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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Introducing our friend Ted Galen Carpenter from the Cato Institute.
And he's got this great one in the American Conservative magazine, will the U.S. go to war with China over Taiwan?
Well, the answer better be no.
Welcome back to the show, Ted.
How are you?
Thank you very much.
I wish the answer were no, but I think even U.S. officials haven't thought through whether the U.S. would go to war to defend Taiwan.
And that's more than a little bit worrisome.
There are some implicit obligations under the Taiwan Relations Act.
And we may be committed to fulfilling those commitments, even as China's military power and determination to recover Taiwan continue to grow.
Well, so maybe we should because we got to keep Taiwan free.
What about that?
Well, I'm sympathetic to wanting a society that is now reasonably free to not be absorbed by a one-party dictatorship.
However, the obligation of the U.S. government is, or at least should be, to the security and liberty of the American people and putting those things at risk to defend any other entity.
And we don't even recognize Taiwan as an official country.
To put those essential values at risk to help another entity is irresponsible.
That's a violation of the government's fiduciary responsibility to the American people.
Yeah, but you know, H-bombs have never hurt anyone, Ted, so You're U.S. H-bombs twice in Japan.
Yeah, no, those were A-bombs.
Anyway, the H-bombs, they're harmless so far.
No, listen, a lot of people got cancer because of the tests.
Not harmless at all.
So, and you know, the Bikini Atoll doesn't exist at all anymore.
So, no, sorry, in all seriousness, can you rewind a little bit here?
We sort of started right in the middle, like Star Wars Episode IV, but the problem is that a lot of people don't even know what a Taiwan is, other than maybe a word on a toy, you know?
Even then, most of that says mainland China on it.
Now, so, can you rewind us a little bit to say, I don't know, the Chinese Civil War and the rise of the communists and the fleeing of the nationalists and then, you know, of course, the Nixonians' strategic ambiguity and all this kind of thing, because it sounds like what you're saying is that that ambiguity, that diplomatic ambiguity, has really translated into a strategic ambiguity, too, where the people on our side, it's not just that their story is fuzzy, it's that their idea about what they really would do in a crisis hasn't, they've been putting off working that out.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
As far as the Chinese leaders are concerned, and apparently a dominant sentiment on the mainland, Taiwan is simply left over business from the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s, where the communists finally win in 1949.
They very likely would have tried to mount an invasion to take over Taiwan, the last remnant that Chiang Kai-shek's government held, had the US not introduced the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait, preventing any such action.
But the Chinese leadership today still regards Taiwan as a part of China.
They want reunification, and they're getting very, very impatient about Taiwan not responding to that desire, and insisting on maintaining a de facto independence.
So, in a rational world, this would be a quarrel between the leaders on the mainland, and the people and leaders on Taiwan.
But the United States, as usual, is on the front lines, it has placed itself on the front lines of a very dangerous situation.
Yeah, well, they took how many years to even recognize that Mao's government was the government of mainland China, and then switch their seats on the UN Security Council.
You didn't get a breakthrough on the realities of the situation with regard to China, until the trips by Henry Kissinger in 1971, and then Richard Nixon's famous trip in 1972.
But even then, we didn't officially recognize the government of Beijing as the government of China, until Jimmy Carter did that at the beginning of 1979.
And in exchange, hawks in Congress insisted on the Taiwan Relations Act, which pledged the United States to regard any aggressive move by China against Taiwan as a grave threat to the peace of East Asia, and implying that the United States would respond vigorously to that.
We also made the commitment to sell arms, quote, of a defensive nature to Taiwan, to enable Taiwan to mount a serious defense of its territory.
Well, now, at this point, say, Ron Paul was president, and you were the Secretary of Defense, and this wasn't our problem anymore, the Chinese would have a real problem taking Taiwan, wouldn't they?
It would be difficult for them today.
But the military balance between the mainland and Taiwan is shifting, I think, inexorably toward the mainland.
Taiwan is simply a small entity.
The mainland is a very large country.
And as China's economy improves, it's devoting more and more resources to building up its military power.
Over the long run, there's no way that Taiwan could defeat China if a war broke out.
I think the best strategy for Taiwan would be, if it does not want to agree to reunification under any terms, to adopt a porcupine strategy.
In other words, really raise the cost to China of an invasion, and give the message to Beijing, yeah, we know you can conquer us if you're absolutely determined to do it.
But the cost in blood and treasure is going to be very, very high.
And all you then get is a new province inhabited by people who absolutely hate you, and will cause you trouble at every turn.
