The background to Ukraine and Taiwan

This passage is from an article by Anatole Lieven in Responsible Statecraft. 




The promise of NATO membership to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 was another, far more disastrous case where West European opposition bowed (albeit in qualified fashion) to U.S. dictation. It brought NATO into direct confrontation with Russia’s determination to maintain a sphere of influence and security zone in its immediate neighborhood, in areas where the Soviet collapse (as with the end of most empires) had left behind actual or potential ethnic and territorial conflicts.

And yet at the same time, [neither] NATO nor its individual members, had a plan or actual desire to fight Russia. Repeated warnings that NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia would mean war were literally laughed away by Western diplomats. As a former officer attached to the NATO Secretariat told me, the Secretariat did not even discuss contingency plans for a war between Georgia and Russia after — on U.S. orders — it threw its weight behind NATO membership for that country.

As he explained, NATO expansion had been sold to Western parliaments and publics on the premise that it would involve no costs and no risks. Even to discuss the possibility of war was therefore taboo. As a result, NATO’s European members acquiesced in a program of expansion that they had been warned repeatedly would lead to war, while making no preparation for war, and continuing to rely for energy on imports of cheap Russian gas.

NATO III now finds itself in something that it, and its American hegemon, were careful to avoid during the first Cold War: a proxy conflict with Russia not in Asia or Africa, but in Europe itself, and in circumstances that in the long run strongly favor Russia.

The resulting (largely imaginary) perception of a Russian threat to western and central Europe has in turn led to even deeper European dependence on the U.S., leading to growing alignment against China, and acquiescence in Israel’s U.S.-enabled crimes in Gaza.

The threat of climate change, which is already having a savage effect on NATO’s southern European members and has been described by the alliance as “existential,” has virtually disappeared from NATO’s real agenda. And while during the first Cold War, the vast superiority of the West’s social, political, and economic systems became completely obvious, today these are all deeply troubled by internal factors exacerbated by migration and neo-liberal economic policies.

Assuming that we have any descendants, they are likely to view us as we do the European elites before 1914: trapped by their inherited culture and institutions, they pursued policies that seemed rational to them, but in retrospect look completely insane.

This is a useful history lesson from a rather dry article by Paul Heer in National History.

Washington was prepared to surrender Chiang and Taiwan to their fate but reversed course after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 when President Harry Truman sent the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to deter further Communist aggression. Although Mao had told an American journalist in 1936 that he was prepared to support Taiwan’s independence, he too reversed course in 1950 because—as Khan observes—“it was inevitable that the Communists would turn their attention” to Taiwan after Truman’s decision, which constituted intervention in the Chinese Civil War “whether Truman thought so or not.” Like Emperor Kangxi, the idea of a “hostile power offshore”—especially a rival Chinese regime under foreign protection—was not one Mao would countenance.

Almost thirty years later, the United States adjusted its position by normalizing diplomatic relations with the PRC, revoking its formal ties and defense pact with the ROC, and committing itself to a “One China” policy. However, it retained a close “unofficial” relationship with Taiwan as outlined by the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) of 1979. In addition, in 1982, Washington delivered “Six Assurances” to Taipei, which reaffirmed the parameters of U.S. support for Taiwan.