 I want to welcome everyone. Sorry to kill the side conversations. We'll have plenty of time for interaction with the front as well. My name's Alex Linen. I'm the editor of the Washington Quarterly here at CSIS. And we're delighted to invite you all and have you here for a luncheon discussion. Many of you may have seen the issue. Most people don't even see the hard cop anymore. These things all come out in PDFs. So the cover of this is actually about Egypt. But we're here for a discussion on Taiwan. So if you're in the wrong room, there's probably another conference going on someplace else. We're delighted to have a range of speakers from across DC that times that we have these sessions about once or twice a year when we have authors that happen to be in town, about half of the authors in the Washington Quarterly from outside DC. So ideally, we try to get people who are stopping in town. Here's my second favorite alternative, which is when you get people from a bunch of different institutions in DC. Some are academics. Some are from think tanks. And you get them to interact with the crowd as a whole. And what is obviously an interesting conversation, given the number of people that are coming and enjoying your lunch. We're going to start with the co-authors of the piece, which is titled in the Journalist Should the United States Abandon Taiwan. Many of you know both Nancy Tucker from Georgetown as well as from the Wilson Center and our own Bonnie Glazer. And then we're going to have comments to follow. Well, the speakers will go for about 15 minutes a piece. We'll have comments to follow from Charlie Glazer on my left, from GW, and from Mike Swain from Carnegie. So we cast them up pretty wide to get a bunch of different institutions from DC represented in what we hope will be a very interesting discussion about ongoing Taiwan policy. With that, I'm going to start with Nancy. My only job is to be the bouncer. So all of you have got to be smaller than me in order to be up at the Capodium. And we'll give you about 15 minutes, and I'll start throwing elbows around. I was going to say, I think because I make my living teaching, I speak better when I'm standing up. So we'll do it from here. As Alex said, the article that Bonnie and I wrote, crystallized in response to calls for change in US-Taiwan policy to jettison Taiwan or to take a more active role in resolving the cross-strait's impasse. Though these are still minority views, they've been getting a lot of attention because of the growing belief that China's importance outweighs any affinity for or obligation to Taiwan, positive developments across the Taiwan Strait, transformation in Taiwan's defenses, including drops in its defense budget, uncertainty regarding Taiwan's determination to defend itself, questions about the usefulness of weapons we might sell because of problems like cratered runways, and a general erosion of the military balance, as well as slippage in American support, particularly in Congress. Our concern is that all of this is creating a false impression that misleads China and frightens Taiwan, as well as our other friends and allies. Our conclusion made clear in the article, which I know you all read, is that it is not in US national interest to abandon Taiwan or to try to resolve the cross-strait impasse through greater direct US involvement, such as dialogue with Beijing about Taiwan. Neither will change China's actions vis-a-vis Taiwan or resolve problems where China's national priorities differ from our own. Abandoning Taiwan risks reinforcing the image of a weak, vacillating and unreliable United States that can be pushed around. Commandeering the resolution process would revive resentment across Asia against a hegemonic United States. Future policy should involve a clear, forthright, and strong commitment to Taiwan, and Bonnie will pick up on that in a few minutes. Why have we reached these conclusions? There are three major reasons for rejecting a radical policy change that I will review very briefly here. Current policy works, we must avoid appeasement, and we risk dire regional repercussions. The first US policy has worked, it's clear because it has made the current positive developments in cross-strait relations possible. US support has bolstered confidence to negotiate with China. It has meant that China has not been able to bully a weak and isolated Taiwan. Taiwan's public is willing to endorse cross-strait talks because it sees US support as a guarantee against coercion. That is, we argue, in China's interests. Without US support, compromise might be impossible, or if agreements were reached, they would not be viable. An end to US support would not be a path to unification as Beijing has long insisted and believed. US policy that under the Taiwan Relations Act has provided for past arms sales has during the last three decades contributed to an absence of attacks by China on Taiwan because they have been made too costly. Taiwan's efforts to develop nuclear weapons, it should be noted, were undertaken at times when the leadership in Taiwan feared US abandonment. Moreover, unprecedented improvement in cross-strait relations has occurred despite, maybe because of $18 billion in arms sales since 2008. Secondly, militating against a radically smaller or larger US role is the reality of appeasement. We must not be so enthralled with, or so anxious about China, that it appears acceptable to sacrifice Taiwan for better relations. Appeasement would send a negative signal to China about US strength, constancy, and our view of our future. Many Chinese believe the US is in decline, as do many others around the world and even here at home. Declinism fuels Chinese assertiveness, overseas, and an abrasive nationalism amongst the Chinese people generally. Appeasing Beijing will intensify that nationalism, making it easier for China's leaders to avoid a China spring and suppressed protests against problems such as corruption and environmental damage by peasants, lawyers, artists, and others. Appeasing Beijing is likely also to generate new demands for tougher policies on issues like Taiwan. Further, having long said the talks must be between China and Taiwan, Washington's reversal on this implies a surrender of Taiwan's interests in the face of China's growing power and influence. Appeasement, moreover, would be a betrayal of our values and institutions. We have nurtured and celebrated Taiwan's democratization. Though we can stabilize, balance, and facilitate talks, we cannot speak for the Taiwanese. As I have said in my book straight talk, we must be mindful of the absence of mutual trust between Washington and Taipei. If the US were to try to represent Taiwan in a dialogue with China, both sides would seek to manipulate us. And were progress made, the US would become responsible for results, not a desirable outcome. Appeasement is also dangerous given China's military threat. The recent Pentagon report to Congress suggested that there are between 1,000 and 1,200 missiles appointed at Taiwan. If you include cruise missiles, as Kurt Campbell did in speaking to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, that number rises to 1,400. Moreover, new missiles that are being deployed are more accurate and more lethal. And there has been no reduction in those missiles even though relations have improved. China's overall lack of transparency makes it even more risky. For example, we don't even know where the red lines are that might make China use those missiles. And the PRC is adding new systems including anti-access area denial capabilities to deter US intervention. Finally, no evidence exists for the belief that appeasing China would lead it to abandoned positions on any issue unless its priorities mesh with ours. China's policies are not decided as favors to or a punishment for the United States. Thirdly, there is regional significance of change in our policy, which we think would be profound. The US alliance structure and regional security depends on American steadfastness. US friends and allies see the United States as a counterbalance to an increasingly powerful China. They want our presence, our support and maybe even our protection. Taiwan is thought of as a distraction, perhaps as a danger, but abandonment of Taiwan would shake confidence in US credibility. In the wake of the 1995-96 dispatch of two aircraft carriers to the waters around Taiwan by Bill Clinton, Japan, Singapore and the Philippines all strengthened ties with the United States. Japan and South Korea's sea lanes of supply and communication are vulnerable and could be jeopardized by US policy change and PRC dominance over Taiwan. Similarly, freedom of navigation in the South China Sea could be at greater risk. A US effort directly to settle the Taiwan stalemate moreover would be criticized as reviving an arrogance of power that too often characterized Washington's international behavior in the 20th century. I'm about to turn over the microphone to Bonnie who's going to discuss arms sales and some of our other recommendations for US policy. But before I do, let me conclude by saying again that abandoning Taiwan, ending arms sales or taking over negotiations with China would be a mistake. Such actions would send the wrong message to China, to Taiwan, to US friends and allies and to the American people. Taiwan is important to the United States but Chinese suspicions that we are using Taiwan to undermine China's rise by keeping it weak and divided are wrong. Rather, the US priority is peace and stability and these goals will not be met by a change in policy. Thank you. Thanks, Nancy. You set the bar perfectly with 12 minutes, leaving three for your co-author. With that, we'll turn it over to Bonnie. Okay, well maybe I can take the three that she's left over. Thank you all for coming. It is always important to ask if policies continue to serve American interests. And so I welcome this discussion, this debate and the expression of different views, which is why of course we have invited discussants today. I'm going to begin by addressing the question of what the US should and should not do on the question of US arms sales to Taiwan. There are several arguments that are put forward by those who propose that the United States should reconsider its arms sales policy to Taiwan. And these are probably not exhaustive, but I think these are some of the central arguments. One is that US arms sales to Taiwan inhibit US-Chinese cooperation on critically important issues, particularly regional and global issues, such