Lai may be hoping that Washington ultimately will adopt his (and the DPP’s) version of history, in which Taiwan has always been separate and distinct from China; the Chinese Civil War was incidental to Taiwan and ended with the death of Chiang Kai-shek; U.S. commitments to Beijing regarding Taiwan (in the Three Communiqués) are similarly obsolete or irrelevant; and Taiwan’s democratization and Beijing’s belligerence have in any event invalidated those commitments. This version of history already appears to have many subscribers in Washington. 

However, history is not erased by more recent history, and selective or revisionist history does not make strategic dilemmas go away. Taiwan’s misfortune was that it got caught in a historical trap created by Beijing, Washington, and Chiang Kai-shek under unique circumstances. All three originally agreed that there was one China, and Taiwan was part of it. Washington retreated somewhat from that position in 1950 (adopting the view that Taiwan’s status was “undetermined”). It nonetheless later assured Beijing—as a condition for normalization—that the United States would neither “challenge that position” nor pursue “a policy of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan.’” Consequently, the United States would maintain only “unofficial relations with the people of Taiwan.”  Because of those assurances, today, the stability of the most important strategic relationship in the world—between the United States and China—is dependent in part on forty-year-old bilateral understandings regarding a third party—Taiwan—which (at least under a DPP government) views those understandings as obsolete, invalid, and unreasonably constrictive. Lai, by all indications, would like to move forward on the basis of a “one China, one Taiwan” policy. And many of Taiwan’s supporters in the United States appear to share that view.

Washington, however, cannot escape this history or this trap any more quickly than Taiwan can. The “fundamental confusion” in its Taiwan policy dating from 1979—the underlying tension between the Three Communiqués and the TRA—has persisted and has been made more complicated by Washington’s embrace of Taiwan’s democratization, which did not negate Washington’s “One China” commitments to Beijing. And Washington cannot claim (as some commentators do) that Beijing itself invalidated those pledges by reneging on its own commitment to peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue—because Beijing never promised not to use force; it promised only to “strive for” peaceful resolution.

Taiwan’s democracy deserves to be celebrated and protected by the United States. However, democracy promotes Taiwan’s permanent separation from the mainland. In doing so, it also exposes Washington’s strategic dilemma since facilitating or encouraging Taiwan’s permanent separation is inconsistent with Washington’s longstanding “One China” policy. The United States needs to find a way to reconcile this paradox, which will almost certainly require sustained diplomacy with both Beijing and Taipei. In the meantime, Washington should be attentive to the differences between its definition of “the status quo” and the nature of the cross-strait relationship and Taipei’s versions. In his inauguration speech, Lai spoke of “turning a new page in Taiwan’s history.” As the island’s de facto security guarantor, Washington should be one of the authors of that next page. 

Paul Heer is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018). Follow him on X @PaulJHeer.

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