Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax 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 hacked.
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 they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, Ben, say it, 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, you guys.
Introducing former Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr.
He chairs Projects International Incorporated.
And we published at Antiwar.com last week this speech he gave to a master class in diplomacy at the Center for the Study of the Conduct of Diplomacy at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia.
And it's this great piece all about the history of America's relationship with China, and especially concerning Taiwan and its pseudo-independence, etc.
It's called Taiwan Arms Sales and the Erosion of U.S.-Sino Diplomacy.
Welcome back to the show, Chas.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks.
I'm glad to be back.
Good.
I really appreciate you joining us here on the show today.
So can you remind us, first of all, it comes up a bit in this piece, but just a little bit about your background.
You were actually there with Nixon when he went to shake hands with Mao Zedong, right?
Well, I didn't actually see Mao Zedong, but I was the principal American interpreter for his trip and spent a lot of time with him and Zhou Enlai and others.
He went off to see Mao on his own, a very bad practice, no American Chinese speaker with him.
But anyway, this was scheduled at the last minute because Mao was actually deathly ill and on life support at the time, and the Chinese didn't know whether they could actually arrange the meeting until the last minute.
It was Monday, February 21st, 1972.
All right.
And then can you just give us a little bit more about your background before we get into this here, and especially concerning the Far East there?
Yeah, I joined the Foreign Service of the United States in 1965, served in India and then was assigned to Chinese language training after a brief stint at the UN trying to keep Beijing out of the seat that Taipei then occupied for China.
I spent some time in Taiwan studying Chinese.
We didn't have any relationship at all with the mainland at that time.
But I had hoped when I joined the Foreign Service that there would be an opening to China because I thought it was geopolitically necessary.
And I wanted to be there and I had the good fortune to be there.
Later in my career, I ran the embassy in Beijing as the deputy chief of mission.
I was intimately involved in getting Cuban troops out of Angola and the South Africans out of Namibia.
And then I was ambassador in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War.
I was ambassador from 1989 to 1992, three years, during which we expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and liberated it.
And finally, my career last position in the government was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.
I was responsible for our defense relations with the entire world other than the former Soviet Union.
All right.
So now to get to the heart of this article here, you go to the historical context about the communist revolution, the success, I guess, in the civil war of Mao's side in 1949 and the fleeing of the nationalist side to Taiwan.
And then this sort of peculiar relationship that America kept with Taiwan and kept them in the United Nations and ignored, tried to ignore away the fact that Mao's forces truly had seized control of the mainland and that Chiang Kai-shek and his forces, in fact, did not rule.
They sort of played this very funny game for decades after that, right?
Well, indeed.
And in 1945, the Japanese invasion and occupation of China ended.
It was 14 years long.
World War II ended and China immediately, almost immediately, went back into civil war between Chiang Kai-shek, Republic of China government, and the then rebel forces of Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party.
And the United States played a very interesting double game.
On the one hand, we professed to be mediators in a sort of peace process between the two.
On the other hand, we were heavily arming and assisting Chiang Kai-shek.
Chiang Kai-shek, he lost and retreated to Taiwan, which China had recovered from Japan in 1945.
It was a Chinese province until 1895 when Japan seized it.
Chiang's forces went to that part of China.
The Truman government here, Truman administration, issued a statement at the end of, actually January 1, 1950, saying that we expected Taiwan to be conquered by Mao's forces and that this was not anything we were going to interfere in.
But then, of course, in the summer of 1950, June 25, 27, the North Koreans tried to reunite Korea by force to prevent the war from expanding.
We put the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait, told both sides to knock it off.
So we basically suspended the Chinese Civil War.
Later, as we got into a war in Korea with Mao's forces, we altered our position and resumed support of Chiang Kai-shek.
And this was, of course, closely related to McCarthyism, and, oddly enough, to Richard Nixon, who, next to McCarthy, was the most vicious smearer of the China hands whom he accused of having favored the communist cause.
In fact, all they'd done was reported their judgment that it was probably going to win, which it did.
