Republicans Steer Nation Into Dangerous Straits

It’s Richard Nixon’s final revenge. He deeded Taiwan to the mainland communists 24 years ago when he played the China card against the Soviets. Now the Chinese leaders who want that historical ticket punched are firing missiles in the Taiwan Strait and poor Bill Clinton is left holding the bag.

Congressional Republicans, including probable presidential candidate Bob Dole, are being irresponsible in the extreme to use the China-Taiwan issue as a club against Clinton. But what else is new? The old bipartisan spirit in foreign policy is dead and Republicans will beat up on the president of the United States every chance they get as long as he’s a Democrat--even if it disrupts a relationship with China endorsed by four Republican presidents and brings us closer to war.

To attack Clinton for his “ambiguity” in defense of Taiwan, as house Republicans did last week, is mischievous nonsense. Ever since Nixon drank mai tais with Mao, “ambiguity” toward China’s claims on Taiwan has been the essence of U.S. policy. One only has to pick up Nixon’s memoirs and find the following excerpt from the Shanghai communique of 1972, issued jointly by the U.S. and China:

“The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.”

Peaceful unification was not an oxymoron as long as “Chinese” were in charge of both the mainland and Taiwan. Both sides could pay lip service to eventual unification while Taiwanese businessmen added to their existing $20-billion investment in the mainland. But that is no longer the case.

In the first democratic presidential election campaign now under way on Taiwan, the vast majority of native Taiwanese will gain control of the island for the first time since Chiang Kai-shek, with the blessing of the U.S., seized it as his personal fiefdom. As a result, it is likely that a majority will vote on Sunday in favor of Taiwanese independence.

For 46 years, no U.S. president ever thought to ask the Taiwanese people what they wanted. Their native dialects were replaced with Mandarin and aging Kuomintang generals displaced from the mainland were given the keys to the island kingdom.

Now the Taiwanese have grown up and the old Chinese nationalists have died off. The leading presidential candidate in the election this week is pushing for international recognition of the island as a national entity. That’s his right, but what does it have to do with us? Nixon long ago put this island in escrow--a fact ceded in 1979 when the U.S. formally recognized Beijing as the authentic capital of one China, including Taiwan. This leaves, at best, an extremely messy situation for U.S. policymakers, one that needs to be handled with a great deal of skill.

It hardly helps to suddenly have Bob Dole discover that he is in favor of a seat for Taiwan at the U.N. That may make for a great campaign applause line, but Dole knows all about the U.S. commitment to the one-China policy. He was Nixon’s water boy in the Senate and the head of the Republican National Committee from 1971 to 1973. To raise the U.N. issue now is partisan politics, dumb and simple.

Personally, I would give Taiwan a seat. Any time 21 million people tell me they want a country of their own, who am I to complain? For the government of China to claim to be threatened by anything Taiwan does is as absurd as the U.S. paranoia over Cuba. But I didn’t play the China card, committing the U.S. to a one-China policy. The Republicans did, and now the devil has come calling.

You can’t blame those mainland Chinese for ever concealing their intentions. In the Shanghai communique, they spelled out their ambitions for all the world to see. No less a scribe than Richard Nixon summarized the Chinese plans for the island in his memoir: “The Chinese stated their claim to be the sole legal government of China and their conviction that Taiwan is a province of China. They affirmed that the liberation of Taiwan was China’s internal affair in which no country had a right to interfere.”

Why are we now surprised that they have come asking for their island back? The least the current Republican leadership should do, as Clinton attempts to clean up Nixon’s mess and finesse Beijing while comforting the people of Taiwan, is to lend the president a supportive hand.