tdaxp

"Taiwan: The Tail That Wags Dogs," by Michael Turton, The View from Taiwan, 26 July 2006, http://michaelturton.blogspot.com/2006/07/taiwan-tail-that-wags-dogs.html.

Later today I will be going on my third Greyhound voyage this month. The first was from Omaha, Nebraska, to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the second was from Fort Wayne to Nacogdoches, Texas. Now I am going to The Good Life, Nebraska, possibilities...endless. But before I go, something more serious:

Below is an excerpt from an attack on a report by Rear Admiral Michael McDevitt (retired), of CNA. Admiral McDevitt wrote a report, Taiwan: The Tail That Wags Dogs, for the National Bureau of Asian Research. McDevitt pushes the same fear of Taipei's influence that some other strategists do, so I am grateful to Michael Truton of The View from Taiwan of highlighting the reports rhetorical slights-of-hand.

An except:

Instead, Taipei's new guidelines accepted the PRC as the legitimate government of the part of China that Beijing controlled. This move effectively nullified the underlying premise of the 1972 Shanghai Communique that "Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that it is a part of China." As Harry Harding has stated, "Taiwan basically abandoned the vision of one country, one legitimate government that had been pursued by Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Ching-kuo, and for that matter Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping." The 1991 Guidelines for National Reunification softened the political blow of backing away from the old formulation of "one China" by stating that the ROC still envisioned a "one country, one system" future but only when the PRC had become"democratic, free, and equitably prosperous"—just like Taiwan.

...

This move effectively nullified the underlying premise of the 1972 Shanghai Communique that "Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that it is a part of China."

Whoa! McDevitt does not add that prior to the Shanghai Communique the US position was that the status of Taiwan was undetermined (the ethically, democratically, and politically appropriate position). McDevitt does not add that Shanghai Communique was a memorandum of understanding among two governments about the status of Taiwan, neither of whom was the legitimate owner of the island, and none of whom consulted its people about its disposition. If don't get the consent of those whose lives and property you dispose of, you are hardly in a position to complain if they later decide your plans are worthless. But then the Czechs were not invited to Munich either....

In other words, Taiwan democracy is not the problem here. The problem is that the original plan to sell out Taiwan to China failed to take into account the wishes of the people of Taiwan, and policymakers are now paying the price for their urgent need to enjoy that feeling of Playing God with Other People's Lives. It was easy in 1972 to anticipate that the Taiwanese would take steps to avoid being annexed by China if given democracy, as that was known to both the Chiang government and to US policymakers (lobbying for Taiwan independence began in the 1960s, and there were numerous public and secret reports that gave accurate accounts of the island's political attitiudes). McDevitt represents a foreign policy establishment that resembles a man who becomes infuriated that the marriage he arranged for his daughter to make himself rich has been rejected by her.

Essentially, this analysis simply blames the people of Taiwan for the errors of US foreign policy decisionmakers. Had the US maintained its original position that "the status of Taiwan is undefined", it would currently have a great deal more strategic flexibility and it would still retain the moral high ground. It would not be locked into the clearly unacceptable goal of "pushing Taipei into a unification dialogue in order to bring an end to Washington's 50-year security obligation." Kissinger, not Taipei, trapped Washington in this moral and political nightmare where it has to sell out a democratic state to an authoritarian dictatorship.

Read the whole thing. The Mandate of Heaven is also impressed.

International Politics 1

How is International Relations an American discipline?
- rational choice emphasis ('rationalism")
- calcuated cost/benefits (outcomes and ratios)
- also likely responses of others
- implies realism

instrumental science: suggests science is a tool to further human domination
critical theorists: Western social science extends that domination to other humans

(but not Eastern philosophy -- tdaxp?)

(state premption, localization, lack of professionalism as roadbloacks to practical instrument social science
- compare to development of "useless" general aesthetics as developed field i n Europe)

Western/Newtonian/Cartestian/American/Anglo-Saxon worldview
- destruction, creationism, mechanics, individual
- blogospheric: tdaxp link?

Many prominent "American" IR Realists are European
- Hertz, Kissinger, Brezinski, Morganthau
- some non-realist ones two (Hoffman)

"The Great Debatein International Relations"
Idealists (emphasis on ability to reform humanity) v. Realists (emphasis on unchanging state of main)
(idealism as similar to dadaism?)
(idealism after WWI, realism before and after)
(realism as "default" position")
(what about non-state realism?)

also: Science (focus on quantitative method) v. Tradition (focus on law and history)

Dependency Theory - from Latin America in the 1970s
- blunted by East Asian (ROK, ROC, SING, HK) growth

Ways / Causes of growth of IR
- Professionalization (verticalization)
- Interdisciplinary Borrowing (horizontalization)
(but isn't verticalization a horizontalization an effect, not a cause?)
- Events (but what did similar events not inspire growth elsewhere)
- Demands (but why demands?)

Is social science more politics driven than hard sciences?
More "progress" in hard sciencess