China-Taiwan-US: escaping a trap between the devil and the deep blue sea

A lot of ink has been spilled in guessing the US president-elect, yet despite the abundance of clues, there are few concrete facts until now. The second Trump presidency is not an unknown quantity, albeit it may be more organised and structured than before, and it will retain its traditional unpredictability.

That said, as we have known since at least 2009, there is a growing bipartisan perception that China has become increasingly assertive in its political statements, diplomatic actions and military postures. This has gradually created the basis for the “Thucydides’ trap” paradigm vis-à-vis the United States, illustrated by Graham Allison in his 2017 essay in the Foreign Policy magazine. During the ensuing seven years, a stream of facts, events and information has continued to enrich this widespread perception, which has a connection to reality but not necessarily to its conclusions.

It is also quite visible that many opposing commentators and opinion-shapers are competing to depict worrying signs as even more dramatic and in the context of ever more negative circumstances: If we were to believe these soothsayers, either a world war would be looming under an imminent Chinese attack – most likely on the disputed island of Taiwan, causing a rapid escalation – or the evil plutocratic West would be conspiring to sap and aggress the glorious Communist republic. We have seen, already during the Cold War with a much more powerful, menacing and monolithic Soviet Union, how these multiple scares were indeed often unfounded and sometimes outright manipulated.

This does not mean that we should not be vigilant of our freedoms as we did from 1948 to 1989, a period in which the regions outside of nuclear deterrence paid dearly for their insecurities (South East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America to name a few). War can break out via a web of misunderstandings, fears, miscalculations, faulty intelligence, bad politics and irrational behaviors (the guns of August 1914 teach precisely this lesson). What started as a spectacular (and clumsy) terrorist attack in Bosnia-Herzegovina and a minor Balkan crisis, developed some thirty days after into a world war that would shatter that global order.

Those who follow world affairs could see the possible risk of another World War originating in the Pacific brewing since 2004, when the then CCP Secretary General Hu Jintao reiterated that China would continue its “independent foreign policy of peaceful development”. Beijing’s words and actions were consistent, China was expanding its multiple peaceful commercial and business connections across Africa and Latin America, and yet then US President George W. Bush declared China as a strategic rival, which indeed it was at the economic level. Unfortunately, 20 years later, this possibility of a conflict had gradually evolved into a probability sketched as a trap ready to spring. One should nevertheless remember that the Peloponnesian War was coldly started by the smart, elegant, cultivated and democratic Pericles and not by the militaristic, authoritarian Spartan king Archidamus II.

In all this, Taiwan risks ending up like Bosnia-Herzegovina or Poland: a battlefield between warring armies and this, almost notwithstanding its internal political debate; a most unfortunate outcome for the country and the whole region.

Read also: A dangerous deadlock over Taiwan

That said, nothing is inevitable and the three political establishments in Beijing, Taipei and Washington, DC are adequately staffed to avoid a disaster. Moreover the “trap” discourse tends to obscure the fact that in international politics there are always shared interests among major powers.

China and the USA are not an exception and, in fact, they share four essential interests: restoring their own social balances; escaping together from escalatory dynamics through dialogue and deterrence; stimulating global sustainable growth; and tackling as many as six vital global common concerns (nuclear weapons, military AI, space/cyberspace, organized crime, climate change, pandemics).

Ukraine, no matter how it might be settled with the new administration, is a powerful reminder of the dangerous warpath to destruction, mortal risk and huge loss. The result is and will continue to be two wrecked societies with rampant organized crime; serious cracks in the deterrence doctrines, policies and narratives; a non-existent growth in a considerable part of the world’s North; a further destabilized cyberspace; and a considerable delay in achieving climate goals, amidst several ecological disasters in Western Eurasia, putting into serious danger the survival of hundreds of millions of humans.

One should notice that these very concrete interests go well beyond issues like the nine-dash line, the containment in the first chain of islands, the dominance in the Pacific, the existing rule-based order, the multipolar world or national rejuvenation through national reunification.

These facts demand a different approach, capable of opening spaces and opportunities for political dialogue, escaping the mechanism of a trap. Taipei’s ambiguity about its final status is not a rebellious challenge to the PRC’s order (despite Xi Jinping’s continuing reference the island as a “renegade province”), but a precious window of opportunity for Beijing to pragmatically avoid being self-coerced into a disastrous patriotic war and an opportunity to have a unique relay for its economic and political influence, as was Hong Kong before an impatient handling of its autonomy.

Taipei has in China not only one of its biggest commercial partners (30% in total for exports), but also a very important counterpart in managing a delicate bilateral relationship. Taiwan too has a strong interest in escaping the aforementioned trap and it has three additional tools at its disposal (beyond the US security guarantee): the deterrence/dialogue couple (a common-sense extension of the successful NATO Harmel doctrine of 1967), more intense political relations with the European Union and cooperative security. The last three instruments have the function of diluting the focus on purely strategic considerations, allowing Taipei to diversify its portfolio of friends (deflecting malign accusation) and extend a web of cooperation across the Pacific, mitigating the problems of formal recognition.

Read also: The US-China-Taiwan: a sticky economic triangle

Between the devil and the deep blue sea, war and harsh economic depression, all parties need to gain time and employ strategic patience. Italy waged four wars of independence to reunify its national territory during a century: the last was fatal (700.000 casualties in 1915-1918), empty for its victory, nefarious for its parliamentary monarchy and leading to the disaster of the Second World War, all because an irresponsible king pressed for war instead of shrewdly and pragmatically negotiating for those territories.

Traps do not function by themselves and can be wisely avoided: the international community, China, Taiwan and the USA, are de facto, like it or not, partners in this life-saving game.