On Monday, March 1, the Brookings Institution and Tsinghua University provided a forum for leading public health and medical experts in both countries to explore the way forward with concrete policy recommendations for medical and research cooperation, vaccine development and distribution, and international protocols for global travel and trade.

Viewers submitted questions via email to events@brookings.edu or join the conversation on Twitter using #USChina.

      

The episode symbolizes the quiet but essential role that Lord played throughout Kissinger’s tenure in government. Serving first as Kissinger’s deputy in the White House and then as director of the Policy Planning Staff in Kissinger’s State Department, Lord was instrumental to an astounding array of U.S. foreign policy feats: from the SALT Agreement to limit the arms race with the Soviet Union, to negotiations with the North Vietnamese that nearly ended the conflict and earned Kissinger a Nobel Peace Prize, to the invention of shuttle diplomacy as a means of halting the Yom Kippur War.

On October 11, the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings hosted Ambassador Lord for the launch of his new book, “Kissinger on Kissinger: Reflections on Diplomacy, Grand Strategy, and Leadership” (St. Martin’s Press, 2019). In conversation with Strobe Talbott—a distinguished fellow at Brookings who served as deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration—Lord shared highlights from the project and insights from his years of working with Kissinger. After the discussion, a Q&A session followed.

      

In recent decades, China has been plowing a sizable share of its growing economic strength into developing advanced military capabilities. As Beijing’s military build-up progresses, concerns naturally mount in Taiwan about its continued security. A certain amount of concern is healthy. It disciplines voters to ask hard questions of their leaders about the appropriate balance of risk in pursuit of objectives. It also instills a sense of urgency to tackle big problems, instead of getting bogged down in petty debates of the day.

Too much anxiety, though, can harm society, by generating a sense of helplessness about Taiwan’s future. This, in turn, can lead the younger generation to pursue opportunities abroad, rather than investing in their futures at home. It can cause multinational companies and overseas investors to go elsewhere in pursuit of opportunities. It can arouse opposition to prudent prioritization of funding for national defense, because, the thinking goes, it’s futile to attempt to match the mainland’s military capabilities. And it can lead to polarization on sovereignty-related questions, with some advocating a strategy of suing for peace and accommodating the mainland, while others throw their backing behind risky gambits to change Taiwan’s status. In other words, Taiwan society daily confronts a difficult balancing act between prudent vigilance against threats, resignation to a future not of its choosing, and impulses toward risk-taking at the expense of centrist support for sustaining the status quo. These are not just academic questions. They have a direct bearing on the confidence, cohesion, and resiliency of Taiwan’s society. In many respects, these are the factors that will be the most decisive for the future of Taiwan.

This is why I am not an enthusiast of putting significant stock in capability counting of military assets on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. While such factors cannot — and should not — be overlooked, they also should not lead to hopelessness about Taiwan’s ability to defend itself. Thinking about a cross-Strait conflict as an arithmetic war of attrition between Taiwan and China is the wrong frame for evaluating risk.

Should Beijing ever initiate military action against Taiwan, it would have to contend with the risk of the United States and others entering the conflict. It would have to factor in the risk of having its energy supply lines cut off, its economy crippled, and its international status tarnished. It also would have to weigh the risk that anything short of quick and absolute surrender by the people of Taiwan could call into question the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party.

Beijing is keenly aware that it imports roughly half of its energy from the Middle East, and that it does not have the naval capacity to protect its sea lanes of communication along the entire route. It actively is seeking to reduce this vulnerability, but this will be a multi-decade effort. And as astute observers of history, Chinese leaders surely also have examined the lessons of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the role that failed adventurism there played in seeding conditions for the ultimate collapse of the USSR. Even as these factors should offer relief against fears of bolt from the blue military attacks, it would be dangerous for them to lead to complacency. There is much work to be done to strengthen Taiwan’s ability to chart a peaceful future for itself.

Taiwan’s voters will face an important decision in January. I hope they elect leaders who understand the need for balance and steadiness, instead of those who rely on charisma and offer promises without consideration of potential consequences. I also hope the next wave of leaders demonstrate competence at overcoming partisan divisions. It is no secret that Beijing prefers a polarized and divided Taiwan to a strong and unified Taiwan. A fractured polity is easier for Beijing to pull in its preferred direction.

To flourish in the face of Beijing’s mounting pressure, Taiwan’s political system needs to show it is capable of solving society’s most pressing challenges, whether they relate to reforming the educational system, improving labor force participation, expanding access to affordable housing, improving access to reliable energy sources, or other pressing issues. Of course, Taiwan’s military also plays a crucial role in safeguarding security. Taiwan needs to strengthen its investment in innovative and asymmetric capabilities, not by trying to match the mainland platform for platform and competing against China’s strengths, but rather by strengthening its ability to take advantage of geographic advantages, where the defender has the edge and the vulnerabilities from an invading force are most acute. Taiwan’s security services also would do well to better incorporate emerging technologies into defense doctrine. But at the end of the day, I expect that the threshold question will be whether Taiwan’s political system works.

