Bargaining from strength, Taiwan buys and buys

WORLD NEWS: “U.S. Proposes $6.43 Billion Arms Sale to Taiwan: Plan to Boost Island’s Defense Follows New Leader’s Warming Relations With China, but Sparks Protests in Beijing,” by Ting-I Tsai and Kara Scannell, Wall Street Journal, 6 October 2008.

In principle, I have no problem with this.

But in a grand strategic sense, this is simply feeding a sunk cost instead of moving the PLA in the direction it needs to go.

I talk about America shifting from the “indispensable nation” to the “insolvent Leviathan” in Great Powers. The best way to manage that reality up-front is to slowly rebrand the PLA as an interventionary Core force, just like I’d like to rebrand the Russian military, which we know—by recent demonstration—likes to go places and blow shit up.

Or I can wait on NATO forever, and put my bucks into places like tiny Taiwan.

Frankly, we should be selling military hardware to the mainland, not the island. We get nothing, long term, from this effort.

And when you’re sucking wind financially, I don’t see the sense in this.

Leave the f—king romanticism of the Cold War in the 20th century. That history, as Fukuyama correctly noted, is dead and buried. We fight different battles today that require different allies.

China is about 30 years old, post-Mao. It should be treated as such. Russia is just coming up on 20, making it your typical, hard-to-control 18-year-old, full of bluster and desirous of a fight.

This is why Obama’s election is so important: we need to bury the Cold War once and forever. It’s all that McCain knows, whereas Obama really doesn’t have a clue.

I can train up the latter, but I cannot deconstruct the former.

So I voted for the conservative, eschewing the radical.

Comments

[stuart abrams]

Speaking as a pretty uncritical Obama supporter, I will express my concern in the "privacy" of this blog that I do hope that Obama really does "get it" in foreign policy. Biden clearly doesn't get it. To me, the scariest part of his "our adversaries will test Obama" speech was the fact that he thinks we have "adversaries" comparable to the old Soviet Union in the world of globalization - the whole thing had a very Cold War feel to it. The bunch of Clinton retreads around Obama - Lake, Susan Rice, Holbrooke, Clarke - don't inspire much confidence either, and I still pine for Samantha Power's return. I hope that Obama has an almost entirely Republican foreign policy team - maybe Lugar at State and Gates at Defense, similar to the way FDR brought Vandenberg into the team that designed the UN and the post-war strategy in order to isolate the isolationists. Since I do think that Obama "gets it" and that in reality he will be his own Sec.State, the smart move would be to have sensible Republicans carry the water for him so that he can drag the rest of the country along into the 21st Century.

[Galrahn]

While I'm not opposed in principle to sell defense stuffs to the PLA, my problem is the theft of intellectual property and reverse engineering aspect that has been done, where China steals then turns around and sells the same goods cheaper than we do.

Russia is having this problem with China having sold military goods, in particular the fighter jets and submarines, and we are seeing China turn around and sell the same planes under a different name. There are other examples, like the naval systems on the new frigates to Pakistan.

Until China is following the legal rule sets that our current defense sales partners do, I’m not sure this makes sense from the perspective of protecting our defense industry. It is getting better, but are we there yet?

For me it is the little things not the big things, which means I agree with your larger point.

[jason]

What does the last sentence mean? Obama is conservative and McCain radical?

[hof1991]

Yes, that's what it means.

[Anonymous]

and, further, Jason, Tom says that Obama will be measured in approach and response while McCain is likely to do something mavericky

[Tom Barnett]

Again with the mavericky!