U.S. Faces Choice on Sending Ships to Taiwan Strait

With the United States and China engaged in a war of nerves over Taiwan, the Clinton administration faces a decision on whether to send the formidable group of warships that it has assembled in the region through the Taiwan Strait.

The force--made up of two aircraft carriers and accompanying cruisers, destroyers and submarines--was dispatched to send a signal that despite the administration’s previously vague rhetoric, the United States will not tolerate Chinese military action against Taiwan.

But with Taiwan’s presidential election set for Saturday and China continuing its military exercises, the administration soon will be forced to decide what to do next: keep the fleet patrolling the South China Sea or send it through the strait, risking an escalation of tensions.

Ideally, Washington would like to see the current confrontation abate and have China and Taiwan return to the bargaining table to continue previous discussions on the possible reunification of the two entities.

To signal their intent to keep the peace, Washington lawmakers overwhelmingly embraced on Tuesday a non-binding resolution by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) that warns China to expect U.S. military intervention if Taiwan is invaded.

“This is a strongly bipartisan resolution,” Cox said on the House floor. “We do and will continue to support a peaceful dialogue between Taiwan and Communist China.”

State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns announced Tuesday that Secretary of State Warren Christopher will meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen on April 21 in The Hague to discuss U.S.-Chinese differences over Taiwan.

But top officials and scholars in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, have raised the possibility that Beijing may seek to heighten the military pressure, either by seizing one of Taiwan’s small, coastal islands or by conducting still more rounds of provocative military exercises over the next few months.

That assuredly would put Washington in a fix. Although U.S. officials are keeping silent about such prospects, the administration would come under strong pressure at home to move more decisively--probably with its naval force.

“It would be the end of [the U.S. policy of] engagement and the beginning of [a revival of the Cold War-era] containment [policy],” said Stanley Roth, a former presidential advisor on China now at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally financed research group.

“Beijing should know, and this [U.S. fleet] will remind them, that while they are a great military power, the strongest, the premier military power in the Western Pacific is the United States,” Defense Secretary William J. Perry told a Capitol Hill gathering.

Indeed, the House of Representatives fired a shot across China’s bow by approving Cox’s resolution warning that the United States will defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, missile attack or blockade.

The vote in the House was 369 to 14. A similar resolution is pending in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and strategists there said it could go to the Senate floor for a vote later this week.

Cox said his “sense of Congress” measure is not legally binding, but illustrates Congress’ opposition to any aggression by China against its island neighbor.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) joined Cox in support of the measure.

“What we have to do now is reassert with the dictators of China that we side with democracy,” he said. “We are the country that stands for human rights and peace.”

While China boasts a 2.9-million-member armed force, its army lacks enough logistic support to capture Taiwan, and its fighter aircraft are no match for U.S. jets, military strategists say. Just the same, even the more hawkish U.S. defense experts have little desire to become embroiled in an armed conflict with China.

William Taylor, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan research group, warned that if the United States and China get into an armed conflict, it could embolden North Korea to attack South Korea while Washington is distracted.

But defense analysts warn that moving U.S. warships into the Taiwan Strait, while well short of qualifying as active military intervention, nevertheless carries risks of its own--particularly with China’s political leadership apparently in some disarray.

“One of the skillful things in choosing the military option was in picking something that wasn’t in China’s face,” Roth said. “We didn’t try to shoot down a missile” or do anything really threatening, he added.

As Taiwan’s first presidential election draws near, China continues its war of nerves against Taiwan. It launched a new round of live-fire military exercises Tuesday in waters off the southern province of Fujian, provocatively close to a small group of islands claimed by Taipei.

At the same time, Beijing blasted the United States for what it called a “brazen show of force” in maintaining a large naval presence in the area. Navy officials said the second U.S. aircraft carrier, the Nimitz, is expected to arrive in the region over the weekend.

Kenneth H. Bacon, the Pentagon’s spokesman, told reporters that the United States will continue to keep “an appropriate” naval presence in the area through the election and will “have to decide what is appropriate when we look at the situation” afterward.