As a speech (see video below), received first prize in the Young Professionals Speakdebate (Center for Strategic and International Studies), November 16, 2005. As an essay, received third prize in the Cato Institute’s intern op-ed contest, December 2005.
During his recent trip to Asia, President Bush praised Taiwan as “free and democratic and prosperous.” Why then, if the Taiwanese already have it so good, should the U.S. rock the boat?
For instance, writing in the Asian Wall Street Journal, Gary Schmitt and Dan Blumenthal recently argued that the U.S. should “encourage” Taiwanese politicians who are independence-minded. During a recent hearing of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute protested that Taiwan spends more on defense per capita than does U.S. ally Germany. What’s more, as Justin Logan of the Cato Institute notes, these neoconservatives advocate very provocative measures, such as sending senior U.S. officers to Taiwan to coordinate with Taiwan’s military.
The problem with these proposals is that international relations is not an academic exercise. It’s not about grandiose abstractions or righteous platitudes. On the contrary, international relations is a cost-benefit analysis, behind which lie death and destruction. To wit, when China issues threats over Taiwan, as it does repeatedly, it’s not bluster. Its leaders mean it when they say that Taiwan is part of China and that reunification—as polling data invariably confirm—is the will of the Chinese people.
Why are 23 million Taiwanese so important to 1.3 billion Chinese? Beijing has invested its very identity in Taiwan. Its national destiny, its pride and its rage are inextricably bound up with this little island. On the Taiwan question, the stakes don’t get any higher for the People’s Republic, so it would be willing to incur massive economic and military losses in order to save face.
As a Chinese general told an American diplomat in 1995, “In the end you [Americans] care more about Los Angeles than you do about Taipei.” Indeed, ask any Chinese citizen what he thinks about Taiwan, and the overwhelming odds are that he’ll respond with deep-seated passion. By stark contrast, ask an American about Taiwan, and he’ll respond with indifference.
Moreover, in matters of national security, Americans should care more about our own freedom, fortunes and futures than those of the Taiwanese. We should be, like all countries, self-interested.
Nonetheless, suppose that we follow the advice of the Free Taiwan crowd. What then?
Militarily, Beijing has made it clear that it would launch a war if Taiwan were “separated from China in any name.” Even assuming that we would win, it is unjust to ask Americans to shed the blood and treasure that war with another nuclear power would entail.
Diplomatically, we need China’s cooperation in the United Nations, which includes not only voting with us but also abstaining. But as a permanent member of the Security Council, China can veto any resolution it wants. One example: we’re engaged in talks with North Korea over its nuclear ambitions. On this issue, China’s regional influence is indispensable. Regarding Iran, provocation would give China an excuse to abandon its restraint on selling arms to the ayatollahs.
Economically, pressuring China would destabilize Taiwan. After all, prosperity requires stability; stability gives investors the security to invest. Indeed, past conflicts between China and Taiwan have caused volatility and uncertainty. In 1996, after the U.S. issued a visa to Taiwan’s president in order for him to give a speech at Cornell University, China lobbed a series of missiles over Taiwan. One result: prices in the computer market jumped dramatically.
Finally, even if China annexed Taiwan tomorrow, reunification would not spell disaster. As various Chinese officials have said, a reunified Taiwan would enjoy even greater autonomy than Hong Kong. In theory, Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. In practice, Hong Kong retains its own legal system, currency and customs. A major international center of finance and trade, it is also an economic dynamo. For these reasons, Taiwan’s reunification would occur more in name than in substance. It would amount to new letterhead on a government memo, not serfdom.
To be sure, the U.S. should not support reunification. Instead, we should continue the current course of strategic ambiguity—which, after all, has resulted in the affluent democracy President Bush hailed two weeks ago. The status quo isn’t perfect, but it’s been painstakingly, skillfully crafted over the past 60 years. Let’s not turn statesmanship into brinksmanship.
Published in the Spectator (Hamilton College), November 21, 2003; in the Free Radical (New Zealand), April-May 2004; and by the Liberal Institute, March 2003.
“Armies are in motion,” observes Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism (2003), “but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding—one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.”[1] That worry is deeply ideological, and as we engage in what Daniel Pipes calls a “cosmic battle over the future course of the human experience,”[2] we ignore it at our peril. Specifically, our so-called war on terror is one of ideas. We still need armies of course, but since culture undergirds politics, in the long run certain ideas, if unchallenged, will only breed more 9/11 kamikazes.