If you let us remain independent, we can have decent, friendly relations, and we can have very, very productive economic relations.
That would seem to be a win-win proposition, if you can give up your insistence on Taiwan being politically a part of the People's Republic of China.
Unfortunately, I don't think the Chinese leaders are terribly responsive, even to that kind of deal.
Well, so I mean, this is kind of an aside, but how many F-16s do they have?
I don't know what the exact quantity is.
The Taiwanese are actually developing a fairly robust domestic arms production, defensive arms industry.
And I think probably in another decade, they could be able to provide the vast majority of what they want in the way of weaponry to preserve the island's de facto independence.
In the meantime, I would remove the barriers to Taiwan buying arms from American producers.
That's always been managed very carefully by Washington.
But I think that's one step we could take that's pretty low risk, and allow them if they want to spend their money on sophisticated weaponry, to buy those items, and make their defense, make their deterrent against a takeover by the Beijing government, much more robust and effective.
Well, now that aside, back to what you're saying before I asked about the F-16s there, and we can get back to weapon sales and all that later.
But so I just want to make sure that I understood you right that you were saying that your modest proposal that you don't think that the Chinese would even accept that at this point, or you don't think that the Taiwanese government could ever get it through their thick skull that this is the approach they need to take?
No, my concern is the almost obsession on the part of Chinese leaders to recover Taiwan.
It's a source of national pride.
And one ought to be careful about minimizing the importance of that in calculations by other governments.
And they regard Taiwan as a very important economic prize, and a strategic prize that really secures China's coastland, its coastal region against having US and its allies put military forces right up against China.
So they have multiple incentives for wanting to insist that Taiwan agree to reunification.
I mean, that's kind of an argument against selling them more weapons and militarizing them more.
I mean, it sounds like what you're saying is the difference between the Chinese communist government, I mean, quote, unquote, communist, anyway, their dictatorships, government, the difference between their take on Hong Kong, 20 years ago, and Taiwan now is that Hong Kong was never militarized.
It wasn't, or I don't know, never.
But at that point, it was not full of American battleships and this kind of thing for them to take over, right?
It's just a commercial.
They worry about the US and Japan, by the way, setting up a military presence on Taiwan.
Now, the Taiwanese are actually willing to give them all sorts of assurances that's not going to happen.
And most Taiwanese don't want that to take place.
But the public sentiment on Taiwan is overwhelmingly opposed to any reunification with the mainland, particularly as long as the mainland is governed by the Chinese Communist Party.
And even if China became a Western-style democratic state, the Taiwanese, I think the majority of them, want to remain independent.
They don't want to be just one province in this massive entity.
They like running their own affairs.
And they also fear with good reason, that if Taiwan became part of the mainland, Taiwan would be a cash cow for the Beijing government, because it is so economically developed compared to much of the rest of China.
Hey, I'll check it out.
This Friday, I'm going to be at the National Press Club out there in the lobby, basically trying to sell my book at the Israel Lobby Conference.
And here's what you do.
Just go to IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, IRMEP, that's Grant Smith's group, IRMEP.org, and you'll find the link.
It's the Israel Lobby and American Policy 2018.
Tickets are still available.
It's at the National Press Club all day, March the 2nd.
See you guys there.
Check this out, too.
On Saturday the 3rd, I'm giving a speech to the Pennsylvania Libertarian Party State Convention, and C-SPAN is going to cover it for Book TV.
So it's going to be all about the book.
So that's happening on Saturday.
And then Sunday, I'm back in Washington, DC, and I'm giving two talks.
One is at Middle East Books and More.
That's the bookstore of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
We're MIA.
They're good guys.
And so that's going to be about some things.
And then I'm going to give another talk at the Tenleytown Library.
So let's see, that's 11 in the morning at Middle East Books and More, and then it's 3 in the afternoon Eastern time there at the Tenleytown Library.
That's this coming Sunday, March the 4th.
Okay, see you guys there.
Thanks.
Now, so when Trump came into office, one of the first things that happened was somebody duped him in the China lobby, I guess, into taking a phone call from the president of Taiwan, which was a violation of the protocol in this somewhat nuanced policy.
I'm sorry, I forget the, it's sort of like the Israelis with their nukes, the strategic ambiguity about we're not exactly saying what our position on this and that is.
But so can you describe that as best you can, and then talk about how that translates into, nevermind Trump's first day, but the actual policy of the US government?
I think it's pretty consistent over the years on this.
But you're saying it's consistently too fuzzy to even be called a doctrine?