as trying to denuclearize North Korea. And China's cooperation is seen by some as so essential, the argument goes that the United States should stop irritating Beijing by selling arms and providing defense assistance to Taiwan because this is a core interest that Beijing has. A second argument that is made is that the military balance has really already shifted in Beijing's favor. So it's really pointless to sell weapons to Taiwan. There isn't much that they could do. And then a third reason that is put forward is that China's tolerance for these arms sales is really running thin. And its willingness to take punitive measures against the United States is increasing. So Chinese nationalism is portrayed as intensifying, public opinion is putting greater pressure on the leadership, and this cannot be ignored. Therefore, again, the argument goes, a crisis in US-China relations could result if arms sales do continue, and the United States should avoid a crisis with China. Now a corollary to these arguments is that Taipei and Beijing are incapable of resolving their differences by themselves. And that therefore the United States should negotiate bilaterally with China to resolve the problem of arms sales as part of a broader negotiation, perhaps, that addresses Taiwan's political status as well. Now I think Nancy and I disagree fundamentally with these arguments and the logic behind them. First, there is no evidence that if Taiwan were to disappear as a problem in the US-China relationship, that issues such as North Korea, Iran, climate change, or other issues that we would be able to cooperate with them, with China on these issues, any better than we are cooperating today. I would argue that Chinese positions on those and other issues are determined by Beijing's national interests, and they will not be substantially altered by US concessions on Taiwan. Secondly, although I think it is clear that the United States in selling arms to Taiwan cannot restore a military balance between the two sides of the strait, weapons nevertheless remain important to make it more costly for China to opt for a military solution. And arms are still necessary for Taiwan to defend itself and to hold out until US forces arrive should we decide to send them. Third, the influence of public opinion on the mainland is certainly increasing, but that should not be exaggerated. Chinese leaders ignore public opinion when it suits them and play up the role of public opinion when it's advantageous. I believe it would be a mistake for the United States to negotiate with Beijing with the objective of resolving differences between the two sides of the strait, just so that arms sales to Taiwan can be eliminated as a potential danger to the US-China relationship. Such an approach, in my view, focuses wrongly on US arms sales as the problem. Instead, it is China's policy. It's failure to renounce the use of force against Taiwan and it's refusal to adjust deployments and to reduce its military threat to Taiwan that is the problem that we should be talking about. If China could actually take such steps, it would have the effect of making acquisition of expensive advanced weapons by Taiwan less necessary. Arms sales should not be seen as the problem and should not be ended prematurely. The mainland and Taiwan are engaged in the very early stages of reconciliation, a process that I view as very much in American interests. Important progress has been made but that progress is not irreversible. If the two sides of the strait over time can work out a modus vivendi in which both sides' core concerns are addressed, then the issue of arms sales to Taiwan will be resolved as a matter of course. Cross-strait rapprochement would not be promoted by a premature end to US arms sales and to the US security commitment to Taiwan. Rather it would be undermined. China should not be permitted to set red lines regarding what the United States can and cannot sell to Taiwan. This would set a dangerous precedent. Beijing would undoubtedly perceive this as American weakness. Such a situation could result in Chinese miscalculation about US determination to defend its interests. US arms sales to Taiwan are also important for political reasons. Arms sales are one of the ways that the United States signals its support for Taiwan for its democracy and for its people. And in the absence of firm US support, no leader of Taiwan will be able to negotiate sensitive issues with Beijing because Taiwan would be too secure and vulnerable. Beijing's claim that US weapon sales to Taiwan emboldened the island's government to seek separation from the mainland and are damaging to cross-strait ties is simply not in accordance with the facts. US arms sales to Taiwan are stabilizing, not destabilizing, and they are an integral part of a US policy that seeks to create an environment in which mainland China and Taiwan can improve relations and conduct negotiations to solve problems and resolve their differences on an equal footing. The US has sold, I think, almost $18 billion of weapons to Taiwan in the past two plus years. And cross-strait relations are obviously in the best state that they have been in decades. US arms sales facilitate greater cross-strait interaction and problem solving. And in fact, they create the potential for a solution to be worked out between the two sides eventually concerning their ultimate relationship. Ironically, I would argue that China should welcome arms sales for this very reason. If the US were to announce an end to arms sales today, it is likely that Taipei would put its negotiations with China on hold and reassess its policy toward the mainland. In the absence of US support, Taipei would lose confidence to continue such negotiations with Beijing. And an abandoned and isolated Taiwan might, in desperation, declare independence or even revive efforts to produce nuclear weapons, not pursue unification as Beijing assumes. The historical record suggests that despite Chinese objections based on interference in its internal affairs, US support is helpful, not harmful to China's interest in achieving their long-term goals of reaching reunification in some form. Now, in managing its relations with Taiwan, the US must keep in mind that US policy toward Taiwan has profound consequences for its position in the region, especially the future of American alliances. If the US is seen as backing away, even slightly from its commitment to security commitments to Taiwan, other nations would question the reliability of US commitments and pledges to them. Now, this is especially true of Japan, which is the only country that really views Taiwan in geostrategic terms and worries greatly about Taiwan's integration with mainland China under any circumstances. Even countries that do not view Taiwan in such terms and would welcome reunification of the two sides of the strait under circumstances of a peacefully negotiated agreement would probably be unnerved by a diminishment of the US commitment to Taiwan. Almost every nation in the region is looking to the United States to serve as a counterweight to growing Chinese power. If the United States is seen as caving into Chinese pressure, then surely smaller nations would see no other choice than to accommodate to Beijing as well. Now, I want to move on to talk about a few other of our policy recommendations in the article and ask the question then beyond selling weapons to Taiwan. What more should the United States do? And Nancy and I argue in our article that the United States should do more to strengthen US ties to Taiwan. First, the United States must prevent Taiwan from being marginalized and isolated. Washington should work with other countries to promote greater Taiwan participation in the international community and integrate Taiwan into the broader process of regional economic integration. Discussions should begin, for example, on how to work toward the goal of signing a free trade agreement. In 2004, Nick Lardy and Dan Rosen coauthored an excellent study on this issue of an FTA for Taiwan in the United States and concluded that such an agreement would be beneficial to Taiwan's economy because it would embolden other countries in the region to enter such talks as well. And that reasoning still applies today. The US should also conduct higher level contact between American and Taiwan officials routinely. We could even think about presidential communication which cannot take place publicly but could be facilitated by video conferences and regular correspondence. We also believe that cabinet level visits must be resumed. Five such visits took place during the Clinton administration alone. Now, it is understandable that the Bush administration didn't conduct cabinet level visits because it did not want to signal support at the time for what it saw as provocative policies being pursued by then President Chen Shui-bian. Restrictions on Taiwan's purchase of American beef were obstacles to cabinet level visits then and now. But the unfortunate consequence is that Beijing has concluded that it has won a victory and now strongly opposes what used to be routine. Now, cabinet level visits serve important functions. They're important symbolically. They signal support to the people of Taiwan. They make it easier for other nations to send ministerial level officials to Taiwan which further reduces Taiwan's isolation. And such visits also improve communication and raise awareness of the common interests between the United States and Taiwan. Self-imposed restrictions that bar Taiwan officials from entering some U.S. government buildings such as the Department of State should be lifted. They make it more difficult to conduct daily business with Taiwan. Those interactions should be routine as well. As the United States strengthens ties with Taiwan, it must simultaneously find ways to convince Beijing that the U.S. does not seek to prevent an accommodation between Taiwan and mainland China. The United States does not have a secret agenda to promote Taiwan independence or to sustain the status quo forever just as it doesn't seek to contain China's rise. U.S. policy aims at sustaining peaceful conditions in which Taiwan and China can reach a long-term and enduring modus vivendi by themselves. Taiwan should have the right to keep its options open and to remain an autonomous democratic entity that is separate from the mainland as long as the majority of the people of Taiwan do not support reunification with China. Unification through pressure or coercion should not be acceptable