I remember staying up late to watch the bombs go off over Baghdad, the late night show that was the opening act for two decades of tragedy. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have always been with us, even when they’ve felt invisible, like ghost limbs of some slow motion zombie foreign policy. The past two decades have been a time of war and peace, somehow at the same time. We’ve turned inwards, absorbed with our own staggering politics and vulnerable immune systems.
Some people might have felt like they were soldiers in some ersatz army over the past years, from MAGA true believers hanging on every tweet from their fearless leader and the collection of misfits who stormed the Capitol to try to steal the election with their conspiracy twitching fingers to the pussy hatted infantry of the Resistance, bound together as ‘Dumbledore’s Army’ and committed to work their woke magic against the orange tinted man in the White House. Joe Biden’s inaugural plea to end the “(un)civil war” that increasingly defines our politics drew the link between Bull Run and whatever state of partisan skirmish we find ourselves in these days.
Many of us tried to do our part during Covid, staying at home to help the home front weather the pandemic, rationing trips to restaurants the way previous generations measured out sugar and coffee during wartime. Wartime production measures have been invoked to produce unimaginable armadas of vaccines the way production lines once threw off bullets and propellers. The gathering relief and animal spirits that seem on their way this summer, the excitement about getting back to normal and dancing in the streets and in the sheets recall the joy soaked photographs snapped after World War II, when the globe wasn’t so much turned upside down as set right again.
But another kind of war might be brewing, one that makes all this military language seem like so much metaphor. Savvy foreign policy eyes are increasingly trained on developments in Asia, particularly the explosive confrontation already underway between China and Taiwan, for which the brutal crackdown on Hong Kong might be both trailer and dress rehearsal. The status of Taiwan has long been contested, with the U.S. following a “One China Policy” that officially does not recognize Taiwanese autonomy while also seeking to nurture that independence. Taiwan is a remarkable, technology rich place that has long been a beacon of success.
China has seemingly emerged from the pandemic emboldened and aggressive, with designs on consolidating its grip on a part of the world where it is the equivalent of King Kong fighting a pack of beagles. It is keen to test the West’s commitment to smaller nations a world away, confident in its ability to act with impunity in its own backyard. In ways large and small, with hard and soft power, it is counting on our distraction, from its atrocities against the Uighurs in Xianjing to its colonizing of the maritime rights of its smaller neighbors to its plans to ingest dissident territories.
The U.S. must stand with Taiwan, for reasons pragmatic and moral. Like our support for Israel and Hong Kong, this alliance flowers from an awareness of similar values and the value of islands of freedom in a world with a surplus of authoritarians and repression. For years, we have been able to soft pedal the tension between our constitutional heart and self interested wallets by engaging in Talmudic distinctions over the boundaries of Taiwanese vassalage and sovereignty, using diplomatese to finesse friction and hold the chilly peace. Ours has been a posture of “strategic ambiguity” that stops short of actual commitment. As Joan Baez sang, we are “so good with words, and at keeping things vague.”
Punting may no longer be an option. China seems to be maneuvering around the geopolitical chessboard in advance of an all out assault, and should that come to pass it will be a moment of reckoning for the Biden Administration and a mirror to the role the United States wants to play in the world in the second decade of the 21st century. To allow Taiwan to fall would be a permanent stain on the West’s conscience and indicate a civilization no longer confident enough to fight for its far flung allies. The more little lights of liberty are snuffed out, the closer the darkness gets.
There is no question that Taiwan is worth defending. The issue is whether we feel like we are still capable of defending our own sense of sense of mission and purpose in the world. Taiwan’s vulnerability should summon us all from navel gazing and towards the broader horizons of global responsibility. All of the infrastructure in the world won’t rebuild our self-confidence if we aren’t willing to fight for just causes. President Obama’s erased Syrian red line should haunt Joe Biden’s dreams.
People often talk about Covid-19 as if it was a world historical event, and of course that’s true, but in so many way it was also an escape from history, a long pause and a flight into screens and apps and digital pleasure halls and conference rooms. History happens out there, in the worlds of power and conflict and the messy fashioning of the globe into a better place.
Of course, any conflict will only be waged by the vanishing few of us who serve in the military. But I wonder if the rest of us are up to the pressure, are hard and idealistic enough, for the coming clash, whether it is with China or another adversary. I hope we still possess the backbones and the grit to know that America might be imperfect, but that we are better than our foes and stronger than the allies who call on us in their hour of need.
I think that call might come sooner than we think.
Have a good weekend,
A
P.S. check out my piece on Biden’s building, and why it might just be a bet worth making.