Abandoning Taiwan, Appeasement or Realism?
Here's the OpEd from yesterday's N.Y. Times with this amazing suggestion: To Save Our Economy, Ditch Taiwan by Paul V. Kane.
The thrust is that Obama should start secret negotiations with China to discontinue our agreement to protect Taiwan, a cold war relic. In payment for our ending our protection of this island, they would cancel the the trillion dollars of U.S. bonds that we are indebted to pay them.
The OpEd did not have a comment feature, so reactions have to be from separate articles such as this one, or this blog Is This NYT Op-Ed a Joke? Selling Taiwan to the Bankers of Beijing from the Atlantic Monthly web site.
I remember when what we now call China was called Communist China, or Mainland China and the seat in the U.N. was held by the small offshore island then called Formosa until 1971 when the Government of the mainland, The Peoples Republic of China, was recognized by the U.N. with Security Council Membershiip.
To give up Military protection of this country would be as radical as our abandoning Israel or recognizing Cuba.
The OpEd acknowledges that this proposal is not politically possible but he doesn't explicate exactly why. Since I accepted the reasonableness of his proposal, I connected it with another issue that is usually seen in the abstract, the perpetuation of our Military Industrial Complex, and more specifically an article by Paul Krugman, Bombs, Bridges and Jobs, where he wonders why Military Expenditures are always held sacrosanct by the right wing. They approve this kind of government pump priming under the rubric of "Weaponized Keynesianism"
I wrote a comment with a radical extension of his thesis, which got considerable approval from the readerscomment #6 with an expanded version here:
There is an added dimension to this phenomenon, that is actually more pernicious, as it not only justifies "warfare Keynesianism, but our counterproductive wars of this last decade. specifically the sanctification of the military.
It is not the military of abstraction, but of flesh and blood humans, from privates to flag officers; those who are universally sanctified, held at least innocent when not revered. Those in uniform who do rebel are either ignored, or punished in the most inhumane conditions without trial, such as Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of passing restricted material to the website WikiLeaks.
This avoidance of a central component of our new type of war, the willing participation of war fighters who make these engagements possible, facilitates ignoring all ethical questions of these wars. This aura of sanctity has even extended to current Republican presidential candidates proudly saying they will relinquish their constitutional prerogatives of commander in chief to follow the suggestions of “uniformed” commanders in the field. Not only are those who fire drones who kill innocents relieved of moral responsibility, but so is the president of the United States.
This glorification of our war fighters, never spoken of unless prefaced with "brave" or "valiant" has consequences. This irrationality fuels the irrationality of our vast expenditures, our unseen imperialism and the blowback that will be the expected result of our efforts. The artificiality of this glorification is illustrated by it not being extended to other Americans who perform the exact same functions but under the auspices of contractors. This cultural taboo against questioning the ethics of our warriors, also allows expenditures on military hardware to be beyond questioning.
With this in mind the advertisement running during this veterans week, "For all who served and all who serve" by Boeing makes perfect sense. The unspoken implication is that spending ourselves into perpetual debt is a way of showing reverence for these brave men and women who sacrifice to protect us.
Until this taboo is broken, we will not be able to evaluate any expenditure for war in any rational context.
Taiwan can and as Kane predicts, shall become part of China just as East Germany was incorporated into the single country. The closest example of what is to be expected is when Hong Kong was incorporated into China in 1997. According to this description ten years after the even by the BBC, it has been generally a success, with almost no diminution of rights of the citizen.
The only way that we can lose the cold war, is retroactively, if we continue it by maintaining our military prowess of that era, which includes the myth of the heroic warrior, a myth that is so ubiquitous that no one in public life dares to question it. It is a small leap to expend adulation for individual troops to the entire military operation, to all of our conflicts that are incorporated under the flag of "protecting our freedoms."
Our country, and the world is at a tipping point. The stasis of the cold war ended two decades ago, yet the United States has continued its Military Industrial Congressional complex as if nothing has changed, this time completely driven by domestic pressure with no enemies commensurate with the forces we continue to amass. Our irrational adulation of individual members of the military easily transfers to the actions they participate in, making them beyond objective evaluation. Their heroism is such that considering the cost of their weaponry is seen as unpatriotic and disrespectful of their sacrifice.
We protect Taiwan by building additional aircraft carriers that are paid for by dollars and bonds to China which provides them the resources to buy us one house, one corporation at a time. Kane's article in the Times was too simplistic, yet it causes us to think hard about what we are doing in this area, whether we are protecting a democracy or continuing a justification for diverting six percent of our GDP to the Military at a time when our threats are many, but not of the kind that advanced munitions or combat troops can address.
The OpEd, far from being a joke, is something that should prompt serious discussion of our national goals in a new world reality.