The more that Taiwan’s political leaders can demonstrate capacity for comity and compromise, the more confidence the people of Taiwan justifiably will have in their future. Taiwan’s January 2020 election provides an opportunity for its people to show the world its democratic experiment is thriving. I hope they take it.

      

How does Hong Kong—a city uniquely positioned at the crossroads of East and West—view the state of global trade? How will global trade tensions impact the city? What role can Hong Kong play in sustaining the future of free trade and in navigating U.S.-China tensions?

On June 12, the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings hosted an event to examine the state of free trade in Hong Kong. The Honorable Edward Yau Tang-wah, secretary for commerce and economic development in Hong Kong, delivered keynote remarks, sharing the city’s perspective on free trade. After that, a panel of experts considered the prospects for free trade in Hong Kong before taking questions from the audience.

      

With so much news taking place inside Taiwan recently, one could be forgiven for not paying as close of attention to the seismic shifts taking place around Taiwan. The purpose of this column is to inject an outside perspective into public discourse in Taiwan, though, so I will just briefly congratulate Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan for setting a new precedent in Asia for inclusiveness with its passage of same-sex marriage law, acknowledge the horse-racing underway between presidential hopefuls, and then focus on the steep deterioration in U.S.-China relations, and what it may mean for Taiwan.

We may look back on May 2019 as a watershed moment in the U.S.-China relationship. While it remains possible that both sides will find a way to reconcile their differences and achieve a trade deal that helps to stabilize relations, it also is possible that this moment could become a turning point when hopes for stabilization of relations were abandoned and replaced by mutual acceptance of a more confrontational relationship.

Hopes appear to be growing fainter in Washington and Beijing these days that a trade deal will be realized any time soon, and even if it is realized, that it will serve to suck venom out of the broader relationship. Instead, there appears to be growing consolidation in Beijing around the view that the trade negotiations were never just about specific trade irritants. Instead, the argument in Beijing goes, the underlying motive of Washington is to coerce China into abandoning a socio-economic model that delivered historic economic progress and that sustained the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. According to this view, there is little point of compromising on specific issues, because it will not satisfy America’s ever-growing demands to change China.

In Washington, senior policymakers have dismissed the idea of achieving a good but not great trade deal with China. They have argued that there is little point in squeaking out incremental progress through negotiations, because Beijing can’t be trusted to keep its word. According to this view, President Trump is not just justified, but in fact obligated to hold the line for a transformational deal. And if a deal can’t be delivered, and American farmers, workers, and business owners suffer pain as a consequence of tariffs, then it will be justified by being in service of confronting the existential challenge that China poses to the future of the United States.

In other words, a sense of fatalism seems to be clouding judgments in both Beijing and Washington. These perceptions are driving both sides to devalue compromise and to gird for prolonged struggle with the other.

This isn’t the first time there has been a sharp dip in the U.S.-China relationship. We are, after all, on the cusp of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, an event that dealt a huge blow to China’s image, and one for which China was singularly responsible. There also was the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1995-96, the Belgrade bombing in 1999, and the EP-3 incident in 2001. Unlike those downturns, however, the present deterioration in relations is not event-driven. Rather, it appears more structural.

Structural factors accelerating the intensification of tensions include China’s determination to give greater expression to its ambitions, including through market-distorting policies designed to help China surpass the United States to become number one in many next-generation technologies. At a broader level, both countries increasingly seem to be viewing the other as an obstacle to the achievement of their national ambitions. This is why getting tough on China is at the heart of President Trump’s appeals to “make America great again.” Trump’s argument is that unless he gets the Chinese to change, then America will be challenged to sustain its strength and prosperity. At the same time, official Chinese media increasingly frames the United States as an anxious declining power seeking to subvert China from its return to its rightful historic place at the center of the world stage.

When both sides view the other in such menacing lights, there is little to be gained from compromise and careful management of relations. The pull of zero-sum thinking becomes hard to resist.

And in such circumstances, pressure on Taiwan will only grow. For example, how will Taiwan’s leading technology firms adapt to the effects of American efforts to squeeze Huawei? How will Taiwan companies with operations in China look out for their own interests as U.S.-China tariffs take hold? Will the Tsai administration seek to stay in step with hardening attitudes in Washington toward Beijing? If other presidential candidates choose not to match the Trump administration’s mood on China, would views of U.S.-Taiwan relations in either capital become more partisan? And if the United States and Taiwan take steps to strengthen relations and China takes out its frustrations on Taiwan, what expectations would Taipei have of Washington’s response?

In other words, if U.S.-China relations deteriorate further, the strategic picture for Taiwan is likely to grow more complex. This will place a premium on preserving a “no surprises” approach between Washington and Taipei for staying in lockstep with each other through this period of flux.