Yeah, I mean, the term that has been used frequently is strategic ambiguity.
And, but there is a difference in my mind between keeping the other parties guessing what the US policy is, making Beijing and Taipei, both uncertain.
But the reality is, even US officials don't seem certain what Washington's reaction would be if a crisis broke out in the Taiwan Strait.
Former Assistant Secretary of State, Joseph Nye, once put that back quite candidly back in the late 1990s.
When he was questioned by Chinese officials, what would you do if X happened?
If tensions really, really rose, it looked like a war was going to break out.
And his response was, you don't know what we would do.
And frankly, we don't know for certain what we would do.
Well, that's, to me, utterly irresponsible.
Any worthwhile leader in foreign policy must be certain at least what the actions of the US government would be.
It's one thing to keep other parties guessing.
You don't want your own foreign policy defense policy team guessing about what to do.
Well, now, so this doesn't seem to be the case, at least currently in Korea.
But I wonder if you think in this case, American support for the Taiwanese makes them brave, and and makes them, you know, take a more intransigent position than they otherwise would.
I think there's some truth to that.
But I think the more important factor is that they are very insistent on remaining independent, being able to run their own affairs.
And I sympathize with that.
However, the first duty of the US government should be to protect American interests.
And putting the safety of the American people in the American homeland on the line because of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait is, to me, utterly irresponsible.
I'm fond of the Taiwanese.
I am not willing to risk having the United States become entangled in potentially a nuclear war with China to maintain Taiwan's de facto independence.
That is far too much to ask of the American people.
And to me, that's not something the US government should ever take as a level of risk with regard to Taiwan, or any other country.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, I sure don't want to be nuked.
And I think probably even the worst politicians don't want to be nuked, don't want to see LA and Denver and Dallas nuked.
And yet, at the same time, I gotta say, if it came down really to a war, and mainland China was invading and conquering Taiwan, and slaughtering all resistance, that Washington DC would get us all killed before they sat there on their hands and did nothing.
I think they're likely to stumble in to that kind of situation, certainly not intending to trigger a major war.
But the US assumption on protecting small allies, like Taiwan, like the NATO countries, especially the eastern most members, countries like the three Baltic republics, is that if we stand firm, really declare our intent to protect these allies, any potential aggressor will back off.
And that to me is a tremendous gamble.
What happens if you find a leader in Russia or in China, or perhaps some other country, who decides to test that US commitment?
Would the United States really sacrifice at least a large number of its cities to the danger of nuclear war, perhaps the entire country country to protect a small ally?
And, you know, no matter which way we answer that question, it's a pretty bad result.
Either the USN backs down and admits, yeah, it's all a big bluff, which makes the United States look stupid and feckless.
Or it actually tries to keep the commitment, which courts potentially catastrophic results.
So it's just, it's an unwise policy.
It's an unwise policy with respect to NATO.
It's an unwise policy with respect to Taiwan, to South Korea, and so on.
Yeah, boy.
I don't know.
I can hear him in the National Security Council.
And just credibility.
That's all they would say, as you're saying, this option that they have to admit that it's all a big bluff.
In their mind, you know, because it's all just self-justification, isn't it?
That if they weren't the ones holding global society together, it would tear itself apart.
If they wouldn't guarantee the security of Taiwan, then China next will definitely invade Japan, or absorb all of Korea, or whatever.
They'll just start spinning hypotheticals.
The Russians will march all the way to Spain, or God knows what they'll claim.
If only they don't stand up here, all the dominoes, that'll fall.
And that's how they all think, right?
You couldn't find a think tank in DC, other than maybe Cato, where they don't think that.
Where that wouldn't be their immediate reaction, their unanimous take around the table, right?
Well, I think the number of organizations, think tanks, and so on, who take a different view, a much more realistic view, that number is growing, fortunately.
Cato is no longer just the only game in town for that view.
You're absolutely right, though.
The leadership in this country very much tends to think that way.
And too many people in the public sector think that way.
The reaction to my piece in The American Conservative, I don't know how many respondents, A, accused me of being Neville Chamberlain, and B, asserted that if we allowed China to take Taiwan, you're exactly right.
They would proceed, they would intimidate and dominate Japan.
They'd take over Guam.
There was one even said that China would be pressing for Hawaii's independence.
I mean, this is utter nonsense.
But that is the way too many people think.
You get the same thing if the US backed away from its NATO commitments.
You would swear that Vladimir Putin would send tank columns to the Atlantic within 48 hours if we did that.
And again, I think that's utter nonsense.
