Trump’s policies on Ukraine, Iran set dangerous precedents for Taiwan
President Trump frequently threatens “severe consequences” if adversaries and competitors do not yield to his negotiating demands. But some of his international opponents seem to have concluded that he is mostly posturing and have called his bluff — without paying a price.
The prime example is the series of deadlines Trump has imposed on Ukraine and Russia for ending their conflict. President Volodymyr Zelensky immediately accepted Trump’s mandates despite initially disagreeing over the joint recovery of Ukraine’s mineral resources. Vladimir Putin, conversely, has repeatedly evaded Trump’s demands, or has agreed “in principle” but has not taken meaningful action.
Trump has responded to Putin’s obstructionism by discarding his own deadlines, such as the need for an immediate cease-fire to enable a lasting peace agreement. Russia continues killing civilians and destroying their cities as it inches forward with its invasion of Ukraine. Donald Trump inexplicably disregards his massive political, economic and military leverage over Russia and the Axis of Evil countries supporting its aggression and war crimes, most notably China.
China has similarly benefited by defying outright or finessing Trump’s mandates on COVID, Huawei, TikTok and trade while suffering minimal adverse consequences.
Trump successfully employed a radically different approach in seeking a halt to Iran’s nuclear program. After giving Tehran a two-week extension to his 60-day ultimatum on a denuclearization agreement, and feigning preparations for a delayed attack, on June 21 he suddenly ordered U.S. B-1 bombers armed with bunker-busting bombs to strike Iran’s nuclear weapons sites.
The attack set back by several years Iran’s nuclear program, which had been on the verge of imminent breakout. The stealth and surprise of the operation was so effective that it weakened Tehran rulers and made regime change a reasonable possibility for the first time since widespread public unrest erupted in 2009.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration said the departure of Ayatollah Khamenei is not an objective of U.S. policy, just as former President Barack Obama had taken it off the table when the Iranian masses were beseeching the U.S. for moral and political, not military, support — a decision Obama says he now regrets.
A keen observer of these events has been the Chinese Communist Party, which harbors the same designs on Taiwan —total conquest and absorption — that Putin pursues for Ukraine. Historically, the United States has a similar moral and geostrategic commitment to the political sovereignty of the two entities, just short of an actual formal alliance.
In 1994, the U.S. persuaded Ukraine to surrender its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in exchange for a security guarantee from America, the United Kingdom and Russia. In 2008, President George W. Bush urged NATO to declare Georgia and Ukraine as eventual members. Russia invaded Georgia that year and Ukraine in 2014, violating the just-executed Minsk ceasefire agreement. The U.S. and the West took no action in either case to honor their security commitments.
In the case of Taiwan, after President Carter in 1979 switched formal diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China on Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China, the U.S. Congress enacted the Taiwan Relations Act. It declared that “any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, [is] a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” The Taiwan Relations Act even suggested the conditionality of U.S. recognition of Communist China — “the United States decision to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means.”
The conquest of either Ukraine by Russia or Taiwan by China would have even greater geostrategic consequences than the abandonment of Afghanistan by the combined actions of Presidents Trump and Biden and their shared distaste for America’s “forever wars.”
For all the TRA’s strong language, no American president since 1979 has been willing to declare as official policy that the U.S. would defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack, blockade or embargo. At most, off-the-cuff comments by Bush and Biden suggested a U.S. military response, but all were walked back by their respective staffs and State Departments in adherence to the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity. Meanwhile, Beijing, with utmost strategic clarity, keeps affirming and expanding its preparations for military action against Taiwan.
As a possible strategic trade-off for Trump’s distancing himself from Taiwan, he said last week that President Xi Jinping assured him China would not strike Taiwan during Trump’s term in office. Xi had originally told the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to “reunify” Taiwan no later than 2027, though U.S. Indo-Pacific Commanders have repeatedly predicted a shorter time frame.
Taking Xi’s courtesy extension to Trump at face value means the world can realistically expect a conflict across the Taiwan Strait on Jan. 20, 2029, unless Trump for some reason leaves office earlier than the expiration of his term. (Then again, avoiding a war with China might be a plausible pretext for unconstitutionally keeping Trump in power beyond this term.)
Alternatively, having lulled Trump into accepting his peaceful intentions toward Taiwan for the next three and a half years, Xi could suddenly accelerate his schedule for military action, just as Trump did with Iran. In 2015, Xi promised Obama he would not militarize his artificial islands in the South China Sea, a promise he promptly broke.
Surprise and deception have been a specialty of Chinese strategy as far back as Sun Tzu, and Russian, Chinese and North Korean communists and post-communists alike have made lying and cheating an integral part of their ideology and practice.
None other than China’s “Great Reformer” Deng Xiaoping called on his strategists to “Hide your capabilities, bide your time.” Xi no longer hides China’s capabilities to attack Taiwan, he flaunts them — we shall see how much longer he is willing to bide his time.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies, a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute and member of the advisory board of The Vandenberg Coalition.