So, for the succeeding decades, one of the most important, or maybe the main thing we did at the UN, was keep Taipei in the Security Council representing China in order to keep Beijing out.
And I did this on one occasion.
I got a vote against a resolution which was offered by Albania to unseat Taipei and seat Beijing in China's seats in both the Security Council and the General Assembly.
And I must say, we were pretty good.
We American diplomats managed to pull off this preposterous game for 20-some years.
1971, we lost.
And basically, the world said it had had enough of this charade and seated the Communist People's Republic of China in China's seat.
Yes, it is amazing that that lasted from 1949 all the way through the end of the Korean War and all the way through all of Vietnam.
And I guess it was part of the idea that if we can make peace with China, it'll make losing in Vietnam hurt a little less worse.
No, I think at the time, I give Richard Nixon, you know, extremely low marks for his political behavior during the McCarthy period, but very high marks for his statesmanship when he became president in 1969.
And before he became president, he had already reached the conclusion that the world could not be stable if China wasn't incorporated into it and that excluding China from a role in global governance was a grave mistake.
When he came into office, he saw that it would be very helpful to our policy of containment of the Soviet Union to enlist China in that cause.
And in 1969, there were major battles along the Chinese border with the Soviet Union.
He became very concerned that the Soviet Union might invade and humiliate or occupy China and basically knock it out of the geopolitical game.
He also, of course, thought that if he went to Beijing, he might shake up Hanoi sufficiently to get a better deal at Paris, where we were conducting talks with the North Vietnamese.
That was wrong.
It didn't work.
But the first thing worked and we got into a relationship with China, a difficult one politically for them to forge and for us, finally under Jimmy Carter in 1979, January 1, 1979.
And, you know, at the end of that year, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and that catalyzed in U.S.-China relations.
We began to cooperate directly against the Soviets.
Some fairly amazing, unknown things happened and I'd be happy to talk about those if they're of interest.
Sure.
Yeah.
In fact, we'll hold off on the 80s there for a second because I wanted to ask about the changing of the one sort of weird structured relationship there where we pretend that Taiwan is the real China for 23 years or whatever it is.
But then under Nixon, there was this new formula of the dual China ambiguity policy and this kind of thing.
Can you explain that?
Yeah.
Basically, both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong agreed that there was only one China and Taiwan was part of China.
I mean, Chiang said that he was not a government in exile.
He was on Chinese soil in Taiwan.
And basically, Nixon said, OK, we don't challenge that.
And he basically wanted to go ahead.
He told Mao and Zhou that he would normalize relations, meaning break with Taipei and establish diplomatic relations with Beijing as the government of China.
He wasn't able to do that because Watergate struck him down and the Ford administration, which followed, was too shaky to undertake a major change like that.
So it fell to Carter.
But the basic formula that has kept peace in the Taiwan Strait is there's only one China.
Taiwan's part of China.
We don't challenge that.
And unfortunately, we're beginning to challenge it again, which raises the possibility of the Chinese Civil War, which is only suspended, might get underway again.
And we could see a war in the Taiwan Strait that would be, frankly, disastrous for us as well as everyone there.
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Well now, so Nixon wasn't able to get the mainland to promise to never invade Taiwan, but he did say, I guess what, the Americans would really prefer that even though we recognize that there's only one China and that Beijing is its capital, that we want to see this resolved peaceably.
But I guess you're saying it wasn't until later that they really started arming up Taiwan again.
Well, it was the Carter administration that achieved a normal relationship with Beijing.
The purpose of that was to abnormalize relations with Taipei.
Part of that process of normalization involved the Chinese being made to understand, which they did, that if they continued to issue bellicose statements and prepare to liberate Taiwan, their terminology, by force, that we really couldn't normalize.
So the same day that we officially established relations with Beijing, they issued a statement saying that they had a firm policy of doing everything possible to solve the Taiwan issue by peaceful means.
And later, as the relationship, the U.S. relationship with China evolved, we reached an agreement in which they reaffirmed that very strongly.
They would not abandon the right to use force, but they'd make every effort not to actually use it.
And finally, Taipei and Beijing began to talk.
