Why Trump should tone down his war of words with Taiwan

Donald Trump has recently told Bloomberg News that Taiwan should “pay us for defense” if it expects military protection in the event of any Chinese attack against what Beijing sees as a renegade province.  

Trump also stated that the “immensely wealthy” Taiwan has “done nothing” for the United States — ignoring Taiwan’s crucial role as a manufacturer of high-end semiconductor chips and implying that the United States has no strategic reason to care about the fate of the island polity of 23 million souls.

These comments may sound like the usual Trump bluster. In the course of American politics, since they were uttered a few weeks ago, they may also have already been largely forgotten.  

But they will not be soon forgotten in Asia.

Former President Trump regularly berates European NATO nations for not paying their fair share for their defense and also has similarly criticized South Korea (in that latter case, quite unfairly). But the comments about Taiwan are much worse.  

Deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan is almost certainly harder than deterring a Russian attack on NATO territory or a North Korean attack on South Korea. Within NATO, the front-line states closest to Russia are almost all spending what they have promised (at least 2 percent of gross domestic product) on their militaries, so the countries most exposed to hypothetical Russian attacks are not guilty of free-riding.  

Moreover, Russia’s military is currently bogged down in Ukraine. In the case of South Korea, America’s nearly 30,000 forward-stationed GIs on the Korean peninsula make it implausible that North Korea could doubt Washington’s willingness to help its ally fend off any attack.

But with Taiwan, the United States has for a long time sought to pull off a delicate balancing act — called “strategic ambiguity” by some, and “dual deterrence” by others. Either way, it’s difficult and fragile.  

The United States does not recognize Taiwan as an independent nation and no longer has a treaty commitment to defend it. Yet it still seeks to dissuade China from any attack aimed at reunifying Taiwan with the mainland with a four-decades-old policy that says we might come to Taiwan’s defense if we determine, in any war, that China carried out an unprovoked attack. 

President Biden has, on four separate occasions, given impromptu comments to the effect that as president he would be inclined (presumably after asking Congress for authorization) to defend the island — but official policy remains deliberately unclear.  

The reason is that we do not want Taiwan to feel it can declare independence and force the issue. We are trying to deter both Beijing and Taipei with the same policy.

In this context, an American president making light of a quasi-commitment by the United States to defend Taiwan could convince leaders in Beijing what they already suspect — that China’s interest in Taiwan is much greater than ours, and that in the end, we might not prove resolute in a crisis.

History tells us this is a very dangerous way to operate on the global stage. Wars often happen when leaders send mixed signals about their commitments, only to realize after an attack that they feel strongly enough about a given interest or ally that they will, in fact, come to its defense.  

The result is often an otherwise avoidable war. Given Trump’s frustrations and anger with China — sentiments shared by many other Republicans and Democrats in the United States today — it is doubtful that he would ignore a Chinese attack on Taiwan, whatever he had said beforehand.

Take four potentially analogous examples from the last century or so.  

In 1914, the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, thought that in the end, Britain might not come to France’s aid if Germany attacked its neighbor to the west (and Belgium along the way). Britain had been ambiguous about its intentions, and an already war-prone Kaiser thought he saw a window of opportunity. He was, of course, ultimately wrong about the Brits, and four years of carnage resulted.

In the early phases of World War II, Adolf Hitler believed that Britain and France would let him get away with mischief in places like Austria and Czechoslovakia, and in rearming his own country in violation of the terms of the Versailles Treaty that had ended World War I. The result was the famous Munich appeasement of the fall of 1938.  

But Hitler then overinterpreted his opportunity and expanded his ambitions, ultimately bringing Britain and France into the war (though in this case, of course, Germany was initially successful in its fight against France).

Just before the Korean War of 1950-1953, the United States had done two fateful things that North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, and his mentors in Moscow and Beijing, misread as indicating American irresoluteness.  

First, we pulled all our occupation troops out of South Korea, leaving it militarily exposed. Then, in early 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a major speech in which he declared Korea outside America’s core perimeter of security interests.  

He meant it at the time, and most American leaders agreed with him — until the actual North Korean attack in June of 1950 made virtually all of them, most importantly President Harry Truman, change their minds. War resulted.

And to take a final example, when U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie told Saddam Hussein that the United States had no official position on border disputes between Arab countries, Saddam took that as a green light to aggression. Of course, he did far more than redraw a border; he grabbed all of Kuwait in August of 1990.  

Then, after a few days of deliberation, George H.W. Bush decided that that aggression could not be allowed to stand. The seeds were planted for 30+ years of American military operations in and around Iraq as a result.

On questions of war and peace, words matter — a lot. Donald Trump needs to be much more careful.

Michael O’Hanlon is the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861.”