Security commitment

Toward late 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S.-China relationship faced enormous

challenges due to the Tiananmen crackdown and the disappearance of the common Soviet threat. To some extent Taipei emerged as a beneficiary of the changing strategic

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The U.S. did agree to a one-year moratorium on arms sales to Taiwan. For the politics of the normalization negotiations between the U.S. and China, see Ross, 1995; Romberg, 2003; Tucker, 2009.

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landscape, as the U.S. became more willing to confront rather than accommodate China on the Taiwan issue. In November 1991, President Bush named China, together with North Korea and Burma as the “important sources of instability” in Asia; (Bush, 1991a) One month later, he emphasized that the U.S. wanted peace across the strait. (Bush, 1991b) Moreover, James Lilley, the U.S. ambassador to China from 1989 to1991 delivered much stronger words regarding Taiwan at Harvard’s Kennedy School in December 1991. Lilley said that the U.S. would not allow the use of force against Taipei by Beijing, and if that happens, the president could take defensive military actions in accordance with the TRA even without the approval of the Congress. Although Lilley clearly did not speak on behalf of the U.S. government at that time, he was a confidant of President Bush and already appointed assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, so Taipei tended to believe that his words did carry some weight. (Chen, 1995, pp. 160-162) These may seem to be minor developments and do not imply major favorable policy adjustments beyond the basic parameters of strategic ambiguity. This is indeed true and some Taiwanese analysts concurred that no fundamental change took place in terms of U.S.-Taiwan relations despite the end of the Cold War. (Lin, 1992) But Taipei’s security is so dependent on Washington that it has over years developed the habit of reading the latter’s every word meticulously sometimes to the extent of over- interpretation so even minor rhetoric changes from U.S. officials could influence Taipei’s perception of U.S. security assurances and assessment of its security environment.

That the U.S. word and deeds has been closely monitored and scrutinized by Taipei can also been seen from the first Gulf War’s subtle impact on it. On the one hand, the war

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demonstrated that militarily powerful countries, under certain circumstances, were still willing to resort to force and the weaker countries could be defeated and occupied in a very short period of time. On the other hand, however, the international condemnation of Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the U.N.-sanctioned military action indicated the universal perception of the illegitimacy of Iraqi use of force. More importantly, the United States was willing and able to step up and adopt a more aggressive interventionist policy after the Cold War.60 These all seemed to bode well for Taipei, whose security was precarious and relied heavily on the U.S. security guarantees.61

President Clinton started his first term from January1993. Both the president and his foreign policy team planned “business as usual” and did not intend to change the fundamentals of the U.S “One China policy”. (Christopher, 2001) Yet a few changing elements seemed to enhance Washington’s security assurances. The U.S. government had long maintained that its policy was based on the three communiqués with China and the TRA, but did not specify what would happen were there a conflict between the

communiqués and the TRA. In early 1994, Warren Christopher, Secretary of State of the first Clinton administration, explicitly stated that the position of the TRA is above communiqués, since the former is a law and the latter are policy statements. (Guo, 2009) Later on under congressional pressure President Clinton signed into law the 1994-1995 Foreign Relations Authorization Act, in which Section 531(2) read that “Section 3 of the Taiwan Relations Act take primacy over statements of the United States policy, including communiqués, regulations, directives, and policies based therein.”(Public Law 103-235,

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Interview with a former ROC senior official in the Lee Teng-hui administration, Taipei, June, 2009. 61

It was also cautioned that the Kuwait/Taiwan analogy cannot be drawn too far given the difference of their

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1994) Since the security provision of section 3 is arguably the most important part of the TRA, the elevation of its status could be seen as an enhancement of the U.S. security commitment. Thus although on balance strategic ambiguity was still in place and no racial change befell the U.S. security commitment to Taiwan during the Bush

administration and the first Clinton administration, a few policy statements, rising U.S. international interventionism and the elevation of the TRA status tended to give Taiwan the impression that the U.S. had indeed strengthened its commitment to protect Taiwan, more or less. (Chen, 1995)