Publish Date:10/29/1999
Story Type:Analysis;
Byline:FCJ Editors
The U.S.-based Foreign Policy Research Institute held a daylong conference June 17, 1999, to discuss the meaning and significance of the Taiwan Relations Act at the dawn of its third decade as the U.S. law governing relations between Washington and Taipei. Panelists included Thomas Christensen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Jacques deLisle, University of Pennsylvania Law School; June Teufel Dreyer, University of Miami at Coral Gables; Robert Ross, Boston College; Harvey Sicherman, FPRI president; Arthur Waldron, University of Pennsylvania; and Suisheng Zhao, Colby College. The following report was prepared by Avery Goldstein, University of Pennsylvania.
Participants agreed that the original reasons for drafting and passing the TRA were both legal and political in nature. The legal rationale was most obvious. The United States needed a basis for arrangements to govern economic, diplomatic and military relations with Taiwan following the decision to recognize the People's Republic of China without maintaining formal diplomatic ties to the Republic of China.
President Jimmy Carter's administration had drafted a legal document to cover many matters, but the TRA prepared in the U.S. Congress offered a more comprehensive treatment of the relevant legal issues. Although the TRA has not entirely prevented complications over the past 20 years, conference participants viewed the legal arrangements it established as relatively noncontroversial and generally effective.
The political purposes and implications of the TRA have been more controversial. A central political motivation for the TRA was the fact that in 1979 Congress was unwilling to cede mainland-Taiwan policy to the White House for two broad reasons. One was the determination of Congress to reassert its role in the American foreign policy process.
For some, this determination was rooted in unhappiness about executive branch dominance of policy during much of the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. For others, the determination was rooted in resentment of the frequently secret diplomacy that had characterized the Nixon/Kissinger years.
With this background, Congress reacted harshly to the surprise announcement in December 1979 by the Carter White House that secret negotiations had resulted in an agreement to recognize the PRC, a decision about whose timing Congress had little input, and a policy shift on which congressional opinion was divided.
Congressional insistence on having its say about U.S. policy toward East Asia and strong support among many legislators to ensure that the recognition decision would not sever long-standing American ties to Taiwan resulted in the drafting of the TRA.
The TRA addressed not only legal, technical and logistical issues, but also expressed the sense of the Congress that the United States retained an interest in the security of the people on Taiwan, justified continued arms sales to Taipei, and required consultations between the president and Congress to craft an appropriate response in the event Taiwan's security were jeopardized.
Yet the TRA language governing arms sales and any U.S. response to threats against Taiwan was vague, requiring only timely consultations between the executive and legislative branches. To the subsequent chagrin of some in Congress, the TRA did not fundamentally alter the reality that such decisions would in practice be dominated by the president and his advisers.
Some participants expressed the view that such vagueness reflected a typical congressional preference to have its cake and eat it too-- in this case, avoiding responsibility for scuttling relations with either the mainland or Taiwan, but insisting that the executive branch figure out how to square the apparent circle of pursuing the U.S. interest in maintaining good relations with both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
The result in the two decades since April 1979, however, has been that U.S. policy toward the Chinese mainland and decisions about the closeness of U.S.-Taiwan relations have been governed more by unilateral presidential decisions--joint communiques, public proclamations of intent, and private assurances to Beijing and Taipei--than by the language contained in the TRA.
The ineffectiveness of the TRA in practice as a tight constraint on presidential prerogative and the uncertain constitutionality of congressional attempts to bind the president in exercising his role as commander in chief notwithstanding, most participants suggested that the TRA has played an important role by establishing a political framework that affects decision-making in Washington, Taipei and Beijing. Despite its lack of standing in international law, this domestic U.S. law provides the clearest formal statement of American interest in the well-being of the people on Taiwan.
Bipartisan base For U.S. presidents, this creates the political reality of formal recognition of the PRC, but with the expectation that the United States will not simply ignore actions Beijing might take which jeopardize Taiwan's security. This reality becomes part of deliberations about a wide range of U.S. policy decisions in the region, including arms sales and the process of cross-strait dialogue.
For leaders on Taiwan, the TRA confirms the U.S. interest in the island's security and the expectation that a substantial segment of the political leadership in Washington, particularly in the U.S. Congress, will remain sensitive to this issue despite the termination of formal diplomatic ties with the ROC and the security treaty which had been in place since 1955.
Indeed, Taiwan's view, in light of the policy crafted during the Nixon/Kissinger years and the Carter administration's recognition decision, was that U.S. backing increasingly depended on the island's friends on Capitol Hill rather than on the White House.
