GW Discourse

It’s always a pleasure to read things written by smart people who know what they’re talking about. In that spirit, I always enjoy picking up the latest copy of Foreign Affairs, published every other month by the Council of Foreign Relations. The group amounts to a sort of Jedi Council on the subject, with a collection of wise diplomats and academics who tend to produce essays of substance that should be required reading for some of the wookies who now hold public office.

In the current edition, I found an essay by Brue Gilley titled “Not So Dire Straits” to be particularly interesting, given how tensions between China and the United States have grown sharper in recent months. Gilley’s topic is Taiwan, and his big idea is how the twenty-first century geopolitical landscape of the Pacific will effectively “Finlandize” the Taiwanese—that is, make the island’s position vis-à-vis Washington and Beijing similar to Finland’s Cold War limbo between NATO and the Soviet Union. In that case, the Finnish government stuck what became a grand bargain with both superpowers that allowed it to preserve its democratic autonomy from historic domination by Russia, alleviate Russian concerns (by muting outright hostility to the Soviet regime), stay on friendly (but not formally allied) terms with America, and become an essential mediator between the rival blocs as a result. As a small country jammed up against the Soviet behemoth, this was the best strategy Finland could hope to pursue, and a situation born of necessity ultimately become one of benefit for the United States.

As the Taiwanese come to terms with their living arrangements next to a China that grows more powerful by the day, Gilley argues that a consensus among policymakers in Taipei will continue to form around such a “Finlandized” approach, following the early steps taken by current President Ma Ying-jeou with the aim of furthering the détente of the moment. Debate in Washington is less nuanced, with too many government actors on both sides of the aisle still clinging to a false zero-sum choice: either redouble the Pentagon’s efforts to beef up what Douglas MacArthur famously called America’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier” or just come to accept “losing China a second time” as a complete, inevitable “sacrifice” to an expanding Chinese sphere of influence. Instead, America should make (as it has already begun to do in many places) military and diplomatic adjustments that serve US interests when the Pacific is less its private lake; but fundamentally America must come to recognize a more Finlandized Taiwan as both a natural development and an opportunity to help diffuse cross-strait tensions, and perhaps even a springboard for political moderation and liberalization on the mainland that would do more for Sino-American peace than any item on the Pentagon’s sales list.