There are conditions in place for regional balances of power.
The world is not going to collapse if the United States becomes more selective, far more selective about when it might go to war.
You know, that's a very serious proposition.
And unfortunately, US officials acquire allies and commitments the way some people collect Facebook friends with about as much thought.
And the consequences, unfortunately, are a lot more serious than acquiring Facebook friends.
All right, y'all, we got to talk a little bit of business here.
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Well, you know, I got to say, you know, I've been hearing from, well, I mean, it's in the media.
We'll just stick with that about this guy, McMaster.
And it seems like, you know, on every issue, I guess, other than the Iranian nuclear deal, this guy is such a hawk.
He's the guy where they asked him, you know, are you determined to have a peaceful resolution of the crisis on the Korean peninsula?
And he says, no, I'm determined to have a resolution.
I don't care if it's peaceful or not.
It doesn't have to be peaceful, but one way or the other, this is going to be solved, this kind of thing.
It seems like, I don't know, they say that maybe he's on the outs and he's going to be fired, but then that just raises the question, I guess, of who will replace him.
But part of the problem here is we have a president who sometimes, when he's like, I don't know why we're bothering doing this, guys, he just doesn't have the thoroughness, the backbone, the wherewithal, the reading comprehension skills or anything to have a real point of view about it.
You know what I mean?
There's a quote in the Washington Post where he's like, why do we even have troops in Somalia, guys?
Jeez.
But that's not enough to stand up to them on.
You know what I mean?
Exactly.
I mean, his instincts on foreign policy, at least sometimes, are quite good.
There are occasions when they're quite bad, including his attitude toward Iran.
But he needed to surround himself by advisors who were cautious realists who would advocate really pruning America's commitments, adopting a much more cautious security policy, and so on.
Instead, he surrounded himself by generals and other very hawkish types who have been whispering in both of his ears to discourage him from adhering to his initial instincts that really showed up with the Afghanistan policy.
I mean, he was quite vocal during the campaign.
What in the world are we doing there?
We haven't accomplished anything.
Let's get out.
And yet his generals and others talked him out of that.
And lo and behold, we're just continuing the Afghan mission for an indefinite period with the same miserable lack of results.
Yeah.
Well, hey, you know, at least somebody's making money off it, right?
Oh, some people are making a lot of money off of it.
The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower identified in his farewell address is much, much more powerful now than it was at that time.
We're talking about multi-billion-dollar entities who profit from a highly interventionist U.S. foreign policy.
And they exert their influence at every opportunity.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny about that, too.
I actually, when you said that, it occurred to me for the first time in a long time.
I remember the very first time I heard that.
I must have been 10 years old or something.
And it came from the ultimate source.
Might as well have been George Washington.
It was like Eisenhower, the five-star general that single-handedly won World War II.
And, you know, it's funny because, I mean, whatever, I guess I learned about Ronald Reagan selling cocaine a few years later.
But that's a big thing.
It's almost like the secret revisionist history you're not supposed to know, and yet it starts at point A, the most respectable opinion that you could imagine.
Ike Eisenhower's is the one where this warning comes from, and then all you have to do is just tick off the decades.
There never was a reckoning, right?
They never did stop and undo that thing that he was talking about.
And as we know now, it's a trillion-dollar-a-year kind of a budget.
There's so much at stake, so much in on it.
So many in on it, I guess I should say.
And it's sort of now, it's the open secret, really.
Especially in the age of the internet.
Everybody knows, like Eisenhower said that.
Everybody knows that nothing's been done about it this whole time since, and yet we still just go on.
Yep.
That network of pro-interventionist elements nearly panicked when the Soviet Union disintegrated, because that really removed their rationale for the kinds of policies they wanted.
But they searched around and found other justifications, other rationales.
But what we have now is a series of potential time bombs in the world, that any one of which could go off at any time.
Eastern Europe, with the tensions with Russia, certainly a possibility.
The Korean Peninsula, obviously a real danger.
And one that isn't getting as much attention, but to me, maybe the most dangerous one in the long term, Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait.
We better pay attention to it.
Right.
Yeah, I know.
That was why I was so excited to see this article.
I hardly ever see anything about this.
And I'm sorry, I should have mentioned at the beginning, and I didn't.
Maybe I'll go dub it in there.
America's coming war with China, a collision course over Taiwan that you wrote back, I guess, 10 years ago or something.
Thank goodness we haven't crashed yet.
But yeah, it does seem to be one of those, even on this show, obviously, where it's so little talked about.
