Tied Up Across the Taiwan Strait

[ 114 ] asia policy A Knot Still Untied Finally, I agree with Richard Bush’s argument that the United States can only play a limited role in stabilizing, and possibly resolving, cross-Strait relations. The knot across the Taiwan Strait will not be untied by American hands. On the contrary, only those residing in Taiwan and the mainland can untie this knot. At the current juncture the prospects for such a resolution still appear to be quite remote, and the measures that Bush advocates in the concluding chapters of his book for dealing with such a situation strike this reviewer as quite limited. Though perhaps sufficient to help substantiate the existing status quo across the Taiwan Strait, by failing to directly address issues of national identity formation discussed in this review, the author’s prescriptions for cross-Strait harmony—in the opinion of this reviewer— fall short of forwarding a truly innovative and potentially transformative solution. Tied Up Across the Taiwan Strait Derek Mitchell Over the past half-century, few issues have been as persistent in U.S. foreign policy yet so little understood by the general public—and even foreign policy elite—as has the issue of Taiwan. The issue’s deep and complex historical, emotional, and political undercurrents as well as highly precise policy language have bedeviled even the most senior U.S. policymakers and foreignpolicyspokesmenfordecades.Understandingtheissuerequiresalmost a Talmudic attention to the nuance, phrasing, and interpretive meaning of the respective actions and policy statements of China, Taiwan, and the United States over the years, a taxing requirement for the casual observer. Richard C. Bush of the Brookings Institution is as good a guide as there is in the United States for navigating these complex and often treacherous waters. In his book Untying the Knot: Making Peace in the Taiwan Strait, Bush documents in authoritative fashion the many complex historical, political, Derek Mitchell is Senior Fellow for Asia, International Security Program, CSIS. From 1997 to 2001 he was Special Assistant for Asian and Pacific Affairs, Office of the Secretary of Defense, during which time he also served as Senior Country Director for China, Taiwan, Mongolia, and Hong Kong (2000–01). He can be reached at . [ 115 ] book review roundtable • untying the knot sociological, and even psychological elements of the current impasse. Watching the action from the front row as an official responsible for Taiwan affairs in the Clinton and Bush administrations, Richard Bush notes that, due to a mixture of arrogance, faulty assumptions, and self-constraints imposed by highly competitive, if opaque, elite politics in Beijing, China has missed a series of opportunities to reach out productively to two successive Taiwan presidents. This series of missed opportunities has resulted in increasing mutual mistrust, suspicions of bad faith on all sides (including the United States), and substantial Chinese military development focused on Taiwan that have only heightened tensions and danger in the area. Domestic Politics and the Sovereignty Question Bush documents in particular how Beijing has consistently mishandled and misunderstood the intentions of presidents Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shuibian , who conventional wisdom holds are troublemakers whose essentially independence-minded agendas have increased tensions across the Taiwan Strait. Bush challenges this viewpoint by providing a nuanced picture of the substance and context of the respective actions taken by the two leaders while in office and argues that both men, though undeniably strong proponents of establishing a new and distinct national identity for Taiwan, have proved to be more politician than ideologue, and more open-minded and flexible on the issue of Taiwan’s ultimate sovereign status than they may at first appear to the casual observer. Bush documents and analyzes how China’s actions, and the dictates of party and electoral politics in Taiwan, have caused the two leaders to modify their approaches to the question of Taiwan sovereignty, in alternately both more moderate and more extreme directions. In the mid-1990s, for instance, as the island’s first democratic presidential election approached, Lee Tenghui found it necessary to promote Taiwan identity more strongly. In 2000 Chen Shui-bian de-emphasized the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) independence platform in order to reassure voters that he could be trusted as a...