All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I got the great Gareth Porter.
Thank goodness for that, man.
He's gonna teach us some stuff here.
First of all, he wrote the book on Iran's nuclear program, Manufactured Crisis, because it ain't one.
And then, of course, the CIA Insider's Guide to America's Horrible Iran Policy that's co-authored with the former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who I'm going to interview in two and a half hours from now with Kevin Gosztola on the Daniel Hale case.
But anyway, the great Gareth Porter, but we're not talking about Iran, we're talking China.
Now welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
Good.
Good to be back on your show.
It's been a while.
I know.
I miss you.
This might have been the longest I've gone without interviewing you since 2007 or something.
It's possible.
No, there's been a couple of times when you're writing a book that you take a couple of months off and doing the news.
Yeah.
True.
True that.
Yeah.
No.
Happy to have you back on.
For people who don't know, I've interviewed Gareth almost 350 times.
I don't know what the number is.
I'll search it up while we're talking here.
I know it's over 300, but anyway, and that's because he's good on so many things.
Now in this case, we're talking about Taiwan and, you know, a guy asked me a question at a thing that I was at and I only figured out later that he was confusing Taiwan with Hong Kong and was talking about how, look, I mean, China pretty much already rules them anyway and this kind of thing.
And I was confused by the question was like, yeah, well, no, not so much, you know, but then I realized later that that must've been what he was thinking about was Hong Kong.
So then, and I'm not making fun of the guy or anything, but just the point is that it's a long way from here and people don't really know a whole hell of a lot about it.
So you've got this great piece.
It's called how Washington's top Taiwan specialist embraced separatist party leader and opened new cross straight crisis.
And this guy, Richard C. Bush, tell me he's not a Bush cousin or something here.
Just a quiz.
He's not related.
He's not related to that Bush family insofar as anybody knows.
Okay.
I got a good friend with the last name Bush, John Bush, great libertarian activist here in Austin who's got no relation to them devils either.
So it doesn't hurt anyone to hold that against the guy.
But anyway, listen first, give us a quick background on Mao Tse Tung took over in 49 and the nationalists fled to Taiwan and they had the American backed dictatorship there for a long time.
And then it's not really a dictatorship anymore, but then, and give us the Nixon and the Jimmy Carter treatment on how America switched from backing Taiwan to at least recognizing mainland China and then mainland China is even sovereign claim over Taiwan and all this complicated stuff.
Could you please?
Well, I'll try to do it in a very, very brief compass and of course, won't be able to do it justice.
But I think the key point here is that beginning with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the United States began a process of ending its civil war, or not a civil war, but it's its war with China over Taiwan in the sense of basically backing, as you correctly put it, the Chiang Kai-shek regime in Taiwan from 1949 until basically the normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China in 1979 or 1982, where, you know, they then de-recognized the Republic of China on Taiwan.
And since then, you know, Taiwan has been still formally speaking Republic of China, but clearly is a rump regime that represents nobody, nobody else except for the population of that island, roughly 100 miles from the coast of China.
And I think the key point here that people basically don't really understand very much in this country is that from that time on, the U.S. government has been pledged to recognize that there is only one China.
There are not two governments representing China, and that Taiwan is, in fact, considered part of China.
Now, you know, this has not been explicitly stated for a long, long time by any U.S. official, but that was precisely what President Nixon and President Carter understood.
And in fact, we know that Nixon did make an explicit commitment to the Chinese.
It wasn't publicly declared, but it was explicitly stated to the Chinese in negotiating that agreement, the original agreement with them, that the United States will not regard the status of Taiwan as unresolved in the future, will not state publicly that it's unresolved in the future.
That's a very important statement.
And I think the problem that we face here, just in general, on U.S. policy toward China and Taiwan now is that this understanding that has held for all these decades has been eroding, has been eroded more or less deliberately by figures in Washington, in the political and national security elite over the last few decades.
And it's reaching now a crisis point.
And so my story is really related to that larger historical theme, which you correctly point out is extremely important as the background to it.
Yeah.
I just think, and it is just a parenthesis in the story, right?
It's not even the point of the story, but how the role of the native Formosans has nothing to do with any of this, right?
Well, it does, of course, have something to do with the current situation in Taiwan.
And that, in turn, is, you know, a potential serious problem, potentially a lack of consideration for them.
You mean, is that it?
Well, I mean, the problem that the native Taiwanese let's just very quickly sort of summarize the political situation in Taiwan.
The native Taiwanese were obviously mistreated by the Chiang Kai-shek government.
There was a big massacre that took place, estimated between 20,000 and 30,000 Taiwanese killed by the Chiang Kai-shek regime very early on, as early as 1947, 48, I guess, 48, 49.