to the United States. It would be contrary to our values and to our sense of justice and it should be avoided at all costs. Thank you very much. The piece from some other journal published out in New York was part of the inspiration for that co-article and we're gonna invite its author Charles Glazer to come up and give his views. Hi. So I'd like to thank the authors for a very well-argued article and as many of you know, unlike the rest of the panelists, I'm not an expert on Asia or Northeast Asia so I bring a rather different perspective but I have to look carefully about the issue and I'm gonna try to lay out my views briefly. I'd like to say to start that I don't think this is an easy issue. So even though I tend to disagree with the two authors, I don't think it's straightforward and I actually have not fully reached a conclusion but I tend to disagree and I'll explain why. I should say two other things though just to put my argument in perspective. One is that my concerns here are not for China's interests but rather for US interests and they're not primarily for Taiwan's interests but for US interests and that's a standard way to evaluate US policy. And so it's working from that perspective. I should also say though that I am not, my preference would be in an ideal world for Taiwan to be able to choose its own destiny if it prefers to stay independent and democratic, that would be is what ideally it should be allowed to do and I don't favor unification with China. But having said that, if a reduction in the US commitment to Taiwan is in the US interest, then it may be the right thing for the United States to do and it's exactly this issue then that makes it a hard issue or it's this trade-off that makes it a hard issue because if we change US policy, we may well be sacrificing some values that the United States holds highly. We value democracy, we value freedom and we have some responsibility to other countries maybe most importantly but importantly Taiwan with respect to those values. But we also have other values and most prominently US security tends to be the value that dominates all values when it comes to US foreign policy. So if the cost to US security are large, then we can be in a situation in which we should make concessions or accommodation or you can call it appeasement if you like that would increase US security. And so the question then from this perspective is whether changes in US policy would accomplish that. I tend to think that there are changes that would but I think that they require the kind of expertise that I don't have and the experts on this panel do have. So in that sense, I'm gonna say awkward position but I think that these issues can be pushed further and I would like what I'm gonna try to do is lay out how those trade-offs at least need to be considered and a couple places where I think their arguments are potentially wrong. Okay so the other thing I wanna say then is how do I come to this problem? Because I do bring a very different perspective and I bring the perspective of somebody who's primarily an international relations theorist but has also worked quite extensively on US policy but not primarily toward Asia. So I've worked a lot on nuclear weapons policy over the years so I have pretty strong views on US, China nuclear issues. But anyway the reason it's important that from a theorist perspective is that many people from many different sort of theoretical persuasions believe that China's rise is posing a major threat to US national security. And the people that have been most articulate about this and hold this view most strongly are so-called realists which is a complicated term because it includes many people with many different views but in broad terms this is a group of people who basically look at the pressures generated by the international system on states and try to understand how the changes in the structure of the international system is likely to change relations between states. And from that perspective there's a long list of so-called realist arguments about why China's rise is gonna be potentially very dangerous for the United States and the globe. And those arguments have to do with the dangers of power transitions, of arms races, of competition for hegemonic control within regions, the potential desire for China to push the United States out of Northeast Asia and so forth. And so from this perspective Taiwan is not very important. Because there's gonna be a major clash between the United States and China in any event. My own view is that these arguments are wrong. And if you have a more nuanced sort of structural view that the prospects for a peaceful rise of China are quite good and there's a variety of different ways that the United States can prosper at the same time that China prospers as they become or if they become the world's major superpowers. And in a variety of ways that relationship could be much safer than the US-Soviet Cold War bipolar relationship. So given this view all of a sudden then the specifics of the region start to become more important because structural views don't tell us what's gonna happen. They tell us about the large grinding pressures that flow from the international system but that's not the only way states get into conflict. Taiwan then rises on the sort of policy agenda because the prospects for peace seem to be there from the perspective of structure. But Taiwan is nevertheless potentially very dangerous. And the authors don't disagree with this at least by my reading of their article. And in fact, on the first page of their article they say Taiwan remains the single issue which could spark war between the United States and the People's Republic of China and then not quoting that it could easily escalate or could escalate to a nuclear war. Now it's very hard to estimate the prospects for this kind of conflict but many people would accept that this is the greatest potential danger. And so then if it is the greatest potential danger it raises the question can we change US policy in such a way that US security would be increased and what would those changes look like? And on its face eliminating the possibility of a US Taiwan crisis then would increase US security and it can do it in two ways. One, if we could eliminate the possibility of a crisis itself then obviously that crisis won't become a war. Related if in fact the US commitment to Taiwan sours US-China relations in a way that convinces China that it needs a larger military, that it needs to build up its forces, that it needs to compete with the United States because there's a major incompatibility over vital interest that strains the relationship in a way that not only a crisis over Taiwan becomes dangerous or becomes a little more likely but there are a variety of other ways that this souring of relations down the road particularly after a couple years of arms competition a couple decades of arms competition in which the United States could get into conflict with China over other issues. So that's why it would be nice to just be able to take this issue off the table. Of course we can't just take it off the table. And so we have to ask a variety of other more specific questions about whether or not we could change our commitment to Taiwan in a way that would work to US interest. Ideally we would like to do that and not hurt Taiwan's interests. So the first question is would backing off and I'll talk at the very end of my talk about what it would mean to back off but could reducing our commitment to Taiwan improve US-China relations? I'm not necessarily saying and I'm not in favor of the US negotiating for Taiwan. There are a lot of changes we can make without negotiating for Taiwan. The authors say no. They say that changing our Taiwan policy will hurt the US relationship with China which is a counterintuitive argument but it could be correct. They say basically that if we pull back China will course Taiwan and that will sour the relationship that it's Taiwan's security that's provided by the United States that allows for cooperation. These are all possible but my inclination on this is that pulling back because our commitment to Taiwan is clearly in conflict with their view of their vital interest has the potential to improve US-China relations. We don't have to do this in a way where we say today it's one policy and tomorrow it's another but our policy could evolve over time in a way that China comes to understand our willingness to respect what to them is a truly vital interest. Interestingly, China does not seem to agree with the authors which doesn't mean the authors are wrong but they don't see our commitment to Taiwan as being in their interest and so just on its face that would suggest that they might not be right but they might understand China, I mean states are often wrong and narrow minded in their views but it would be very important in an ongoing discussion to see if China at some point comes to agree with us but if not China does get to decide. A second argument they make is that pulling out of the region or not pulling out of the region that reducing our commitment to Taiwan will essentially undermine our alliances in the region and so in a sense you could say we're getting down a slippery slope where we're basically pulling out or out of the Northeast Asia or where our actions will result in other countries actions Japan and North and South Korea thinking that's what we're doing and they'll act accordingly. I think they've exaggerated this danger for a couple of key reasons. I think it's a problem the United States would have to manage but I don't think that a decay of these alliances is the likely outcome. Two reasons, one is if these allies start to doubt the US commitment they won't be happy but what they're gonna want they're gonna want the alliance more than ever because they need the US for their security and so I think that Japan will actually embrace the alliance and try to figure out ways to convince the United States to act in ways that restore its credibility. This is a standard sort of realist argument. If you're more threatened you need your allies more not less. It's unlikely Japan would say you're not reliable anymore leave they're gonna need us more and I think that would be an unhappy but natural reaction. That might seem counterintuitive but it's actually a very straightforward balance of power kind of argument. But second, the United States can do a variety of things to try to maintain its credibility in the eyes of Japan and South Korea. It can