An intelligence leak reveals inconvenient truths as the US seeks to defend freedom from authoritarianism—and democracy.
(Originally published April 10 in “What in the World“) Ukraine desperately needs new air-defense munitions to replace rapidly depleting Soviet-era ones and keep Russia’s air force from turning the tide of the war, according to Pentagon documents leaked online.
This assessment, which comes as Russian forces dig in against an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive, was only one of many found published on Twitter and other social media networks in the past week. They include revelations that the U.S. has been spying on allies, including South Korea (no balloons have yet been found, however).
The assessment, from late-February, revealed that Ukraine’s supply of Soviet-era S-300 and Buk air defense systems will run out as early as this month. Despite the introduction of Patriot missiles and Nasams from the U.S., these older systems still account for nearly 90% of Ukraine’s air defenses. Weakened by constant artillery and drone attacks, however, their depletion could enable Russian fighters and bombers to re-enter the war and gain air superiority.
The assessment thus appears to dispel the mystery of Russia’s missing air force. After early forays, the Russian air force has been conspicuous by its absence in Ukraine, giving rise to speculation that it might lack supplies, or even be resisting Russian President Vladimir Putin. The truth, alas, is much more prosaic: Moscow simply didn’t want to risk having its expensive aircraft shot down over Ukraine.
Speaking of moving expensive equipment, the U.S. made the unusual announcement that it has sent a submarine, the USS Florida, from the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal to the Gulf to better deter Iran. The Florida can carry more than 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles. The statement is unusual because submarines are supposed to be sneaky, so normally governments go to lengths not to reveal their whereabouts.
To keep the Mediterranean safe, meanwhile, Washington is extending a cruise there by the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier. The Pentagon cited growing tensions between Iran and Israel, but Iran has been making mischief recently on several fronts, pledging to continue enriching uranium for nuclear weapons, supplying drones to Russia for use in Ukraine and sponsoring militias in Syria that have been attacking U.S. troops there.
As predicted in this space, the U.S. media has begun criticizing French President Emmanuel Macron’s efforts to broker a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine by visiting China and asking President Xi Jinping to talk sense into Russian President Vladimir Putin. Any efforts to engage China and de-escalate tensions between Beijing and Washington are now at risk of being seen as comforting the enemy.
Macron didn’t help himself by traveling to Beijing at the head of a 50-member business delegation. The New York Times’ analysis of Macron’s visit at the head of portrays it as a craven attempt to sidestep U.S. containment to secure economic advantages for Europe. Macron also failed, it notes, to take the opportunity to scold Xi over Taiwan, even though doing so would obviously have undermined Macron’s efforts to woo China away from what the U.S. has portrayed as a growing Axis with Moscow. Infuriatingly, Macron told reporters while in China that Europe shouldn’t side with either the U.S. “rhythm” or China’s “overreaction” on Taiwan, but rather pursue its own course.
Americans appear to be decidedly less adroit at conveying nuanced foreign policy positions. Accidentally on purpose, a U.S. legislator on Sunday let slip Washington’s real goal in defending democratic Taiwan. And it isn’t to defend democracy there.
On Sunday, Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, who chairs the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, fretted that delays to U.S. weapons deliveries to defend Taiwan from possible Chinese invasion faced a new and pernicious threat— from elections.
Fresh a whirlwind tour of Taiwan, Japan and South Korea that followed a meeting in California between Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen and U.S. Congressman and Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy, McCaul noted that Taiwan’s former President Ma Ying-jeou had visited China, which he implied was a form of political interference by Beijing.
“I think the next elections in next January are going to be extremely important,” McCaul said, “because I do believe with the former President Ma in China right now, China’s going to try to influence this next election and take over the island without a shot fired.”
If Beijing did irony, it would be rolling its metaphorical eyes like a teenager. Influencing domestic politics is exactly what it has been accusing Washington of doing by courting Taiwan’s political leaders. Beijing’s typical response isn’t droll sarcasm, unfortunately, but rather to launch military maneuvers around Taiwan meant to demonstrate the consequence for any move to make Taiwan overtly independent.
Beijing’s latest military response has been decidedly tepid, as others observe that it now appears more interested in cooling global tensions and avoiding World War III. China’s military has staged two days of exercises around Taiwan, including simulating precision strikes on key targets. It wasn’t immediately clear whether China’s previous exercises, which included a naval blockade, mock aerial attacks and amphibious landings, had ever before envisioned “precision strikes.”
Ma, who was president from 2008 until 2016 when Tsai was elected, last week became the first former Taiwan president to visit the mainland. Ma is also former head of the Kuomintang, the nationalist party that fled China and occupied Taiwan in 1949 when Mao Zedong’s Communist Party took over in Beijing and established the People’s Republic of China. The Kuomintang, or KMT, established Taiwan’s own version of the “one China” policy still held by both Beijing (which since 1949 has regarded Taiwan as a renegade province) and (since recognizing Beijing in 1979) Washington, in that it declared itself the sole, rightful ruler of all China.
The KMT maintained authoritarian rule over Taiwan until 1987 when it lifted martial law and ushered in democratic reforms that allowed the formation of Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party and, in 2000, the election of the DPP’s candidate Chen Shui-bian. Ma’s presidency was marked by rapid expansion of trade and investment between Taiwan and China. Today, the KMT is still considered the “pro-China” and “pro-business” alternative to the DPP.
