would manage rather than exacerbate current problems, avoid creating new problems that can be anticipated, and hedge against the possibility that some problems may prove intractable. In other words, Washington ought try for the best, but prepare for the worst. This approach applies to a broad range of issues in Sino-American relations, including predictable economic disputes that will accompany China’s accession to the WTO, persistent disagreements about human rights, and unpredictable incidents such as the U.S. reconnaissance aircraft collision with a Chinese fighter near Hainan. But the two most challenging issues on the bilateral agenda for the immediate future will be Taiwan and missile defense.

The Taiwan Question

For China, the determination to achieve political reunification with Taiwan reflects not only nationalist outrage dating to the mid-19th century about foreign interference in China’s internal affairs and frustration about the abortive conclusion to the civil war of the mid- 20th century. It also reflects new concerns of the post-Cold War era. Three such concerns stand out: the need for the Chinese Communist Party to rely on its nationalist credentials (rather than discredited Marxism-Leninism) as a source of legitimacy, the fear that the failure of its Taiwan policy might encourage separatism in peripheral regions of the PRC, and concern that a successful reassertion of American influence on the Taiwan problem will reinforce U.S. “hegemony.” Thus, when China’s spokesmen and analysts assert that the United States wants to use Taiwan to “check China,” they are implying much more than simply that the island poses problems for Chinese naval operations off the eastern seaboard or could serve as a base for military forces that threaten the mainland. China links the Taiwan issue to a host of others it believes it must address if it is to fulfill its destiny and become a genuine great power.

For the United States, the determination to ensure that any change in the current relationship between Taiwan and the mainland is accomplished peacefully and with the consent of the parties involved also has historical and contemporary roots. The American decision to “freeze” the Taiwan Strait after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 (in order to reduce the chances of having to fight on a second front in East Asia) reintroduced the United States into a Chinese civil war from which it had just disengaged. Thereafter, the growing U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s security in the context of the Cold War containment strategy prevented China from using military force to bring Taiwan under Beijing’s jurisdiction. Simultaneously, it provided Taiwan with the opportunity to pursue economic development and, eventually, democratic political reforms. Yet the United States' decades-long commitment to Taiwan’s security was always contestable under international law, especially after Washington abandoned the fiction that the island’s regime was the real government of the whole of China. After the 1950s, moreover, the commitment also lost much of its military-strategic rationale. To contain China, the United States had bases throughout East Asia that sufficed; after 1972, containing China was no longer a goal.

Why, then, does the U.S. interest in cross-strait relations endure? First, regardless of the original justification for its policy, the United States has acquired a moral obligation to the people of Taiwan. Because it is largely responsible for creating the situation that now prevails, the international stature of the United States would suffer greatly if it attempted to wash its hands of the problem, even if it could somehow justify such an approach as consistent with international law and not harmful to the country’s military disposition in the Western Pacific.

Second, for those who believe that advancing the cause of democracy is a worthwhile goal for U.S. foreign policy, Taiwan serves as an exemplar of the peaceful, if difficult, transition from authoritarian to democratic rule and as a refutation to claims that Chinese culture is inherently inconsistent with liberal democracy. Some analysts have also argued that Taiwan’s role as a potential model for political change on the mainland may be important not just because it is consistent with American values, but also because such change might give rise to a China with which the United States could more easily coexist.

Third, during the 1990s American concerns about Taiwan’s security were demonstrated with increasing clarity both by advocates in the U.S. Congress (who justify their position by reference to the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act) and presidential actions (including continued arms sales to Taiwan and the U.S. response to China’s military actions in the Taiwan Strait during 1995-96). As a consequence, even if Taiwan no longer has intrinsic value as an ideological or military asset, the United States now has a reputational interest in avoiding the appearance that it would abandon a significant obligation. Such a perception could tempt potential adversaries to challenge important American interests elsewhere. It could also lead allies and friendly states to doubt American credibility and perhaps to conclude that they must either accommodate, rather than resist, threats or strive to become fully self-reliant. The latter outcome could easily exacerbate currently muted regional rivalries in Asia and undermine the willingness of others to accept American leadership.