explain why Taiwan is a very different type of interest to the United States and to China than these alliances are which will make sense. It may not be easy but will make sense to them and the United States can do a variety of things in terms of its declaratory policy but also its forced deployments to make it clear that it's committed to the region even if it's less committed to Taiwan. Okay I think I'm running out of time so let me just say a few things that I think deserve further consideration than enter the thinking through this Taiwan policy and I'm skipping a few other points that I would like to make. But my bottom line is that we need to think creatively about alternatives to the status quo. One way to put it is wouldn't it be odd that if the balance of power globally is changing dramatically but the policy that we've had for 20 or 30 years turns out to still be the right policy, it's possible. But chances are there's some other policy out there that's a better match to the future which is gonna be a very different looking future. Odd coincidence has happened but this would be a very odd one. So it makes me think we need to be careful not just to be stuck where we are although there is some past dependence that flows from having made commitments. So what are the possibilities? We could slow the sale of arms. This doesn't mean negotiating with China over Taiwan but it could create a window in which there were fewer problems created by arms sales in which China came to understand that the United States was more willing to try and accommodate its interest but we still could keep our commitment to defend Taiwan if China launched an unprovoked attack. You can make the alternative argument which is we should actually keep the arms sales but we should say Taiwan is on its own to defend itself. So we'd still be maintaining some responsibility for Taiwan but we'd be saying we're not gonna end up in a fighting crisis or a fighting war in Northeast Asia over Taiwan. Or we could do both. So there's all different degrees and none of these have to be high level declarations. They can all be things that will be understood over time that allows this relationship to evolve in a way that's productive. The most ambitious solution which is the one that I'm actually most interested in is a kind of grand bargain in the region which would be designed to deal specifically with concern about appeasement. And the argument here is that the United States does have other interests and its allies have other interests in maritime disputes in the region and you can imagine a set of very complicated and multilateral negotiations where we're not negotiating for Taiwan but in which we explain to China that if there's progress or resolution of disputes in the East China Sea and the South China Sea that we're willing over time to change our policy toward Taiwan. This solves a number of problems simultaneously because those other, those disputes are also potentially dangerous for the United States and resolution of those disputes isn't our interest as well as our allies' interest. And it essentially deals with or doesn't solve the concern about our resolve because we'll actually be making it clear that we care not only about our direct, our allies but in fact their security and resource interests. Now in this one I think the devil's in the details because each of these is hard to resolve on their own but if you think about a decade long policy it's at least worth exploring. So let me stop there. That's just to try to share my perspective on this. I think that the specifics of the arguments obviously have to be worked out but that's the spirit in which I think we should proceed on this issue. Thanks very much Charles. Michael Swain, over to you. Do you can stay seated? I'm just lazy. Thanks very much, I apologize. I have a cold and we'll see how long I last. All very interesting presentations and let me just say for the record right at the start that a lot of people have looked at Charles Glazer's article in Foreign Affairs focused on his recommendations regarding Taiwan and discounted the argument as a result of this. I mean the larger argument that he makes about security in the region and US-China relations, the security dilemma, what it is and what it isn't and many people criticize him because he's not an Asianist in making these arguments. Well, I've studied China for probably all my adult life, 30 years or more and there's nothing in Charles Glazer's article that I disagree with other than Taiwan and the specific point he makes about Taiwan and his specific assessment of how the Chinese look at Japan which I think is not quite correct. But that's not saying, I mean the overall argument about the region, people should read because it is an important argument and it really states things that need to be discussed much more in the US government and in other places. So let me just, that's my modest attempt to try and say, you don't throw out this kind of an argument because he's not an Asianist. Nancy and Bonnie spend a lot of time in their article and I'm really responding to their article. I can say a few words about what, because they've added a few addendums here which I think were directed at a particular person. And we can go into that, but I just wanna say, focused on the article. They spend a lot of time arguing why abandoning Taiwan and they use that word repeatedly would be a bad thing for the US, for Taiwan and for the region. However, they never really seem to spell out how the proponents of this argument make that argument. In other words, what is that argument exactly? It seems to be taken by them as suddenly cutting all ties with the island, ending arms sales and repealing the TRA. And they suggest that this is what everybody from Bill Owens to Charles Glazer to Joe Priar to Bruce Gilly to myself have argued for. A clean, quick break and we're done with it. In fact, with a few possible exceptions, I don't see most of the so-called abandoned Taiwan advocates as saying this. Much of the talk is about gradually reducing levels of commitment in certain ways or permitting existing trends to run their course toward greater cross-street interaction or negotiating stability through mutual concessions, not unilateral concessions. Nancy and Bonnie apparently regard even such gradual steps or partial steps as abandonment, equivalent to abandonment or would inevitably lead to that outcome in any event. But lumping everybody together as proponents of abandonment or appeasement of China, even if they advocate a reduction in commitment or a modification in policy, in my view, does a disservice to the people who are making variations of this argument. Bonnie and Nancy don't focus on what sort of process might be involved to what ends under what circumstances other than to identify the motives of desiring to quote unquote, Jettison Taiwan in order to appease China and thereby improve US-China relations. That's apparently what the sum total is of the argument. In other words, to my view, to some extent, this is a straw man argument. It encourages observers, especially in Taiwan, to equate those who argue from modifications of policy that might be interpreted by some as severely reducing commitments to Taiwan as wholesale and abrupt abandonment, listing the many reasons why such an extreme action would be bad does not really get at the nature of the issue, in my opinion. The real question is, given that the Obama administration has sold more arms to Taiwan than any other administration and repeatedly asserted the basic elements of US policy toward Taiwan that Bonnie and Nancy say need to be stated, is it in fact this approach, US policy, is it the best one possible for protecting US interests over time, given specific types of trends and developments that we can see underway? Do existing trends and conditions argue for some type of reassessment of current US policy toward Taiwan? Or is any modification, any modification, other than strengthening ties with Taiwan to be viewed as abandonment and therefore dismissed? Bonnie and Nancy argue that the US needs to deepen its support for Taiwan and they argue that this should be done in many ways, political, diplomatic, military, economic. And this is supposedly because Taiwan needs more confidence and security in order to engage China. And yet Bonnie and Nancy, in arguing why abandonment is bad, offer several reasons to indicate why China would think, pardon me, they offer several reasons to suspect that China would not treat Taiwan well at all if there were even uncoerced unification, even if the Taiwanese might agree to some form of unification. And that a unified Taiwan and China might indeed undermine US strategic interests. They don't state this explicitly, but when I read it, boy, I certainly got that impression in some ways. They write of China's, quote, need to demonstrate its power. And they seem to associate this with China's domestic environment, that China's unstable domestic environment in some way emilitates the Chinese government in order to shore up their legitimacy to assert their power overseas. I don't know if that's the argument or not, but it seems like that's part of the argument. They state that ending arms sales is bad, in part because it would reduce US defense industry profits and cost defense industry jobs. Now this may well be true, but is this what one justification for this policy should be? And be stated publicly? And be conveyed that way to the Chinese? Now abandonment would undermine US business opportunities in Taiwan, they state. And undermine Taiwan's critical role as a democratic model in Asia and a vanguard for political developments in Asia. And they cite the Hong Kong example as a good example as to how authoritarian governments cannot coexist with democratic institutions. Is that really an apt comparison? I don't think it is. We can discuss that, but when Hong Kong reverted to China, it was not a democracy. Taiwan is a democracy. The problem in Hong Kong is how to become a democracy and become a more representative government and how China looks at that process. In Taiwan, it's a very different situation. And so the question there would be, does China or does China not undo democracy in Taiwan by having any kind of association with it that involves a compromise of Taiwan's sovereignty? And that is a very different question. So to my view, I think what people also need to do, Bonnie and Nancy say, they need to staunch this discussion about appeasement. Well, I think there also needs