China Redux

For the most part, I have stayed away from the issue of Taiwan since I started writing this blog. The main reason for this is that it is hard to write about relations between China and Taiwan without grossly offending a lot of people.

Since I don’t have strong personal beliefs on the subject, I figured it wasn’t worth it. [For the record, I support whatever the people want (a nebulous little phrase). If that means reunification, that's great. If it means another arrangement, that's fine too. At a fundamental level, I think democratic governance is a good thing. As to hammering out the details -- how to get all the diverse interests and views in China and Taiwan together on the same page -- I am happy to cede this work to the politicians in Taipei and Beijing, with help from Washington.]

My primary interest in cross-Strait relations as a policymaker is in maintaining international security and US interests in East Asia. First and foremost, this means avoiding conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

I was fortunate to hear three experts on Asian security policy discuss how Sino-American friction around cross-Strait relations could result in conflict — and how to avoid it — at an event at Washington’s Brookings Institution on April 26. Richard Bush, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at Brookings, and Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies, presented their new book, A War Like No Other (available here).

This important new book is based, somewhat contrapuntally, on the authors’ belief that in spite of the disjunctions caused by China’s rise, the US and China can work together to build a strong, mutually beneficial relationship. But there is one issue, more than any other, which threatens to derail the entire bilateral relationship: friction in the Taiwan Strait. Read the rest of this entry »