President Biden’s recent visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping may have offered a glimmer of hope that tensions may be easing between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Regrettably, the lack of any progress on the main question — Taiwan — also served to remind us that some serious challenges remain, and that rhetoric should not be confused with reality.
The last two years have shown us that the world remains a very dangerous place. After Russia’s blind aggression toward Ukraine, starting the biggest land war in Europe since World War II, and then the brutal and inhumane attacks by Iranian-backed terrorist group Hamas on Israeli civilians, people started looking uneasily toward China, wondering with good cause if the Chinese Communist Party would soon follow suit and make good on its threats against Taiwan.
That threat is real, and is of critical interest to the United States for a number of reasons.
The first is economic. America does a great deal of trade with Taiwan, much of it in the high-tech sector. Ninety percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors — which power everything from our cars and trucks to our most advanced jet fighters, down to the phone or laptop you are probably reading this on right now — are manufactured in Taiwan. Not only that, but fully 60 percent of the world’s trade passes through the Taiwan strait.
But our concern for Taiwan’s safety is not simply economic; Taiwan occupies a critical location in the Western Pacific. It’s very existence as a de facto independent state anchoring a vital position between Japan and South Korea to the north and the Philippines to the south serves as a crucial check on China’s control of important sea lanes and ability to project power in the Pacific.
And finally, we cannot ignore that as a free people who fought to win, and later to defend our own liberty, we owe a certain moral obligation to a country that is a beacon of individual rights, democracy, and free market economics living in the shadow of a communist behemoth. Taiwan’s existence as a free nation stems from its own resistance to communist tyranny more than 70 years ago.
After all of China’s aggressive posturing in the last few years towards Taiwan, it is understandable to feel a bit of a sense of relief that Chinese President Xi Jinping has appeared to calm down somewhat during the San Francisco summit. But it is not likely that this is a signal of any reversal of China’s revanchist designs or ambitions in the Western Pacific and beyond, but a reflection instead of the economic realities that China is facing. The Chinese economy is stagnant, suffering from the lingering effects of CCP’s draconian COVID-19 policies and general economic mismanagement. We welcome a thawing of tensions, but we should not be fooled into thinking that China’s strategic aspirations are any less aggressive now than they were a year ago. They are simply on hold.
We should take this time to fortify our commitment to peace, freedom and prosperity in the Western Pacific and beyond. We need to do a number of things: first we must follow through on the promises we made to supply Taiwan with the weaponry it needs to deter Chinese aggression, and to defend itself should the time come. In the meantime, we need to invest adequately in our own military, which has been so depleted over the past several years, to ensure that we are capable of meeting any threat in that region ourselves.
Second, we need to take the opportunity to expand our trade relationship with Taiwan. This means pressing ahead with the second round of negotiations on bilateral trade talks, known as the Taiwan-U.S Initiative on 21st Century Trade, and expanding those into a full free trade agreement with Taiwan. We also ought to support Taiwan’s bid for inclusion in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). We would also urge the Biden administration to reverse the lamentable delay in including Taiwan in the U.S.-led Indo-Pacific Economic Framework; and while he is at it, to bolster that framework into something that resembles a meaningful regional trade policy.
And finally, we need to support Taiwan’s bid more vigorously for inclusion in the community of nations, inclusion that has been consistently and shamefully blocked by China.
Taiwan does not occupy a great deal of space on the world map. But its importance greatly transcends its relative size. The Western democracies are facing renewed threats by authoritarian regimes that wish to see a shift in world order away from political freedom, individual rights, free markets and rule of law. Taiwan is a key bulwark in preserving those values, and deserves our greater engagement. Expanding trade and building on our military and political commitments to Taiwan is the right thing to do, for the Taiwanese, for our own nation, and for the world.
Doug Lamborn represents the 5th District of Colorado and is chairman of the Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee. Bruce Westerman represents the 4th District of Arkansas.