to be some effort to staunch the notion that the US is opposed to unification because I don't understand US policy in that way at all. And how to deal with looking at Nancy and Bonnie's paper, how to deal with the likely deepening of Chinese suspicion towards US motives that could very well result from this list of consequences and issues that I just described. Well, Bonnie and Nancy merely state that the US, quote, must find ways to convince Beijing that the United States does not seek to prevent an accommodation between Taiwan and China. And that China must be persuaded that arms sales facilitate cross-strait compromise. Indeed, they serve Beijing's interests. And that China must be persuaded that in the absence of US support, Taiwan would lose confidence and stop negotiating, declare independence or maybe acquire nukes. And so US support actually serves Taiwan interests and the more China's interests and the more US support, the better for China. It seems. Well, all I can say is good luck in achieving these goals by convincing the Chinese that they really are all wrong about this. My concern is really a somewhat different problem. It's not about trying to convince the Chinese they're wrong. It's about trying to establish some level of stability long-term in the presence of trends that I think are very destabilizing, despite all the improvements in cross-strait relations. Trends that I think require some level of reassessment of policies towards Taiwan and towards China regarding Taiwan. Some level of consideration about what indeed could result from the development of much greater Chinese levels of relative leverage along its periphery, military, political and economic, in the absence of any kind of substantive forward movement in cross-strait dialogue. And the likely fact that the United States, if China does not unilaterally draw down its military regarding Taiwan, would be forced to sell vastly more significant arms to Taiwan over time. And that this would become increasingly intolerable to the Chinese. And that we begin to overshadow other efforts to compensate for that fact in the Chinese calculus. That's the problem to me. If China doesn't develop these capabilities relatively speaking, if China unilaterally draws down its military, if cross-strait relations do have a breakthrough and move politically towards some kind of stabilizing modus fivendi, then you can throw away my concerns. They don't matter. But I'm just simply saying, we need to think hard about this and about what the implications of it long time over time will be and whether or not the current policies are adequate to deal with it. And I'll stop there. Thanks. Thanks very much. What we're gonna do for the Q and A session is the standard. If folks could identify themselves and the institution at which they work, we have microphones in the back. If you can wait until I call on you and please keep your comments or questions short. We have a lot of people in the audience and I expect a lot of questions. We'll try and do this in two rounds to give the authors a chance to interact with the audience rather than just dumping everything forward. We'll start here in the front and then over here and there for the first three. Thanks. I'm Tom Rekford with the World Affairs Council. I wonder if the authors of the principal article considered what would happen if there were a change of government in Taiwan. It's one thing to have the Kuomintang run the country and which favors improving relations with China. But if the DPP were to come back, would that make a difference in US policy? Sorry, we'll collect a couple of questions. The second question over here, if I can get a microphone. And then the table behind for the next one just to queue you up. Yes, I'm Jonathan Pollock from Brookings. My thanks to all the contributors to put their ideas on the table. A comment and a question. The comment I fear, maybe this is a conceit of all people who put their views in print is there's a very over-determined quality to all of what I've heard here. I think that there is an underlying subtext which both papers dance around to an extent. And that's presumptions about what I'll call either the Imagine China or the Imagine Taiwan. It would seem to me as a general proposition we should not, American authors should not be advising other governments on what's good or bad for them. They can make their own determinations. So there is a connection here. My query though is more to Bonnie and maybe even more to Nancy. Nancy, you recited a very, very long list of imagined horribles here. And the implication was also that arms sales to Taiwan would be a curative for those imagined horribles. What I'm curious about is if I were to take your arguments and apply them to the normalization of US-China relations at the end of 1978, would you have argued that that was a good or a bad thing to do? There were a lot of arguments very similar to the ones you were characterizing that were made precisely at that time that it would doom the US-Japan relationship, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We're all familiar with that. So I'm wondering if you could explicate that a little more. And maybe if both papers or paperwriters, all paperwriters, could talk a bit more about what are the true underlying assumptions that you're making here about the efficacy of different kinds of American policies. I'm still left a bit in the dark on that. Thank you. And then at the table behind, perfect. Dave Brown from Zan, from CICE. Abandonment and appeasement are sort of black and white political terms. I have a comment and a question. The comment relates to the absoluteness of things. And one of the things that is not absolute that seems to come through from the papers and the presenters' comments is that our commitment to Taiwan is absolute. We don't have an absolute commitment to Taiwan. We have one which is nuanced, stated in the Taiwan Relations Act. We are not obliged to come to Taiwan's defense. I think that's well understood, but I just wanted to make it because it links to the second point, which is also the question that Tom Rekford asked. And that is that the paper seems to imply that there is no domestic politics in Taiwan where we know that there are fundamentally different policies towards cross-strait relations from the KMT and the DPP. And I would like the authors of the paper to talk a little bit about what the implications of those differences are for policy because it seems to me they're quite substantial. Since we don't have an absolute commitment to Taiwan, if a DPP government is in office and provoking trouble, then providing arms is not facilitating negotiations. It's tending to facilitate resistance to negotiations and hardline policies on the part of the DPP. During Chen Shui Dan's administration, the United States had to do one thing that Bonnie mentioned, which was signal that we have very different policies with Chen Shui Dan, and we had to do that not just in a political way, but by actually cutting back on the pace of defense sales to Taiwan in order to make a political point. That point was welcomed in Beijing and contributed to good US-China relations, even though it was taken for very different reasons than Beijing might have thought. And I think it also contributed to something which I would like to put in a slightly different way than the authors do. And that is what people in the region want is not just firm American commitment to Taiwan, but a sophisticated policy for managing relations in order to avoid a conflict which would force many countries in the region to be put in a position where they have to pick between the US and China. So it's the sophistication of the policy that's important. And there is where I come down in favor of the arguments that the article made. I think it makes a very good case for why current US policy is a sophisticated one for promoting US interests. Yeah, as I said, with that, we're gonna move from the early stated cases into the sophisticated nuances of the questions. Let me start with Nancy and Bonnie and then give Charles and Michael a chance to respond as well, and we'll go back for another round of questions after that. I'm not sure how Dave got from where he started to are being sophisticated, but thank you. I'm gonna take up a few of these things and then I'm sure Bonnie will either speak to those same ones or others. Just to begin with, I think it was Jonathan's question about whether we would have taken a position at the time of normalization with China that would have opposed that because of the damage it might do in other ways. In those days, I was actually very skeptical about Taiwan because it was not a democracy. It had a government. I didn't think we should be supporting. So the whole context is different. But on the other hand, and this is perhaps too scholarly an article for many people in this room to be familiar with, but I wrote one a few years ago in the Journal of American History, which argued that while normalization was the right thing to do, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sold out Taiwan by making a series of commitments on Taiwan's behalf or behind Taiwan's back that made the situation not only more difficult for Taiwan, but in addition made China believe that we were walking away from Taiwan. And then when we didn't and the Taiwan Relations Act happened, they felt betrayed as they should have been. So I think the context is different, but the bottom line is, and I've forgotten whose question this ties to, but yes, there has to be a difference in American policy depending on what the government in Taiwan is, just like what the government in Britain is or France is or Greece is, but our commitment is to the people of Taiwan and not to any particular government that is hopefully democratically elected. So yes, we can signal to a Chen Shui-bian that we think he is behaving badly, but I don't think that means that we cut off arms sales, which then means that for a significant period of time, whether or not they stay in power, the whole pipeline, the whole supply chain to Taiwan freezes. And so yes, then you get a government you like better, you can't start things up quickly again. So I think our commitment has to be a long-term commitment to a democracy in Taiwan and there have to be other ways to signal concern to a particular government other than cutting our farm sales, refusing to send cabinet officials and not being willing to talk to their officials. Final word is we make a very strong case for why