      

Taiwan’s political atmosphere is growing more fervid as the January 2020 election draws nearer. The roster of contenders includes candidates with experience governing and an understanding of the need for balance, and others who rely on charisma and offer promises without consideration of potential consequences.

There also is growing momentum in Washington for judging that Beijing’s bullying of Taiwan is escalating at intolerable rates, and that the antidote is for Washington to show stronger support for Taiwan to counteract the squeeze that Beijing is putting on Taipei.

Some American experts hold a different perspective, namely that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has altered the status quo by not accepting the 1992 consensus or finding a way to manage differences of interpretation with Beijing. By and large, though, this perspective is not ascendant in Congress or inside the Trump administration.

Having spoken with both American and Chinese officials involved in cross-Strait policy recently, it is striking how much both sides hold the other in contempt for seeking to stretch the cross-Strait status quo. From official Washington’s perspective, Beijing’s poaching of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, particularly in the United States’ backyard, was provocative; President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) January 2 speech on Taiwan was bellicose; the People’s Liberation Army’s April 1 penetration of the Taiwan centerline was dangerously escalatory; and Beijing’s ever-expanding meddling in Taiwan’s internal affairs has grown out of control.

From Beijing’s perspective, China has been reacting to actions by Washington and Taipei that it finds unacceptable. Beijing’s grievances include: President Tsai’s inflexibility on finding a way to reconcile differences over the 1992 consensus; the U.S. Congress’s increasing activism on Taiwan; the U.S. Navy’s attention-seeking behavior for each of its transits of the Taiwan Strait; press reports of upcoming big-ticket arms sales to Taiwan; and Washington’s quiet loosening of procedures for Taiwan presidential transits.

In other words, Washington, Taipei, and Beijing are falling into an action-reaction cycle on cross-Strait issues, even as they disagree on who is the initiator of this cycle. This is occurring at a time when there is under-developed muscle memory at senior levels in all three capitals for managing cross-Strait tensions, U.S.-China relations are severely strained, and cross-Strait relations are becoming more contested in more domains.

On top of that, we are entering a dangerous period for resolve-testing behavior. As elections approach in Taiwan in January 2020 and in the United States in November 2020, there may be shrinking political space for moderation in response to perceived Chinese provocations.

All this is occurring at a time when there are atrophying channels of communication between Beijing and Washington and Taipei, respectively, on cross-Strait issues. Some of this is due to Beijing’s reflexive dismissal of Tsai’s initial offers of reassurance, and its preference for punishment over genuine efforts to bridge differences, including by freezing official channels for cross-Strait communication. In the U.S.-China context, the primary channels that previously were used to manage cross-Strait tensions — in-depth conversations at the presidential level and in the Strategic Security Dialogue — are no longer available.

As a consequence, all three sides have a less granular understanding of each other’s sensitivities. In the absence of an ability to clarify the meaning of events, all sides will face a bias toward assuming the worst intentions of the other’s actions, which risks leading to exaggerated threat assessments of the other. A case in point is Beijing’s interpretation of recent U.S. Congressional resolutions, which reflect the political views of members of Congress and do not require the Trump administration to take specific actions, yet are treated by Beijing as substantively significant.

Taken together, these are the types of ingredients that could spark a crisis that nobody wants, but that nobody feels they could avoid. While the risk of deliberate military conflict remains low given the catastrophic consequences of any such action, the risk of an unplanned incident leading to unintended escalation is rising.

This risk ought to concentrate minds in Washington, Taipei, and Beijing on practical steps for mitigating unintended escalation. These could include:

• Fortifying the “no surprises” approach to cross-Strait relations between Washington and Taipei;
• Establishing a dedicated and functioning channel between Washington and Beijing involving seasoned diplomats to examine on a sustained basis each other’s concerns regarding cross-Strait developments;
• Developing a reliable, discreet, unofficial channel between Taipei and Beijing to manage incidents when they arise, so that impulses toward rapid retaliation can be dampened;
• Exercising restraint on the part of Beijing in its use of financial, cyber, media, and social media tools to meddle in Taiwan’s political discourse. (If evidence becomes publicly available of Beijing seeking to interfere in the election, it will harm Beijing’s preferred candidates.)

Overall, the security situation in the Taiwan Strait is likely to grow tenser in the next year. It will become ever more important for all sides to get ahead of problems, rather than react to them after they occur. The alternative likely would be an intensifying security dilemma, where each action one takes makes the other feel less secure and causes them to respond accordingly.

There are practical steps all sides can take now to reduce risk. Given the stakes involved, this should be a priority for Washington, Taipei, and Beijing.

      

On April 7, Ryan Hass spoke on a panel about China’s Belt and Road Initiative and China’s relations with the Middle East during a session of the “World Economic Forum on the Middle East and Africa,” which was held in Amman, Jordan.