How can the Bush administration deal with the Taiwan issue so that it serves American interests? Any approach should begin with the premise that a peaceful resolution acceptable to the people of Taiwan best preserves U.S. moral, political, and reputational interests. The task then is to pursue policies that are likely to discourage the mainland from using force to seize Taiwan or, more plausibly, as part of an attempt to dictate terms of reunification. American policies must also discourage Taiwan from provoking a military reaction from the mainland, whether through reckless steps towards independence, more subtle efforts to establish de facto statehood, or continued rejection of even reasonable conditions for resuming an official cross-strait dialogue.

What do these considerations mean in concrete terms? First, the United States needs to maintain the present belief among leaders in Beijing that American intervention in response to the unprovoked use of military force by China is nearly certain, and the belief among leaders in Taipei that American intervention in response to Chinese military action that Taiwan provokes cannot be presumed. The American responses to China’s missile coercion in 1995-96 and to the uproar over former Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui’s “two states” thesis in 1999 have clearly established these expectations, despite the “strategic ambiguity” of formal U.S. policy. Maintaining this posture does not require enacting legislation such as the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act: actions continue to speak louder than unnecessarily provocative words.

Second, and related, the United States must carefully manage its unusual military relationship with Taiwan, especially arms sales. In the past few years, some American analysts have used improving Chinese air, naval, and ballistic missile capabilities to argue for the sale of more advanced U.S. arms, including destroyers suitable for deploying sophisticated missile defenses. Whether such a sale is wise, and more generally whether the United States should be more agreeable to Taiwan’s requests for arms transfers, is a matter that the Clinton administration left for the Bush administration to resolve, and it may soon have to do so. If Taiwan requests, and the Pentagon recommends approval of, so-called “red-line” items whose transfer China has ominously insisted would lead to “serious consequences,” what is the advisable course for the new president?

Approval of a provocative military package for Taiwan at this time is neither necessary nor wise, for several reasons: the present military balance does not demand immediate redress; any major weapons systems would be introduced over several years; the ultimate cross-Strait military consideration for China is the prospect of confronting American military power; and, most significantly, Beijing and Taipei appear to be probing each other’s flexibility as they search for a way to reopen talks. Instead, the Bush administration should approve only sales that steer clear of “red-line” items for now but not preclude a different decision in the future. Such an approach, perhaps best labeled “attentive restraint,” provides an opportunity to test both the sincerity of Beijing’s asserted preference for a peaceful resolution and Taipei’s willingness to engage in dialogue. If President Bush succeeds in facilitating progress, he serves his country’s interests and his own (having clearly expressed his support for Taiwan). If his effort meets with disappointment, he is in a stronger position to approve the more controversial and potentially risky arms sales next spring.

Missile Defenses

In comparison with the Taiwan issue, differences with China over the U.S. intention to deploy theater missile defenses (TMD) in East Asia and limited national missile defenses (NMD) in North America have only recently gained prominence. On the one hand, because the dispute is relatively new there may be room for creative solutions before it becomes intractable. On the other hand, because the substance of the issue touches on China’s most impressive military asset and the United States’ most glaring vulnerability, missile defenses could plague Sino-American relations for a long time to come.

China’s objections stem from a respect for American technological prowess and a concern that the systems will ultimately threaten to neutralize China’s conventional ballistic missile capability within the region and its strategic nuclear deterrent against more distant enemies. Chinese defense planners worry that missile defenses, combined with overwhelming U.S. nuclear and conventional superiority, could make preemptive strikes against their country a more attractive option for Washington in a future crisis. Their other major concern focuses on the prospect that TMD could be used to protect Taiwan, or American forces that come to Taiwan’s assistance, thereby offsetting Beijing’s medium-range ballistic missile forces, which can presently strike not just Taiwan but also U.S. forces and dependents throughout the Western Pacific.

Given the state of current technology, China can be confident of its ability to overwhelm U.S. missile defenses with large numbers of missiles or a combination of multiple- warhead missiles, decoys, and penetration aids. Indeed, Chinese spokesmen clearly state that the PRC will accelerate its missile modernization program in order to counter NMD. Why then is China so concerned about what the United States insists will be a limited shield not geared to cope with great power arsenals? Aside from the possibility that even limited theater missile defenses deployed elsewhere in Asia might be shifted to Taiwan during a crisis, China worries about the prospect of continuously upgraded U.S. missile defenses. China’s leaders have explicitly pointed to the Soviet Union’s arms race with the United States as a fatal mistake that contributed to its collapse. For a country still grappling with the daunting challenges of domestic economic development, boosting investment in weapons programs to compete with a technologically and economically superior adversary is a distinctly disturbing prospect.

