I Don’t See Any Method at All

In the wake of the phone call between President-Elect Trump and President Tsai Ing-Wen of Taiwan, a few analysts of the Asia-Pacific tried to make the best of it.  The arguments that the Trump call represented a genuine strategic maneuver, and not simply the random hurling of feces, boiled down to two points.  The first was that US diplomatic treatment of Taiwan ought to be considered intolerable from the perspective of liberal democratic foreign policy.  The second was that the phone call signaled Beijing that the United States was willing to put China’s most tightly-held maritime aspiration in jeopardy.  Even if the US did not decide to recognize Taiwan, the move would force Beijing to acknowledge the danger.

I don’t quite hold with either of these, but they aren’t abjectly silly rationales.  In the flush of the moment, it was possible to imagine that President Trump did indeed have some vision for what US-China relations should look like, and that he was willing to engage long-standing (for better or worse) taboos in order to push the relationship in a direction.

Turns out not so much.

Make no mistake; I think this is the right move. There are merits to the idea of rethinking the US approach to Taiwan, and there was some logic to trying this in the midst of a Presidential transition, but the risks outweighed the benefits. But it should put paid to the notion that there was any logic or coherence to Trump’s first foray into the US-China relationship. Trump either had no idea what he was doing when he spoke with Tsai Ing-Wen, or had no good sense of the costs and benefits of opening up the snake nest that is US-Taiwan relations.

As long-time readers will know, I don’t take arguments about “reputation,” “resolve,” or “credibility” all that seriously; in addition to all of the problems associated with defining foreign policy in terms of aggressive masculinity, there are simply too many psychological, cultural, and bureaucratic filters to allow messages to have the kind of fined-tuned impact necessary to making the argument work.  But a lot of folks still do take credibility seriously, and many of those were harsh critics of President Obama’s decision not to bomb Syria after Assad’s violation of the “red line.”  It’s fair to say that if you take credibility seriously, Trump’s phone call with Xi should be deeply disturbing. China made multiple verbal and non-verbal threats to the United States following the call, indicating further action if Trump did not back away from his Taiwan comments; subsequently, Trump backed away.  The question of whether B naturally flowed from A is irrelevant; it’s hardly irrational for the Chinese (or for various third party observers) to conclude that Trump’s resolve failed in the face of Chinese power. Again, if you believe (as I do) that the politics of reputational messaging is nonsense all the way down, this won’t bother you.  If you’re someone who was deeply troubled by Obama’s failure to bomb a misbehaving Russian proxy, then you should be very concerned about what just went down between Trump and the closest thing that the United States has to a peer competitor.