And therefore, there is this lingering resentment toward the mainlanders based on that experience, understandably, by the native Taiwanese population.
And that has resulted in, since the son of Chiang Kai-shek passed on, and that post-Chiang Kai-shek era began in Taiwan, there has been a new development of a new sort of Taiwanese sense of nationalism.
And that has clearly changed the internal politics of Taiwan.
And as a result of that, you have a political party, the Democratic Progressive Party, the has long since become a separatist party, a party which is committed officially by their bylaws and has never renounced the aim of a separate Taiwanese state that would be explicitly independent of the mainland of China.
So that's a very big political obstacle potentially to peace between both the mainland and Taiwan and between China and the United States, to the extent that the United States continues to be tied up with support for an independent Taiwan.
And that's why the story that I've written here, which is about how this top ranking non-governmental specialist on Taiwan, Richard C. Bush, has played this role in basically smoothing the way, if you will, for the Obama administration to abandon, in effect, a very long observed policy toward Taiwan by the U.S. government, which was that if a Taiwanese leader were to begin to talk like separatist language, to make statements that implied or stated even more directly that he or she intended to move away from the one China principle, the basis that the United States and China had agreed on in their negotiations, and which, by the way, very importantly, the regime that had come out of the KMT, the Kuomintang, still calling itself the Kuomintang Party, had in the 1990s, early 1990s, negotiated an understanding with the mainland through intermediaries, not officials of either side, but unofficial intermediaries had met in 1992 and agreed on a principle that involved the idea of one country, two systems.
And that was the basis for that Kuomintang government in Taiwan to come to a set of agreements on a lot of political, not so much political, but social economic issues, where there's been developed a lot of cooperation between the mainland and Taiwan.
And that resulted in a decade and a half of, well, let's put it this way, a solid decade from 2008 to 2016 of very far reaching cooperation between mainland China and Taiwan.
And it assured a peace between the two governments, the two states, if you will, and or two governments, we'll leave it that way, because state implies something broader.
And so the problem is that when President Tsai was elected in 2016, for the Democratic Progressive Party, she represented this separatist point of view.
Now, you know, she did not talk about it openly, but she hinted at it very broadly.
And so my article is about what happened when she was elected.
And this guy, Richard C. Bush, who already knew President Tsai very well, and liked her, but was very, you know, he understood that her position on separatism because of her leadership of this separatist party, which has a wing, which is extremely active, extremely vocal, and even radical on this question of separatism, and was unwilling to basically piss off that, that activist wing, separatist activist wing of the party, she hid the fact that she was, in fact, taking that position.
But but the US government understood what was going on, and her refusal to approve of this fundamental principle that had been approved by all the previous governments was, to say the least, problematic in terms of the PRC's view of what was going on in Taiwan.
And so Bush actually expected that the US government would have to continue to carry out a policy called dual deterrence, quote, unquote, very important principle, which had begun, basically, at the end of the previous century, the beginning of this century, when the US government began the practice of calling out privately, or publicly, leaders of Taiwanese parties that talked in a way that threatened the fundamental principle on which this peace and cooperation between the mainland and Taiwan had been based.
And they had done so on four occasions, as has been documented by Richard Bush himself, as well as another former US official who was part of the US unofficial representation in Taipei, Taiwan.
And in fact, Bush was one of the people who actually carried out the dual deterrence policy in the past.
And so he was very well acquainted with it, to say the least.
But when Tsai was elected, he then backed off and allowed her to get away with this ambiguity, which covered obvious commitment to the principles of the DPP party.
And so my article was aimed at trying to uncover why that happened, to explain why this guy Richard C. Bush suddenly turned around after she was elected and inaugurated, and said, well, I understand what's really going on here is, she's not to blame for the breakdown in relations that followed her inauguration, and her speech.
It's the Chinese government who is responsible, because they're not allowing her the freedom, which is necessary to keep her base, that is the separatists, in her party, and keep the party unified.
Well, as far as I'm concerned, and I think any objective person would be concerned, that is not the basis for, you know, that's not a reason for the United States to suspend its dual deterrence policy.
But in fact, it did do so.
And so, in a nutshell, what I finally discovered when I looked into it is that what was really going on here was that the Obama administration was being put under very strong pressure, both political pressure from Congress, and pressure from the Pentagon, to adopt a much tougher stance toward the mainland, because primarily of China's much more active military presence in the South China Sea, and equally or even more important, their growing military power, which threatened the ability of the United States to command any situation that might occur in around Taiwan in the future.
And so, what the Pentagon wanted was for the Obama administration to say, we are now in a situation of great power competition with China.