And they had a series of dialogues.
And not that long ago, under the previous president in Taipei, the two leaders, Ma Ying-jeou then in Taiwan and Xi Jinping in China, met for a meeting in Singapore.
So the Chiang Kai-shek's party, the Kuomintang, is committed to, like the Chinese Communist Party, to some sort of cooperative relationship.
The rulers in Taipei today are not.
They want independence.
And well, now to, I guess, skip ahead to the present times then.
The Trump administration just sold them some more F-16s.
And so does that mean that the Americans are, they really are changing under Trump then?
They're changing their position to a much more reckless one?
I'm afraid so.
The basis for the Chinese statement that they had a fundamental policy of pursuing a peaceful resolution of the issue was American restraint on arms sales.
And that lasted through the 80s.
In 92, however, during the presidential election, George H.W. Bush, I think at the urging of Jim Baker, who was running his campaign, authorized the sale of F-16s to Taipei, the largest single military sale to that time in world history.
And that violated our policy of restraint.
In Beijing, there was a concern that Beijing might have reverted to using force as a policy.
But they continued to emphasize peaceful resolution.
They had actually in the 80s moved a lot of their forces out of the area opposite Taiwan on the other side of the strait on the mainland in Fujian province.
And unfortunately, the sale of F-16s then sort of re-militarized the whole issue.
And we got into the situation we've been in, where instead of having a political process that makes war less likely, we are reliant on a military balance between Taiwan and the mainland, which is simply impossible.
An island of 23 million people cannot balance a country of 1.4 billion people, especially when that 1.4 billion people are as entrepreneurial and economically successful as they've been.
So we're in a position now where having tried to maintain a military balance in the strait again, that has now turned very much to Beijing's advantage.
They have the power to destroy Taiwan whenever they feel they must.
And we, of course, have a sort of vague commitment to get involved in any war that happens there.
There is domestic legislation called the Taiwan Relations Act, which the Congress passed at the request of the Carter administration, but added a policy statement to the draft legislation that says the United States would regard with grave concern, which is the language you usually have in defense treaties, any effort to settle the issue of Taiwan by force.
People in Taiwan believe they have a blank check from the United States in military terms.
And that is very, very dangerous.
Now, what does America get out of this other than F-16 sales?
Well, nostalgia, perhaps, for the lost cause.
Some parts of the country specialize in that.
And I think you're in Texas, aren't you?
And so you know about that.
But also, this involves national honor.
There's not really any concrete benefit to the United States.
We never were able to use Taiwan for any purpose strategically against China, although it's nicely placed for that, which is one reason the Chinese are concerned about it being in hostile hands.
We now have a hostile relationship with China.
The Trump administration has produced one.
And so this is all tied up in that rivalry and adversarial relationship.
What do we get out of Taiwan?
Taiwan is a democracy, a very vigorous, robust democracy.
So if your starting point in foreign affairs is ideology rather than interests, I suppose there's a rationale to back it.
But concretely, no.
Especially because the Chinese offer for reunification is that they would not station any troops, they would not send any officials to participate in Taiwan's governance.
So basically, they've answered this strategic question that the U.S. and Japan have been concerned about.
Would they use Taiwan to project force into the Pacific?
The answer is no, if there's a negotiated solution.
Obviously, if there's a resolution by force, no such assurance would apply.
Now, a couple of questions at once here.
If there was a war, would the Americans really fight, do you think?
And then has the bounce of power, do you think, really changed with the recent parade in China, for example, where they kind of make a big deal about their supersonic missiles and this kind of thing?
I think it's anyone's guess whether the United States would actually join a war over Taiwan.
I suspect that the American people would be shocked, frankly, if they understood the risks that the people within the Beltway have imposed on us.
That is to say, maybe we could start a war.
I don't think we could sustain it.
It would make the Vietnam War look like a very popular endeavor.
And the risks, of course, are vastly greater.
China is a nuclear power.
And here we are disputing how the civil war among China should come out.
Pretty risky.
As for the modern weaponry, basically the Chinese put military modernization last among the four modernizations of agriculture and business and so forth.