For Beijing, the TRA signaled that the United States had not irreversibly agreed to refrain from intervening in a resolution of cross-strait relations. Thus Beijing's options would be constrained by the way Washington decided to employ its overwhelming capabilities in the region.
One of the enduring features of the U.S. experience with the TRA, participants suggested, has been the bipartisanship that characterizes its congressional base of support. Because the TRA could at once be viewed as a method to facilitate the new relationship with the PRC, an expression of U.S. support for the human rights of the people on Taiwan, a restatement of support for a Cold War ally, and a reassertion of Congress' role in the foreign policy process, the legislation gathered and retained the support of lawmakers across the American political spectrum.
Such bipartisanship may well have grown broader still over the past 20 years, even as its basis has shifted with the end of the strategic calculus that informed U.S. policy during the Cold War and with the emergence of a more critical view of domestic politics on the mainland following the tragic events of June 1989.
Although the TRA provided a consistent framework that was sufficiently ambiguous to permit presidents to adjust the U.S. policy toward the PRC with changing circumstances, participants emphasized that dramatic international political changes and domestic political changes in Taiwan have gradually altered the significance of the law.
In the immediate aftermath of recognition, the strategic alignment of Beijing and Washington against the Soviet threat contributed to the credibility of U.S. assurances that the TRA was not designed to thwart mainland Chinese aspirations. The Cold War alignment also induced a willingness on the part of Beijing to at least temporarily set aside disagreements about the continuing U.S. support for Taiwan, especially in regard to arms sales.
By the 1990s, the unifying common adversary had disappeared. U.S. perceptions of the PRC had taken a turn for the worse after Beijing's bloody suppression of demonstrations in 1989. The mainland's economic modernization and assertiveness in regional disputes were increasing American worries about its capabilities and intentions. And Taiwan was well on the way to building a prosperous democratic society.
The result was a strengthening of the U.S. commitment to live up to the spirit of the TRA. By chance or by design, the TRA in the mid-1990s had become a key element of a post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy that places heavy emphasis on fostering the spread of democracy and hedging against potential threats to the status quo in Asia.
From Beijing's perspective, however, the TRA looked increasingly like part of a broader U.S. effort to foster close relations with others in East Asia in order to block the PRC's emergence as a great power. As such, to Beijing the TRA looked less like an annoying temporary arrangement on a problem for which a resolution had been postponed and more like an arrangement of frustratingly indefinite duration.
Some participants suggested that the occasionally intense disagreements between Beijing and Washington about Taiwan may reflect underlying problems stemming from a failure of many American political leaders to realize the depth of the PRC's nationalist sentiment on the issue of Taiwan.
They pointed out that Beijing sees the Taiwan question as a non-negotiable sovereignty issue that is especially sensitive because of China's historical experience with foreign infringements on its political and territorial integrity beginning in the early 19th century.
To the extent leaders in Washington fail to grasp how large the issue looms in Beijing's thinking, American policy-makers may believe that finessing the Taiwan issue with vague formulations about Taiwan's status reflect Beijing's pragmatic willingness to "agree to disagree." Compatible interests? Yet, the PRC's setting aside the issue may instead reflect only an inability to reach agreement at the moment, and a willingness to postpone the matter while higher priority issues are addressed, but with the understanding that the matter remains an important item which must be dealt with when the time is ripe.
Participants noted that for two decades the ambiguity of the TRA has served the U.S. interest in neither provoking the mainland nor abandoning Taiwan. The status quo that it has reinforced encouraged both Beijing and Taipei to search for a peaceful resolution of their differences, and provided a context that both permitted and encouraged Taiwan's leaders to promote democratization of their political system in ways that have solidified U.S. interests in the island's continued security.
Less clear, some noted, is the extent to which these U.S. interests will remain compatible. As Taipei's policy is increasingly shaped by public opinion on the island and the dynamics of competitive party politics, cross-strait politics have grown more complex.
When the TRA was drafted, it was conceivable that cross-strait relations could be managed by a small group of the political elite in Taipei and Beijing who shared a unifying vision reflecting Chinese nationalist aspirations dating to the early 20th century. Now that Taiwan has become democratic, any agreement must be politically sustainable among a constituency without recent ties to the mainland that expects its preference for continued autonomy to be respected.
It was pointed out that the U.S. commitment to the security of the people on Taiwan, reflected in the general language of the TRA, has multiple bases. These include ethical obligations rooted in the role the United States played in facilitating the island's post-World War II autonomy.
The resulting economic and then political modernization of Taiwan means that even if strategic obligations or political litmus tests become less relevant, it will remain difficult for Washington to write off the U.S. commitment to the people of Taiwan most visibly embodied in the TRA.
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