And Obama was reluctant to do that, because he thought that it was important to keep the Chinese on board with a number of or several issues, where the Chinese had been supportive of US interests, for example, climate change, and North Korea, those are the two ones that were most frequently mentioned.
So, there was a lot of conflict within the Obama administration over this question of whether to openly declare that the United States was in great power competition.
But in the end, I think Obama had to make some, had to make obeisance to that position.
And I think part of the fallout was that the Obama administration was not going to take the position that Tsai was violating this principle, and instead was going to remain silent on it and let it go.
And that effectively legitimized her position, and I think set up a very problematic situation in the future, because her party is likely to have the candidate who is going to win the 2024 election, that candidate is going to be openly separatist.
He is the leader of the separatist wing of the party.
William Lai, her vice presidential candidate in previous round, is going to undoubtedly be the DPP candidate for 2024 election.
And that's going to presumably pose a crisis in US-China relations.
So, that's why this is an extremely important issue, which just is not at all understood by the public or by the mass media.
Hey, y'all, check out my new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, at enoughalreadybook.net.
Early reviews are that people either think it's hilarious or they get so angry that they put it down.
But it's the Iranian Revolution, the 80s Afghan War, the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq War I, Iraq War I and a half, and then Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq War III, Yemen, and all the special operations wars throughout Africa in the aftermath of the war in Libya.
It's all there for you.
Might change a friend's mind.
Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, at enoughalreadybook.net.
Hey, guys, Scott Horton here for expanddesigns.com.
Harley Abbott and his crew do an outstanding job designing, building, and maintaining my sites, and they'll do great work for you.
You need a new website?
Go to expanddesigns.com slash Scott and save 500 bucks.
Hey, guys, check out Listen and Think audiobooks.
They're at listenandthink.com and, of course, onaudible.com.
And they feature my book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, as well as Brand New Out Inside Syria, by our friend Reese Ehrlich, and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there.
Reese might be one exception.
But essentially, they're all libertarian audiobooks.
And here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to Listen and Think audiobooks.
Just donate $100 to The Scott Horton Show at scotthorton.org slash donate.
All right, now, so obviously, the Trump government inherited the Obama pivot to Asia policy.
And I guess you're saying Obama had conceded the point by the time he was out.
But then did Trump and Pompeo really escalate things?
Or they just kept that status quo?
They absolutely did escalate it.
And I've written one piece about that, you know, one aspect of that escalation, which was to carry out the first major arms sales to Taiwan.
And to include in that, what I would say was a kind of very open effort to portray the United States as favoring a aggressive Taiwanese military policy toward the mainland, because it involved F-16 fighter planes, which previously, you know, there had been very limited sales of F-16s.
And this was a much bigger sale.
But also, the sale of a missile that is capable of hitting targets on the mainland.
And which I think symbolizes this, this idea that Taiwan can now strike at the mainland.
Now, you know, this was a kind of stupid policy decision, I think, because as some of the specialists in the Biden administration pointed out, all it was doing was trying to compete with China in the military areas where China is far stronger than Taiwan.
And so it's kind of a losing proposition.
But it was a kind of political gesture, if you will, toward Taiwan, rather than a meaningful military response to the situation.
But I think that in addition to that, and perhaps even more important, the Trump administration was carrying forward this idea of high level representation, you know, meetings with Taiwanese high government officials, by high government officials of the United States.
And that is, of course, something that they know is going to piss off the PRC, it's going to create much more hostility toward Taiwan, and it's going to ultimately result in some Chinese responses, which are going to up the ante.
And what we've seen over the last few, over the last couple of years, is that the PRC has responded to both the Tsai presidency and its open violation of the understanding that I was talking about, and to the Trump administration's policy of sort of trying to give more diplomatic status to the Taiwanese government by starting to use military demonstrations in the Taiwan Strait to poke the Taiwanese government and military in the eye and remind them that the Chinese military really controls the Taiwan Strait because of its superior air power.
And so that's what they've been doing.
On frequent occasions, they have been sending small air armadas, fighter planes, over the Taiwan Strait and crossing into the air identification zone of Taiwan, which doesn't really mean that much.
It's not even an officially recognized zone, but it's simply a way of symbolically reminding Taiwan and the United States that the mainland does have the wherewithal to do much more than they're doing.
Yeah.
I'm sorry, man.
What a horrible place to end the interview because I got more questions, but we'll have to pick it up next time because I got to go because I'm late.
But thank you so much.
Okay.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that is the great Gareth Porter.
Here he is at antiwar.com slash Porter.
It's a reprint from The Gray Zone, how Washington's top Taiwan specialist embraced separatist party leader and opened new cross-strait conflict.
The great Gareth Porter.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APS radio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