Until the former president of Taiwan, Li Donghui, deliberately provoked them.
And that was in 1996 and again in 1999.
And that kicked off the Chinese military modernization drive, which has now given China the ability to compete on pretty equal terms with the United States, given that it's basically talking about fighting on its territory or very close to it.
And we have to project power 8,000 miles across the Pacific to get into a war with China.
So the problem is nobody's got any escalation control.
If we start a conflict over Taiwan, it could very easily escalate into a nuclear exchange.
The Chinese position is they won't use nuclear weapons first.
But if they're attacked with nuclear weapons, and we've just abandoned the INF Treaty, which restrained us in that regard, if they're attacked with nuclear weapons, they will respond in kind.
So what they were showing off in Tiananmen Square in the military parade was in part a series of missiles with the designation Dongfeng or DF-41, which have multiple warheads that can reach any part of the United States.
They were also showing off hyperglider warheads for missiles.
And of course, they have the ability, which no one else has to date, to strike carrier battle groups at a considerable distance from the mainland with ballistic missiles.
So cruise missiles, ballistic missiles.
Charles, I read a thing that said that the new H-bombs that they show, that they are mobile on the back of trucks and that they are solid-fueled, unlike the old missiles that the Americans always considered not really a strategic threat because they take too long to prepare.
We could nuke them before they could launch them.
But these essentially are a real game changer and make it where they can prevent their nukes from getting nuked.
And they'll have plenty of time to erase Los Angeles from the map if they want.
Yeah, they have the, you know, their nuclear doctrine is very clear and their deployments and their weaponry are consistent with it.
Basically, they would absorb a first strike and then retaliate.
And the fact that the missiles are now solid-fueled, which means that they don't require any time to be launched, and they're mobile on trucks, meaning that, you know, their location is constantly shifting, means that they have a very good chance of being able to retaliate if we attack them.
There's a further complication, and this is that we don't know where the warheads are stored in China, the nuclear warheads, and they seem to be commingled with non-nuclear warheads.
So here's a question.
If the United States uses a conventional missile or airstrike to take out a Chinese base and that base has nuclear warheads on it, is that the equivalent of a nuclear attack by us, in the Chinese view, that would trigger a nuclear retaliation?
Because it would look like an effort to knock out their ability to deter attack with nuclear weapons.
So this is all very complicated, and unfortunately, we don't have an effective dialogue with the Chinese on these issues.
And certainly the mood in Washington now is not conducive to such dialogue.
This is one of several significant dangers that are going up for us.
And I'm sorry because we're over time here, but I got to ask you one last thing, which is what proportion of the influence here toward these policies is wielded by Lockheed and the F-16 lobby?
Oh, I think there's significant impact from lobbying by the three, four major defense contractors, which are basically state-owned company.
And they're not owned by the state, but they might as well be state-owned enterprises because they get all their funding from the taxpayers.
And they try to make profit off that for their executives, and they're quite successful.
But, you know, look at this situation.
So obviously the United States, since 1989, has not sold and cannot sell under current policy weapons to the mainland Chinese, but it can sell them to the Chinese on Taiwan.
So it's in the interest of these companies to talk up the threat to Taiwan so they can sell weapons there, which is what's just happened.
So, yeah, they have a significant effect on this.
But, you know, there is also ideological identification with Taiwan on the part of Democrats, some Republicans, anti-communists, that is a factor as well.
Sure, which that's fair enough, but it should only go so far, and I think it seems to go a lot further is the problem, right?
Well, we have developed a habit of making commitments that, you know, are somewhat questionable in the new context, to put it mildly, and that may be beyond our ability to deliver.
So there you have it.
And I think we probably are over time, and I have to excuse myself.
Sure.
I thank you for the opportunity to speak with you.
All right, everybody, that is Ambassador Chas Freeman, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and a lot of other jobs along those lines.
And we ran this one at AntiWar.com, Taiwan arms sales and the erosion of U.S.-Sino diplomacy.
Thank you again, sir.
My pleasure.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