summit meetings are important and the fact that Obama meets with Hu Jintao and other Chinese leaders regularly, we think is important. The fact that George Bush looked into Putin's eyes and their souls met or something, we thought was important. The fact that our president never can meet a leader of Taiwan I think is dangerous because you lack that ability to judge other leaders or for them to understand where American leaders are coming from. So for the very same reason that we think it's very important for Obama to meet with Hu Jintao, I think at the very least he ought to be able to pick up the phone and talk to Ma Yingzhou or as Bonnie said, do a video conference. I mean, the human interface I think is very critical to being sure that the message is clearly received on both sides. Okay, the first thing that I wanna do is to underscore that there is nothing in our article that suggests that the integration of the mainland and Taiwan is bad for American interests and in fact, I think Michael you read an excerpt in your presentation that suggested just the opposite and I believe very strongly that we do need to reassure Beijing that we are not seeking to undermine their objective of unification. This is ultimately up to the people of Taiwan. It's not up to the people of the United States and frankly, I think it shouldn't be up to the people on mainland China. And the reason why I think this is important is because if we can convince the Chinese that this is truly our objective is to allow the people of Taiwan to decide, then Beijing's efforts will be less on the United States to stop arms sales to Taiwan and more on the people of Taiwan to win over the hearts and the minds of people there. Ultimately, China's efforts are misplaced when they are constantly trying to convince the United States to change its policy, they should be trying to convince the people of Taiwan that there are benefits to reunifying with the mainland. So we should not stand in the middle. I also certainly don't think that there's anything in the article that suggests that we are opposed to China's peaceful rise or think that that's improbable. I personally believe that it is. I'd like to comment on this question also about there's a DPP return to power. Of course, ironically, in the question that you ask if we look back at the Chen Shui-bian period in which Taiwan was pursuing provocative policies that were damaging to American interests, we expanded our defense relationship with Taiwan in many important ways, going way beyond arms sales. And that had nothing to do with who was in power in Taiwan. It had to do with the very dangerous nature of the capabilities that China was acquiring against Taiwan. And so ultimately, I would agree with Nancy, we had these enduring interests with Taiwan. Now, we might want to change other policies. We did have President Bush sat down alongside of Wenjiabao and said that leader who wants to pursue unilateral to changes to the status quo is a problem or something to that effect. And so, yes, you might want to change other policies, but when it comes to ensuring that Taiwan is the capability to defend itself, that we have the capabilities in place, should we make the decision, as David Brand very correctly says, there is no automaticity to the Taiwan Relations Act, should we make the decision that we want to defend Taiwan in the event that China attacks it, that we have those capabilities and we can do it. Thank you. Charles, you wanna add anything? This is a little bit oblique, but it was one of the questions had to do with what our assumptions were about China. And so I do think it's useful to get on the table that your view about accommodation or call it appeasement in the more negative sense does depend upon your view about the extent of China's motives. I think the underlying thing that makes Taiwan different or potentially different from the US perspective is that China could care a great deal about unification with Taiwan and not care nearly that much about anything else. And if that's true, then the basic logic of this discredited kind of policy, which is accommodation or appeasement is the logic is often strong from the perspective of a major power that making some number of concessions with an adversary that or potential adversary that has limited objectives can be a successful policy. It's not one you necessarily like, but international politics is not only about what we like or even what we desire. And so I haven't built my argument on the crystal clear assumption that that's what China's motives are. I think that expert opinion says that there is this decreasing hierarchy which falls off pretty quickly once you get beyond Taiwan and that in that kind of situation we just is why we need to think hard about a change. And furthermore that when you face uncertainty about motives or the extent of motives you can often pursue a policy of hedging which is to more energetically protect the layer of interest that you're committed to protecting which both clarifies your determination and increases your capability so that not all concessions necessarily put you on a very quick slippery slope. So in terms of assumptions I wouldn't say I'm assuming that that's what China's motives are or necessarily assuming that they won't change in the future but I think that that is more than the modal bet on what they are and that given that kind of situation there are appropriate policies for balancing out the risks. Michael the short story of going last is I was gonna ask you whatever question got dropped in your lap and they picked on all of them so you've got a free reign on what you wanna comment on on that group. I think a lot of this discussion does revolve around certain basic assumptions about US interests and about Chinese interests and flexibility on both sides. If the United States can sustain the level of dominance in the Western Pacific that's required in my view to maintain a clear and sure deterrence on Beijing that it would not resort to any form of coercion even as it proceeds to strengthen Taiwan's military capabilities and there is no resolution of the cross straight interaction that leads to some sort of dialogue then we're okay. If the US can sustain that level of dominance and retain that level of deterrence and it doesn't have collateral damages that are really significant for US interests then even if the Chinese regard this as a core interest we can maintain the status quo indefinitely but what I'm saying and I think what Charles is saying to some degree is that we have to think about those assumptions and we have to think about what the Chinese regard as acceptable or unacceptable but it's a really hard problem I mean this is not easy if it were we'd know what the answer is. You hear the standard line from the Chinese all the time about how important Taiwan is and what they wouldn't do what they would do I mean I heard it just yesterday and what they're committed to and you can't believe everything that's being said obviously but you can look at what they're doing and what they're doing is really quite significant particularly in the military realm and what they're doing is particularly very significant in the economic realm and the diplomatic realm with regard to China, Taiwan pardon me and both of those things are both disturbing and reassuring at the same time and so the problem for the United States is over time how confident is it that its level of leverage in this situation will retain, will maintain itself over time and that we don't need to talk to the Chinese? I mean there's, it always strikes me as kind of strange if somebody came down from another planet and looked at this situation the first thing they would do is say well the US needs to talk to the Chinese about this right? No, US can't talk to the Chinese about it. That's impossible but wait a minute this is a potential cause of conflict between two great powers in the western Pacific and they're both engaged in trends that are extremely destabilizing and yet they're not gonna interact about it? No, they can't. And to me it just becomes increasingly a difficult position to take but I know the counterarguments to it and Bonnie and Nancy have laid them out in part it's because the US isn't competent. Right? The US isn't competent in really negotiating with the Chinese on this because they're gonna get used. They're gonna get manipulated, they're gonna get outmaneuvered, they're gonna get drawn in, all hell's gonna break loose. And I'm not the biggest, I don't have the greatest confidence in US diplomacy in every case and I don't think we should but this is an issue that really does deserve some serious thinking about what could or could not what might or might not be possible in dealing with the Chinese and I'd just like to emphasize this isn't from my point of view this isn't about stopping arm sales to Taiwan. It's about really assessing whether or not it's possible to reach an understanding with Beijing that it actually could that would involve sacrifice on China's part in the way it manages Taiwan in return for certain changes in US policy and whether or not that is possible. Now the argument can be, it's not possible. You can't decide on what would be sacrificed on both sides. You can't confirm whether or not the Chinese would hold faith with whatever they agree to because they're cheaters. A whole list of things you can lay out as to why this is not feasible but you can also lay out a whole list of reasons why it's possible and which I've tried to do in this recent book I wrote but I think that's worth considering anyway. Bonnie wants to have one quick thing and then we'll have a final round of questions. Just very quickly, I certainly personally don't think that the issue is the competency of US policy and I don't necessarily think that it's the issue of the six assurances and nobody has raised that yet here today but the United States does have assurances to Taiwan one of which is that it will not consult China when making arms sales to Taiwan but I'm gonna set that aside because that's not the argument that I'm making here. I disagree I think with Michael on the confidence that I have in the two sides of the straits abilities to work this out on their own and I look at what has been accomplished in the cross-strait relationship over the last three years and see remarkable progress and I think that there is a possibility that the two sides could make further progress. There are discussions underway on both sides of the strait not between them