Trumping Taiwan Strait

Trump has already created a major distraction and challenge for the next United States Secretary of State, and has given us a clue that he doesn’t know how to implement his professed management style of "delegating."

Trump accepted a congratulatory phone call from the President of Taiwan, and then doubled down by publicly suggesting he would use, as a bargaining chip, the United State’s "One-China" policy towards Taiwan and China. This policy, since being initiated by Nixon and Kissinger in 1972, has been gradually deepening, along with international marginalization of Taiwan’s claim to be a separate country.

If Trump triples down on this suggestion, and perhaps even if he fails to publicly walk it back, then, predictably and probably inevitably, China’s Central Government

• will be infuriated,
• will pose as being even more infuriated,
• will stoke it’s public’s tendency towards suspicion of the United States,
• will take actions very costly and disruptive to the huge investments in (and related to) China of the Fortune 500 and other Wall Street players, and
• may raise the temperature of international disputes (not to mention “domestic” tensions between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau) so high that, in Asia or worldwide, all business decision-making is affected by perceptions of higher volatility and risk.

The reasons for this are that the Chinese central government:

• is deeply committed to the position that China’s sovereignty over Taiwan is a non-negotiable point of principle,
• is deeply averse to being publicly seen to allow matters of principle to be used as bargaining chips against it,
• has a long track record of responding to disputes with shrill public rhetoric and/or with quiet-but-costly administrative harassment of foreign businesses,
• has a potentially restive public that is suspicious of foreign governments;
• is always sensitive to the risk of international relations flipping, from their longstanding role as a diversion of Chinese public attention away from domestic economic and political grievances, into a multiplier and igniter of those grievances; and
• is not always able to quickly dial-back its public rhetoric (or even administrative harassment) after a dispute is resolved.

Trump’s track record indicates a habit of using discourtesy and protocol breaches as a quickly-abandoned tactic in seeking deals on substantive issues. In contrast, China’s Central Government treats courtesy and protocol has having important, and potentially long-lived, independent substance-- especially in connection with the status of disputed sovereign territories. Any view by Trump that the congratulatory phone call is without substance, or lasting consequences, is not widely shared.

If the US Ambassador to China has a personal relationship with Chinese President Xi Jingping (like that of likely appointee Iowa Governor Terry Branstad), this would probably exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the above difficulties, because President Xi’s personal contacts in the US would probably increase, rather than decrease, his individual sensitivity to the above issues.

The United States is not the only country where politicians’ path of least resistance is to pick fights with foreigners, or where picking fights is easier than unpicking them. This is well-understood not only by every diplomat, but by every person who has ever lived in a foreign country. It is also well-understood by most citizens of countries like Japan and South Korea (and even Taiwanese who voted for their independence-minded President). They know they will be living with China as a neighbor far after Trump and every Trump policy are long forgotten. If Trump loses their confidence, then both Trump and the United States will lose more, for longer, than he appears to realize.

It is possible to envision a carefully considered strategy that includes the United States seeking more leverage over China through the Taiwan issue, but not a strategy that allows a short phone call to initiate a public cycle of recriminations-- before the next Secretary of State has even been confirmed. Prior nominees, in their confirmation hearings, have attempted to minimize the breadth and detail of questions and answers about China, because preserving certain ambiguities has been useful to both countries. That will be more difficult now that Trump has opened the door to questions that he and his nominee will find no less awkward than prior administrations.