Taiwan matters more to US Republicans than Ukraine – here’s why The Guardian explains

Why do so many Republicans see China as a bigger threat than Russia, Tim Stanley wonders in his recent article for the Guardian.

Given that America is fighting a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, the message that China is the real danger – and, by implication, Ukraine is a distraction from defending Taiwan – sounds like rank partisanship.

“Whoever the Democrats currently hate, we like; whoever the Democrats like, we hate.”

The grand liberal conspiracy theory is that Donald Trump came into office committed to rapprochement with Moscow (were the Russians blackmailing him?) and now that the GOP is captured by his wide-eyed cultists (to quote Hillary Clinton) it has rewritten its traditional foreign policy to reflect the personal prejudices of one man. And what a man! In March last year, he suggested a means to kill two birds with one stone: stick the Chinese flag on US planes and then “bomb the s--t out of Russia.”

Deconstructing the Trump-capture theory helps illustrate two key aspects of the Trumpian ethos: one, it has historical precedent and, two, it is more rational than Donald’s jokes suggest.

Remember that prior to the 1940s the Republican Party was broadly protectionist and isolationist. The Cold War changed that; a new consensus favoured a military posture to contain communism and free trade to spread the wealth. There were still areas of dissent. Senator Robert Taft believed that over-extending US influence risked repeating abroad what the New Deal did at home: a welfare programme for the world that would sap America’s wealth and undermine its constitutional freedoms.

Nevertheless, the shock was universal when China went communist in 1949, a country that had hitherto been fertile ground both for business and Jesus.

Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the nationalist forces, was a Methodist; US churches had flooded the Middle Kingdom with missionaries. Henry Luce, the Republican publisher of Time magazine, had been born in the country to missionary parents.

Time editorialised: “At no time in the long chronicle of its failure” had the Democratic administration of Harry Truman, “displayed a modest fraction of the stamina and decisiveness which had checked communism in Europe.”

In short, China was “lost” by Democratic incompetence. Joe McCarthy claimed Reds had infiltrated the state department; the liberal elite strikes again.

The Republican Party’s anti-Mao line held till 1972, when Richard Nixon, in a bid to corner the USSR, flew to China and met the genocidal maniac in person.

“We have lost – irretrievably – any remaining sense of moral mission in the world,” lamented conservative William F Buckley.

Ronald Reagan swallowed the U-turn only if it meant hurting the USSR while doing no harm to Taiwan, governed by Chiang Kai-shek and his clan. He flew to Taipei in 1978, while still campaigning to become president, and declared that no American committed to “individual liberty and self-determination would stand by and let his government abandon an ally whose only ‘sins’ are that it is small and loves freedom” (it should be noted that this plucky little country was a one party dictatorship until the 1990s).

As president, Reagan decided that China wasn’t so red after all and he was willing to accept formal relations with it at the expense of Taiwan, but he also issued the Six Assurances that guaranteed continued strategic support for Tapei. This is essentially the compromise we live with today. The West does not formally protect Taiwan, but it’s understood that we might do so were it invaded or threatened: as indeed America later did, with a huge display of naval power during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995-96 when Taiwan got round to having real elections and China flexed its muscles.

Republican Cold War foreign policy was dictated by ideological conflict. In the 1990s, when the world returned to the usual order of multipolar competition, it was reshaped by trade. It seemed to some on the American Right that they had won the Cold War – at great cost – only to lose it at home, either by surrendering to the Left in the culture war or by allowing Asian Tiger economies to “steal” jobs from the rustbelt. While parts of the GOP returned to their isolationist roots, the Democrats doubled-down on globalisation, welcoming China into the World Trade Organisation. In 1996, it has been alleged, China spent vast sums to influence elections in the Democratic Party’s favour. The parallels with Russia’s supposed support for Trump in 2016 are tempting yet, curiously, rarely made.

The anti-Beijing position taken by Republicans today is not linked solely to Trump (one of its most important figures is Marco Rubio, who ran against him in 2016) and was not invented overnight but gestated for three decades, mixing culture, economics and legitimate concern for strategic decline. It taps into constituency psychology: the liberal voter tends to favour engagement and dialogue, the conservative voter prefers to put America first. And while Putin tries to paint himself as the defender of Christianity against secular atheism – a line that, sadly, some of the Right have fallen for – China’s suppression of religious freedom casts the Republican mind back to 1949.

Many conservatives see Russia’s goals as limited to Europe, whereas China’s are global, and – the People’s Republic being an atheistic dictatorship – spiritually evil. Russia is a challenge, but China is perceived to be an existential crisis.

In practice, foreign policy is fluid and administrations tend to do similar things, regardless of party. Barack Obama failed to stop the annexation of Crimea; he did start to build up resistance to Chinese aggression in the Pacific. Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan to showcase her support for the nation’s independence. Trump became the first president to speak directly to a Taiwanese president since 1979, but this didn’t stop him from talking with China, too; and for all his skepticism about the Ukraine war, he did help to arm the country.

Republicans might be leading the charge against Chinese subversion by, say, pushing a ban on TikTok, but many Democrats agree with them. One of the loudest critics of the TikTok ban, allied to progressives, is a Republican: Rand Paul, on the grounds of civil liberties.

If the GOP is divided over Ukraine, fans of democracy can take heart that the party is pretty united around China – indeed the debate about Ukraine is partly about the best way to protect Taiwan. Some argue that the European war drains US attention and resources, leaving Asia open to attack. Others counter that Beijing is surely watching what we do about Russia, and that by forcing it to fight tooth-and-nail in a conflict that was supposed to be “over by Christmas”, we send the message that an invasion of Taiwan will also lead to large-scale casualties and economic ruin.

Ukraine has become the line in the sand.