Despite China’s strong interest in the issue, until recently its concerns have not played an important role in the American debate about missile defense. Largely in reaction to the Patriot-Scud experience in the Persian Gulf War and subsequent fears of an emerging North Korean missile threat, the United States decided to improve its rudimentary TMD capabilities. In addition, it sought the capability to thwart attacks in case threats of retaliation cannot deter them (such as weapons launched accidentally or by wholly irrational actors). American officials have repeatedly stated that the proposed missile defenses are not being designed to degrade the nuclear deterrents of the major powers— and in any case will not have the ability to do so. Yet the most prominent proposals for the first- generation limited NMD system would theoretically be able to defeat an arsenal the size of China’s. For that reason, and because of some explicit American suggestions that the real purpose of the system is to deal with the growing “China threat,” Beijing is unpersuaded by Washington’s assurances that the system is only meant to address the danger from states like North Korea.

Nevertheless, despite their apparently incompatible perspectives, the two sides have informally begun to explore possibilities for reassuring China while permitting the United States to proceed with its plans for deploying missile defenses. The good news is that dialogue is unlikely to exacerbate China’s concerns, and Beijing may even prefer heated exchanges to having its concerns wholly ignored. The bad news it that the prospects for meaningful agreement are slim. As long as China remains outgunned by the United States, it is unlikely to accept any arrangement that indefinitely preserves its inferiority. Conceivably, Beijing might agree to verifiable limits on U.S. systems if, for example, the lack of any such constraints seems likely to leave China in an even worse strategic position. However, it is difficult to imagine that Washington would forswear improvements to missile defenses that promise greater protection of the American homeland. One should therefore anticipate that even a modestly self-interested China will strive to redress the current imbalance in capabilities that missile defenses would reinforce. Chinese claims that it was only seeking to ensure its retaliatory capability would probably sound no more assuring to Americans than American claims about the purely defensive purposes of its missile defenses sound to the Chinese.

Thus, the Bush administration should anticipate a rocky road as it moves ahead with development and deployment of antimissile systems. The United States has to decide whether their plausible security benefits outweigh their likely costs, which include increased tensions with China and a possible ripple effect in South Asia if India decides it must compete with the more rapid growth of China’s arsenal that missile defenses will encourage. Although American rhetoric about a “strategic partnership” with China back in 1997-98 may have overstated the benefits of good relations, it would be a mistake to forget that a sound bilateral relationship enables both countries to address proliferation concerns, facilitate dialogue on the Korean peninsula, and cope with the challenges of international crime and terrorism.

With regard to U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific, the costs of missile defense are, for now, much clearer than the limited benefits it can offer. Therefore, the prudent course for the immediate future is to invest in research and development rather than rush to deployment. Deployment decisions should await technological advances. Following this approach, the first deployment decisions will focus on the presently more promising theater defenses, an issue on which the Chinese have demonstrated greater (if still little) flexibility. It is even possible that carefully managing the process of deploying TMD (including the sensitive issue of assistance to or coverage of Taiwan) could help mute, though it cannot eliminate, China’s worst case fears about the intentions driving U.S. plans for national missile defenses. Rushing to deploy the partially effective missile defenses now available clearly risks provoking China, complicating relations with our allies, and perhaps destabilizing the region. Protection from missile attack is an attractive goal. But exaggerating the benefits and minimizing the costs of pursuing an attractive goal, is an exercise in wishful thinking rather than serious policy analysis.

U.S. choices alone cannot determine the character of Sino-American relations. In the end, China’s choices reflect its own perception of national interests and values; these are only partly shaped by American decisions. Despite the inevitable uncertainties, however, the U.S. must maintain a clear focus on managing the issues that threaten the most serious disruption if it is to establish the foundation for a long term relationship that is more constructive. As the U.S. crafts its China policy, Taiwan and missile defense are the issues that now pose the most vexing challenges and demand the most careful choices.

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E-Notes

U.S. Policy Toward China: Try for the Best, Prepare for the Worst

Relating to China After the Cold War

The Taiwan Question

Missile Defenses

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