“President Tsai’s party does not want to be a part of China,” McCaul revealed to his interviewer. Actually, neither party advocates independence. The DPP adheres to the “one China” principle but has become more stridently anti-China amid growing efforts by Beijing to influence Taiwan’s elections and the crackdown on political dissent in Hong Kong. The DPP’s latest slogan is “Resist China, Protect Taiwan.” Beijing considers Tsai a separatist. The KMT, by contrast, tends to favor friendlier relations with the mainland and recently has accused the DPP of unnecessarily escalating tensions. “Our administration continues to lead Taiwan to danger. The future is a choice between peace and war,” Ma said upon his return.
But it isn’t the only issue Taiwan’s voters face. Last year, KMT candidates swept local elections, largely over political dissatisfaction with the DPP’s pandemic response, not because of unhappiness with cross-Straits policies. Like Tsai’s visit to the U.S., Ma’s visit was largely personal yet clearly political. Ma no longer heads the KMT and isn’t the party’s likely candidate in the 2024 elections. His China visit may, therefore, have been a political stunt aimed at boosting his own potential candidacy and not a backdoor bull session between the KMT and China’s Communist Party.
If Ma did run and win reelection to a third term as president next year, and if he did then manage to ease tensions with Beijing, it might prove awkward for Washington’s efforts to use Taiwan as a rallying cry for its military buildup in the Pacific. But it would be a democratic outcome. Just not the democratic outcome Washington may be willing to accept.
To recap from the newsletter’s discussion from late-February, the U.S. quietly slipped about 30 special forces from the U.S. Marines into Taiwan in 2020 to train local troops. Washington now has plans to more than quadruple its forces in Taiwan, sending as many as 200 in the next few months to expand its training program and help Taiwan develop what has become known as a “porcupine” defense against attempted invasion by forces from mainland China.
The U.S. hadn’t had any troops in Taiwan since 1979, when, as part of the normalization of relations with Beijing, the Administration of then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter agreed to withdraw U.S. forces and recognize Taiwan as a self-ruled part of China. This “One China” policy ended decades since the end of Japanese rule in 1951 when the U.S. hadn’t recognized Taiwan as part of China. That rankled governments in both Beijing and Taipei.
The U.S. has since maintained commercial relations with Taiwan (even when it was under authoritarian rule by the KMT) and supplied its government with arms to defend itself, while promising under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act to maintain sufficient force to repel any attempted invasion—long before democratic elections in 1996. But the U.S. has all the while recognized the government of Beijing as the legitimate government of China, which includes Taiwan. Reunification may be inevitable, the U.S. acknowledges, but it must be allowed to happen on Taiwan’s own terms in the fullness of time.
That gave rise to a policy known as “strategic ambiguity” under which the U.S. kept mum on whether it would come to Taiwan’s defense against any attempt by Beijing to reunify it by force. President Joe Biden made headlines last May when he explicitly pledged to defend Taiwan against invasion from the mainland. Biden’s pledge was made in response to increasingly aggressive actions by China’s military around Taiwan, suggesting to Washington that Beijing was either planning an invasion or trying to bully Taiwan into submitting to a reunification plan.
But it turns out that the U.S. had already inserted forces to aid Taiwan’s resistance before Biden’s impromptu policy switch. In February 2018, the Administration of then-President Donald Trump drafted a classified policy document called the “U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific.” It predicted that China “will take increasingly assertive steps to compel reunification with Taiwan” and resolved to “enable Taiwan to develop an effective asymmetric defense strategy.” Trump declassified this document on Jan. 5, 2021, the day before his Jan. 6 attempted coup to remain in power.
China was already stepping up military exercises around Taiwan in mid-2020 as the pandemic raged, with increasing intrusions by Chinese military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone that prompted protests by Taipei that Beijing was preparing an invasion. Reports at the time suggested that China’s increased activity was a way of diverting public attention from the pandemic. But its more assertive actions may also have been in response to Tsai’s re-election in January that year. Tsai campaigned on a platform of resisting growing pressure from Beijing to accept reunification under a Hong Kong-style “one country, two systems” model amid the 2019 crackdown on democratic protests in Hong Kong. Tsai took office promising to modernize Taiwan’s military.
It was apparently around this time that the Trump Administration send U.S. forces into Taiwan, which Washington still officially regards as a self-ruled Chinese province and not, like Ukraine, a sovereign nation. These U.S. forces would already have been in Taiwan last August, therefore, when U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi inflamed tensions by traveling to Taipei to pledge support for Tsai. Pelosi’s visit stirred up a hornet’s nest of Chinese saber-rattling that included a record number of intrusions into Taiwan’s airspace and the launch of missiles towards Japan and South Korea.
As unjustified and disastrous as a mainland invasion of Taiwan would be, stationing U.S. troops on what Washington agrees is domestic Chinese soil, even if self-ruled soil, is unlikely to convince Beijing that Washington isn’t agitating for Taiwan’s independence. Beijing denies it plans to invade and its own documents suggest it recognizes an invasion would be unsuccessful. A U.S. troop presence in Taiwan will certainly serve as further disincentive. But it also seems likely to heighten the kind of regional tensions that could tip China and the U.S. into an accidental military confrontation. It also risks pushing Beijing into a corner where it concludes it cannot afford to let the U.S. bolster its position further.