about the possibility for example of military confidence building measures and there are some discussions that have taken place again not yet between each other on the possibility of an interim agreement or peace accord and just the other day President Ma said that he is willing to consider the possibility of signing a peace accord sometime within the next 10 years. Of course he would if reelected he'll only be there for another four but he's saying this is something this is something that he doesn't rule out before he was elected I think he actually thought about doing this within his own terms in office and I wouldn't even rule that out if he is reelected. So I have great confidence in the ability of the two sides to work out their differences in the absence of very firm US support for Taiwan my confidence then diminishes. Okay, I saw one hand in the back second one there and a third there and then we'll see where we're at. John Zan with CTI TV of Taiwan thank you very much for a very timely debate. Well the first quick comment on the seating arrangement it's obvious to the eye who still represent the mainstream and who are on the sidelines. I hope that will not be changing for the next 10 years. Quick question here, we are debating whether or not the United States should change its policy with regards to Taiwan but isn't the policy already changing or the way the policy how the policy is implemented is already changing. Look at arms sales, look at arms sales. You know people talk about the TRA people talk about the actual needs of Taiwan's defense. Well realistically according to Taiwan's defense needs according to the TRA I think selling F-22s or even F-35s to Taiwan would probably not be sufficient enough to rebalance the cross street air power. So the policy is already changing. The Taiwan has asked for F-16 CDs for five years, for five years and today we still do not see the CDs on the list. Isn't that kind of subtle change if not within the policy but within the way that the policy is implemented? What about 10 years later, 20 years later? Thank you very much. Second question is over here on the side. My name is Garrett Van De Wees, I'm editor of Taiwan Communique. I want to pick up on the issue that was raised by Nancy just in the last comment and that's the basic reason why we do support Taiwan and that's its recent democracy which only really happened in the late 80s, early 90s. Could you perhaps elaborate a little bit more on why democracy is really a reason to expand our relations with Taiwan and to enhance them? Not just for the reason that it is a basic US value but also because of the lighthouse effect for China itself, one of the reasons that China is so adamant about Taiwan is that it is a democracy and it's right there on the doorstep and an example for the people in China which the rulers in Beijing don't like very much. And then right here in the middle for the third. Hi, Nadia Chow with Liberty Times, Taiwan. Recently, Secretary Hillary Clinton made an important speech, also an important article about the US's re-engagement in Asia Pacific, but she didn't mention one word about Taiwan. I'm just wondering, when US is trying to re-engage Asia, where does Taiwan fit? People talk about the first island chain before, does that still matter to the US security in Asia? And my second question is that even the Taiwan wants to reach a peace accord or motive the vanity with China. In the right now, the deterrence not only come from military but also come from the US support. The deterrence means that the US support, international support, so it's not only a military might matters. So in the future, if we want Taiwan to achieve a kind of political arrangement, the international US endorsement's still important. So would US ever concede to be the guarantor for this kind of agreement? Maybe that's what Mike, I don't know if that's what Mike talk about in your article. Thank you. I'm gonna add one final question to this mix and then give each of the speakers, I should say, about five minutes to respond. We had a question before from Tom about changes in Taiwanese politics. A Beijing-based colleague of mine in trying to explain the Chinese reaction to the 2010 arms sales package, which was a surprise to many in Washington, said that it was a particular importance to Hu Jintao and his legacy that he'd be seen as an improvement in cross-strait relations. That was part of the legacy he was looking for as he was moving out of office. So particularly for those of you that are China focused, what will that legacy be, do you think, for Hu Jintao's term? And how might it change in Chinese politics with the upcoming generational transition starting this summer moving forward? How might that change the Chinese sensitivities or Chinese approach to the cross-strait issues? Let me start with, let's go in the same order with and start with Nancy and then Bonnie Charles and Michael DeClos. I was gonna make Bonnie talk first. Let's see, I guess to begin with, to begin with the question of the F-16 CD sales and U.S. unresponsiveness to requests, that's by no means new. The United States has often over time not sold to Taiwan what Taiwan would like to have. Often it has said Taiwan isn't asking strongly enough or regularly enough or whatever, but we do make those judgments, I think with Taiwan's needs in mind, but I would say also with China policy in mind, regardless of the six assurances in the TRA, I think that China becomes a very important variable as policy makers sit in their offices and think about this, but also depending on where U.S. politics are at any given time. And where I thought Alex was going with his question was, will the change in American leadership make a difference here? We have to remember that there's gonna be a lot of fluidity. I would say offhand Taiwan's not gonna be a big issue in the American elections and that China will be only in so far as it's an economic issue, but the economic issue is important in this context. Michael objected to our mention of the defense industry in the article. I'm not saying that we should do things because of the defense industry. On the other hand, we are talking about thousands of jobs that may or may not exist depending on whether the F-16 production line is operational or not. And if we're talking about somewhere between 13 and 26,000 jobs, that's of significance in our economy. As far as the lighthouse effect of Taiwan and its democracy, I think that's important for China. Although that argument can go either way because some people argue that if Taiwan becomes part of China, it will have even a stronger influence on the future of Chinese politics and that's not an argument that I like particularly, but I think Taiwan has had a lighthouse effect for the whole region. The Chinese sometimes look at what happens in the legislative you want and people throwing chairs at each other and saying is this democracy and do we want this? I would remind you as a historian, I have to do this, that in the early days of the US Congress, people were hitting each other over the head with their canes and there was bloodshed there too. Democracy is messy, but that's part of what we like about it. What can I say? Final thing that I wanna say is Michael earlier made the point about Hong Kong and that not being a terribly good illustration or parallel for what we're saying, but that's what the Chinese use. I mean, one country, two systems was used for Hong Kong but with the intention of inducing Taiwan to wanna become part of China because one country, two systems worked so well. Well, it doesn't work so well and whether Hong Kong was or was not a democracy when unification happened in 1997, it is the case that freedoms of assembly and speech have been curtailed, that the press in Hong Kong self-censors because they're concerned that China has been very slow in moving towards greater democracy despite its pledges that it was gonna do so in terms of elections and other things. I think it's very hard, and we say in the article, you can't expect a communist or an authoritarian government of any kind to nurture democracy. That's not what it's there for and it doesn't understand democracy. Some of the big problems we have with China is that it doesn't understand our system and it doesn't understand democracy in Taiwan. On Nadia, your question about Secretary Clinton's article, I personally would have liked to have seen a mention of Taiwan in that article though I don't think that Taiwan's importance to the United States is really geostrategic as you imply by mentioning the first island chain and as I said in my presentation, I know that is very much the prism through which Japan looks at Taiwan. I happen to more agree with Garrett Vanderewies and that's in that regard that it really is about democracy and our support for Taiwan's democracy. One could also, for example, have mentioned that the United States welcomes Taiwan's participation eventually in the Trans-Pacific Partnership as an economic entity, just as it is a member in the World Trade Organization. So I think that there could have been space allocated to that issue, there was not, obviously. Now the question of the U.S. role as a guarantor, I'm not quite sure guarantor for what. If the two sides of the strait reach an agreement, for example, that involves reduction of China's missiles and Taiwan does other things and I don't want to speculate here, but they could be political, not just military. And if Taiwan doesn't have the means to verify whether or not missiles are being moved or destroyed, then there is a role perhaps for national technical means. That is an example where I could see the United States or other players playing a role. But I don't think, first of all, any guarantor must be trusted and accepted by both sides. My guess is that Beijing would look to another country, potentially, as a guarantor. So some country might play that role. It doesn't even have to be the United States. And then I'd just like to briefly comment on Alex's question. Increasingly, I think people on the mainland are seeing that the improvement in the cross-strait relationship is Hu Jintao's legacy. That it has, in fact, demonstrated the correctness of a policy of emphasizing peaceful development across the straight. And let's not forget that Jiang Zemin was pushing the idea of a timetable for use of force against Taiwan. So this was a very fundamental reversal in a policy that the mainland had been pursuing. This is not necessarily a very popular policy. Does it