Time to return to the more secure Truman-Eisenhower ‘old normal’ on Taiwan

After last-minute passage of some of his legislative proposals, President Biden has taken to comparing his domestic record to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Regarding the greatest foreign threat to the United States, however — the existential danger from Communist China — Biden needs to channel Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. 

With the end of World War II in the Pacific and Europe, the American people and their government had little interest in remaining deeply committed in Asia. Despite the victory of China’s communists — hostile to the U.S. even before its support of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in China’s civil war — Truman considered U.S. forces in Asia an unnecessary investment of military resources. The Soviet threat in Eastern Europe was the preeminent national security concern. The 7th Fleet was withdrawn from the Taiwan Strait.

Truman said in a speech in January 1950, “The  United  States  has no  desire  to  … establish military bases on Formosa at this time. … The United States government will not pursue a course which will lead to involvement in the civil conflict in China [and] will not provide military aid or advice to Chinese forces on Formosa.” Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a National Press Club speech that laid out America’s security interests in Asia. Neither Taiwan nor South Korea was included within that security perimeter.

But Joseph Stalin had ambitions for world communism in the Far East, as well as in Europe. He  immediately conferred with Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung on their intentions to take advantage of the Asian security vacuum being left by the U.S. Mao seemed ready to make the first move on Taiwan, but Kim beat him to the punch.

When North Korean forces poured across the 38th parallel on June 24, 1950, the seriousness of the Truman administration’s mistake was evident to all. For the second time in less than a decade, America was compelled to pivot and confront war in Asia.

Truman organized a United Nations “police action” to meet the communist aggression against South Korea. Within months, Pyongyang’s invasion force was joined by a million “volunteers” from China, North Korea’s “lips and teeth” strategic partner. Those Chinese forces had been intended to accomplish Mao’s original purpose — the invasion and conquest of Taiwan.

That option was foreclosed because of Truman’s other policy reversal precipitated by Pyongyang’s aggression. He returned the 7th Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to prevent either Mao or Chiang from reigniting China’s civil war, saying in June 1950: “I have ordered the 7th Fleet to prevent any attack on Formosa. As a corollary of this action, I am calling upon the Chinese government on Formosa to cease all air and sea operations against the mainland. The 7th Fleet will see that this is done.”

Upon his election to succeed Truman, Eisenhower kept his 1952 campaign promise and visited Korea. When an armistice was signed in 1953 and the shooting stopped, his administration executed identical Mutual Defense Treaties with the Republic of Korea and the Republic of China on Taiwan. He told the officers and men of the 7th Fleet that they would remain in the Taiwan Strait: “Until the nations of the world find a way to insure their security without armaments, the 7th fleet must be strong enough to support our allies, maintain our interests, and help keep the peace in the Far East.”

But Eisenhower also noted that China’s action joining North Korea’s invasion of South Korea — for which both were condemned as aggressors by the United Nations — changed Truman’s 7th Fleet commitment. It would cease playing a neutral balancing role, he said in his State of the Union address in 1953: “[T]here is no longer any logic or sense in a condition that required the U.S. Navy to assume defensive responsibilities on behalf of the Chinese communists, thus permitting those communists, with greater immunity, to kill our soldiers and those of our U.N. allies in Korea. I am, therefore, issuing instructions that the 7th Fleet no longer be employed to shield Communist China.”

The Navy continued to patrol the Strait for the next 19 years to protect Taiwan, until Richard Nixon, encouraged by his chief China negotiator, Henry Kissinger, withdrew the 7th Fleet from those waters in 1972, for the second time since the end of World War II.

But that U.S. commitment was conditioned on “a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question.” The Shanghai Communique of 1972 stated, “With this prospect in mind, [the United States] affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime, it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes.”

America’s commitment to a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question was reaffirmed in the 1979 communique, which shifted diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, and in the 1982 communique that pledged further reductions in U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.

The seriousness of the prohibition against war over Taiwan laid down by Truman and Eisenhower, and repeated by every American president since, was starkly emphasized by Congress in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979: “It is the policy of the United States … to make clear that the … decision to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means.”  

But Beijing rejects that approach, as it did in the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995-96, and last month in the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, as the “old normal.” With its dramatically escalated missile firings and wartime exercises, China claims to have established a “new normal” applying the use of force against Taiwan.  

Beijing’s mounting aggression is opposed by Washington’s “routine” Freedom of Navigation Operations. But the 7th Fleet’s presence in the Taiwan Strait has been anything but routine by Truman-Eisenhower (and Kennedy-Johnson) standards, with only two carrier battle group transits in 50 years.

It is time to return to the “old normal,” when the 7th Fleet kept the peace in the region, operating fully not only in the Taiwan Strait but also in Subic Bay in the Philippines. That country knows from firsthand experience how an aggressor nation can use Taiwan to engulf the region in war. When planes from Japanese carriers in the Pacific bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, aircraft from Formosa, “the unsinkable aircraft carrier,” launched Japan’s attack on the Philippines.

Expanded Strait transits and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit with Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. are steps in the right direction. 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.