It's just on the very, I mean, anybody interested in foreign policy knows that it's a thing.
But it doesn't seem to be part, really, of anyone's agenda to solve.
It's just like Kashmir, right?
We know there could be a nuclear war over Kashmir, but we don't even pretend to host peace discussions over that.
You know what I mean?
Why wouldn't we want to solve that?
Why wouldn't everyone in the world, why wouldn't every sovereign government on the planet be falling all over each other trying to host the peace talks for that one?
And I know it's a difficult problem, but yeah, so that's why to get cracking on it.
Instead, we just sort of sleepwalk, as they say, into possible extreme problems.
Same thing going on with increasing the NATO presence in the Baltics right now, right on Russia's border.
And this just happens because everyone in the room agrees that it's the smart thing to do, even though they must all know that it's not.
But for whatever reason, they do it anyway.
Whatever reasons, you know?
Well, never underestimate the capacity for self-delusion, even on the part of high-level policymakers.
I think what worries me the most about the Taiwan issue is that it increasingly appears that the Beijing leadership has a deadline in mind.
They haven't made it explicit.
But there are reports that keep circulating in both the Chinese media, and let's face it, that has to have at least the tolerance of the Beijing government, and is even circulating in Taiwan that there may be a deadline as early as 2020 or 2021, where in essence, Beijing gives Taiwan an ultimatum, either start serious talks on reunification, or we now must consider the use of military force.
And if that's true, we could see this crisis come to a head in a matter of just a few years.
Yeah.
Man, oh man.
All right.
Well, I always thought that Ron Paul should have won and should have made you the Secretary of State or the National Security Advisor.
You and Bandao would be good running the NSC together.
I could see that.
But I don't get to make these decisions.
Unfortunately, I'd have to live in Washington, D.C. again.
You know, there are sacrifices and there are sacrifices.
Yeah, well, I understand.
But you know what?
I bet you'd do it for a Ron Paul regime.
I would for any president who is truly, truly committed to adopting a much safer, much more sensible and prudent US foreign policy.
And he certainly would have been a president that would have done that.
And you know, if Donald Trump meant what he said, when he said any of the good sounding stuff that he said about foreign policy, there really was at least one good cabinet full of people who are acceptably, quote unquote, to the right, broadly speaking, who are not liberal Democrats, I guess, who are, as the National Interest blog says, skeptics when it comes to American benevolent global hegemony here.
And he could have, there's just enough of you guys to staff the NSC, to have, you know, Bacevich as National Security Advisor or Defense Secretary and the rest of you guys on the National Security Council, and to implement this stuff, you know, in a serious way to roll the empire back.
And so, he could have done it.
That's the whole thing.
You know, Ron Paul could have never really been the president.
We all know that.
But Donald Trump was the president and he had the opportunity.
And it's really Bannon's fault, right?
Because Bannon was rogue enough to be a little bit good on some of this stuff, like Afghanistan and a couple other things.
He's horrible on Iran, though.
And he never prioritized opposition to American intervention as the real thing that needs doing, just like Pat Buchanan in 92.
If he had run against George Bush's foreign policy and made that the issue and said, this is what we have in common with good liberals, instead of declaring culture war, he might have won that election.
We might have never had the, quote, New World Order of the 1990s at all, you know?
Well, there's no way of rerunning history to find out.
I think it was extremely sad that when Trump made his foreign and defense policy appointees, there wasn't a cautious realist in sight.
All of them were either just establishment types or very hawkish individuals or both.
Yeah.
Really too bad.
Although there's such a turnover rate that, hey, I guess we'll see what happens up there.
They might have nobody left but you and Doug by the end of this thing, by the end of his eight years in power after the Democrats lose again.
Kind of a bureaucratic war of attrition, I guess.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm glad you're here in Austin with me, man.
Great to talk to you, Ted.
Take care, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That's the great Ted Galen Carpenter from the Cato Institute, Cato.org.
He wrote America's Coming War with China.
And also check out this great article at the American Conservative, Will the U.S. Go to War with China Over Taiwan?
And you know what?
He also wrote the Korean Conundrum, the fire next door about the drug war down in Mexico, the bad neighbor policy about the drug war all through Latin America.
And geez, how many of these?
You know, a solid dozen books here on his Amazon.com page, guys.
Delusions of Grandeur about the UN.
Nice.
All right.
And you know me, antiwar.com, libertarianinstitute.org, scotthorton.org, youtube.com slash scotthortonshow, foolserend.us for my book, Fool's Errand, Time Down the War in Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter, at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, guys.