have its supporters on the mainland? Absolutely. But there are some on the mainland who believe that China has been too soft, has been too tolerant of Ma Yingzhou, and basically let him get the advantage in many of the agreements that have been negotiated, including the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement. And so I would cite one such example of a military officer who argued that Ma Yingzhou is essentially pursuing peaceful separation. So what I hear from some people on the mainland is that it is possible that if the DPP comes back to power, that Hu Jintao's legacy will essentially be lost and that his successors, Xi Jinping and the new leadership, will be compelled to pursue a much tougher policy against Taiwan. That is something for us to think about. We should not be pursuing policy so that we shape what the mainland does toward Taiwan, but we have to analytically understand the impact that it could have. And I think that we should try and have Taiwan, and have Taiwan, I think, send signals that it wants to send to Hu Jintao about what policies that it would pursue if the DPP comes back to power. That is ultimately up to Tsai Ing-wen if she wins the election. Reassurances if she chooses to give them about acceptance of, for example, the Republic of China Constitution. Because if she is elected, she would indeed be the president of the Republic of China, not Taiwan. So I would argue that there are ways to ease mainland China's concerns about her, about the DPP, even in ways that might preserve that legacy of peaceful development across the strait. Thank you. Yeah, very good. Just two very quick words. It seems to me one of the things we also have to keep in mind is even if Tsai doesn't win and Ma is re-elected, the pressure on Ma may escalate a lot between January and the Party Congress in the fall to come across with something so that Hu Jintao will look better. And so that the efforts that he's made will be seen to have been the right thing. And in that line, we also should look at Xi Jinping very carefully. He has had a lot of Taiwan related experience because of his previous positions on the southeast coast of China. And it could be said that that will make him softer, but what I've read tends to think that will probably make him tougher than Hu Jintao, but then who knows. But there's a lot of that internal dynamic that could change things a lot. Charles. Okay, I'll just make a couple of quick comments which are more general than the questions because none of them were directed at me. So I'd say that as I listen to the conversation and the comments, I think it's important to step back and keep the Taiwan issue in the bigger perspective, which is at least that most people think and you can think of it as an IR theorist or just sort of anybody watching international politics that the trajectory of US-China relations over the next few decades is critical to US security and that we're really just at the beginning of this transformation of the relationship. And so that when we think about Taiwan, we need to think about it in terms of what set of policies are likely to put the United States on the trajectory, maybe for this century, but at least for the next half century that isn't most in the US interest, broadly defined to include its security, but also its other political and ideological interests, including democracy, human rights, political freedom, and so forth, so the whole list. But you don't have to be a realist to say that US security doesn't literally dominate all of them but it takes priority when there's a conflict between them. And so I think we need to ask how confident are each of you that the United States and China will be able to avoid conflict over the next 50 years and what impact are current policies that the US has available to change that likelihood in a way that it's in our interest? That's a daunting question obviously because we know that conflict comes from all sorts of unexpected roots and pairs, but we also know that some sources of conflict are understandable and if not absolutely predictable. So we didn't hear much about the probability of US-China conflict, we heard a lot about Taiwan and domestic politics and arms sales and so forth and those are all very important today at a policy and the US-Taiwan policy but we're sort of missing the boat if we can't relate these choices to their impact on a trajectory that's gonna evolve over this decade and the next few decades. And so it's from that perspective that we need to step back and try to understand how the issues we're dealing with today which are sort of small influence that trajectory. I think there are only a handful of issues between the United States and China that we can sort of predict will influence that trajectory. I think that US policy toward Taiwan is the most important. I think that US decisions about how to deal with China's development of the survival of nuclear forces may be the second most important. And then third I think how we decide to stay in Northeast Asia how we maintain the alliances we have in the region is maybe second or third most important. I don't know how you put that in the context. I tend to focus on nuclear issues so I may overvalue that but I sort of do see the danger over this decade of serious tensions over China's efforts to deploy a large survival nuclear force. So it's in that context that I think that we need to decide how to deal with Taiwan. And I don't think that unless you're confident that we're gonna be able to avoid conflict which most people are not. I mean I'm most comfortable with somebody that I'm looking 30 years down the road and I'm confident there's no conflict happening between the United States and China. In that case we can do whatever we want to with respect to helping achieve our goals in Taiwan but if we're not confident then it does seem like the greatest way that we're gonna the most likely way to get it in that conflict is over Taiwan. Now the authors of the paper Nancy and Bonnie have said well we're actually gonna improve the relationship by strengthening our commitment to Taiwan. That's possible I don't, I just, it doesn't seem right to me but if they're right then it's easy there's no trade-off. We can achieve our objectives for democracy and freedom or at least try to stick to them at the same time that we increase our security. But if they're not right then there's a much more serious trade-off than is typically confronted. Michael Rathen saying last but not least I'll say you've got the parting shots within reason unless somebody gets it out of it. I'm kind of pooped. I guess I should just add I think it's important for people to understand we're all engaging in this back and forth about Taiwan and policy towards Taiwan and the logic of continuing U.S. policy or modifying it. But I haven't seen much of any evidence that any of this discussion goes on in the U.S. government. And that again is kind of reassuring and troublesome at the same time, right? I mean it's reassuring that Taiwan itself should not draw from this the conclusion that the U.S. is considering radical alternatives to U.S. policy. Including the idea of abandoning Taiwan. Now I don't follow this as closely in terms of inside the U.S. government as perhaps Nancy or Bonnie do. And maybe they've seen more to substantiate this kind of discussion than I have but I haven't seen much of anything. The U.S. government tends to operate under large amounts of inertia. And as I see it and it tends to take a position that if a problem isn't broken today in an obvious way then don't try to fix it. So I mean that's reassuring in the sense that Taiwan shouldn't think that there is some sudden, it's all hanging in the balance here. Because it's not. I wish some things would be considered more. And maybe they will be but I have little expectation that you're gonna see an upswell in the U.S. government of a desire to either abandon Taiwan or start engaging in negotiations with Beijing. Both of them hold risks for sure. And the question is are the risks really greater than any possible benefits? And a lot of these questions hinge on the stuff that the issues that Charles just raised. And the U.S. isn't terribly good and neither is any country making long range predictions. But I will say one thing and that is that the U.S. is very committed to the notion that stability and peace in Asia are best served by maintaining American predominance in the military realm in the maritime theater. I'm not talking about the continent of Asia. And that from that flows all kinds of benefits. But that kind of an assumption I think is and the policies that attach to it is increasingly coming under greater scrutiny by countries that are fearful and by countries that to some degree are hopeful. And I think China ultimately is, well China is on the fence on this issue in some ways but I don't think it is terribly supportive of the idea of the status quo continuing indefinitely. And that factor has to be really seriously considered. How to either change Chinese views on this or change American views on it. And what would best serve the interests of the two countries over the longer term. Thank you. With that I just want to leave two final notes. One is no matter what is on the cover of the journal I think all of you who follow the journal know that China is probably the topic that appears most frequently. In the winter issue coming up in December related to this discussion we have both the piece by Cheng Li from Brookings because we've got to put Brookings into the group as well. On the power transition to the generational transition coming in China as part of the feature section on 2012 power transitions with other articles on Russia and France and their upcoming elections with very different processes in those two countries at least. And we also have a piece on the prospects for and trends in Chinese democracy by two Chinese authors that were particularly excited about coming out in that issue. The second thing is I want to ask you all of you to help me thank a couple of people. One is in the back Savina Rapani and the staff for doing all the hard work to bring this whole issue together. Savina is the one who's looking terrified in the back of having her name called out. And also of course the speakers, both our neighbors Michael Swain from Carnegie particularly Charles Glazer from GW for coming into the Lion's Den. Nancy and Bonnie of course as well. Thank you all for joining us and please help me thank them for a great discussion.