Some say these ideas evince an epochal antipathy between militant Islam and the West, a “clash of civilizations” in Samuel Huntington’s formulation, which shapes the essence of their mutual alienation. Yet what is this essence? What is it that we, as Americans, stand for? Who hates what we stand for? And what do they stand for? If the answers have been ambiguous—for one, “terrorism” is a tactic, not an enemy—Berman brings them into focus.
His most useful contribution is his commentary on the philosophy of the Egyptian theologian Sayyid Qutb (1906-66). A member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the prototypical terrorist organization that politicized a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, Qutb violently opposed Gamal Nasser’s secular régime; in return, Nasser imprisoned or executed many members of the brotherhood. But the organization remained active underground, and 35 years later Qutb’s poisonous legacy shot up in four Boeing 767s, by way of a new brotherhood, known as Al Qaeda. (In fact, Qutb’s younger brother Muhammad taught Islamic studies in Saudi Arabia, where one of his students was Osama bin Laden.)
Qutb denunciated all things modern and lamented the dualistic “schizophrenia” of the secular and the sacred. He took greatest umbrage at the separation of church from state. Yet rather than seeking transcendence in a way that would allow both to exist within a larger context, he sought to erase secular life by engulfing life itself in religion. Indeed, his acutest quarrel was not with America’s failure to uphold its principles; his quarrel was with the principles.[3] Scorning our materialism, capitalism, individualism, humanism, rationalism, decadence and moral laxity, Qutb cherished austerity, self-sacrifice, collectivism, faith or feeling above reason or science, and self-denial. In Qutb’s view, the former traits not only induce mental confusion and spiritual corruption; they also graft those sins onto the pure Islamic soul.
But why the sword and not just the pen in response? Why do Qutb’s disciples furiously beat back discotheques and Big Macs in Bali and Iran? Why do they try to stone women to death for adultery in Nigeria? And why did they knock down those “tower[s] of Babel,” in Norman Mailer’s description, in downtown Manhattan?[4] To the Qutbian mentality, anything this-worldly lacks moral value; only a supernatural paradise awash with virgins has meaning. Hence, employing force, in this life, to achieve one’s ends cannot be immoral. Moreover, as Dinesh D’Souza argues in What’s So Great about America, freedom entails the freedom to choose one’s virtue—to wear a burka on Monday and a miniskirt on Friday. To a Qutbian, such freedom is in fact slavery. And in a world of unending temptations, coercion must accompany, in effect co-opting, the exercise in philosophical cleansing.
And yet, our enemy is not coextensive with any particular religion, like Islam, or any particular region, like the Arab or Muslim world. Rather, the enemy is wider—the enemy is an idea, a political ideology that revolts against the liberal world order. For instance, consider the following passage: “Man is made of mud and ashes. . . . Why are you proud, O mud? Wherefore art thou exalted. . . . O the vile ignobility of human existence! O the ignoble condition of human vileness.”[5] The author is not Sayyid Qutb oor Osama bin Laden, but Pope Innocent III, who wrote these words in the 12th century. But would Qutb or bin Laden disagree? No, for whether they are American Evangelical Christians living in the Bible Belt, ultraorthodox Jews in the West Bank, or Islamists in Pakistani madrasas, our enemies all merely spin variations on the same basic rejectionism. (The latter are more consistent than their brethren, who have and continue to adapt their beliefs to modernity and its midwife, liberalism.)
To concretize this revolt, recall the image of two passenger jets smashing into the Twin Towers. Explains philosopher Harry Binswanger: “First, observe the target: the World Trade Center. What does the World Trade Center symbolize?. . . . It is the core of Wall Street, which is the base of New York City. New York is the [cultural and economic] dynamo powering America—the so-called Great Satan.” Next, recall “the images of Osama bin Laden and his primitive, bearded barbarians squatting in the dirt around their campfires in Afghanistan.” Now juxtapose that primitivism with the image of a skyscraper, wherein free men and women were hard at work on their computers and cellular phones. The difference: whereas our attackers seek to destroy, Americans seek to develop. For America stands for “individual freedom, the freedom to use one’s independent mind to produce material prosperity, a rising standard of living, and individual happiness on this earth. Freedom, wealth, happiness”—our values are absolute anathema to our enemies.[6]
Is this hyperbole? Do some people really, as President Bush declared, “hate our freedoms”?[7] Heed the words of Ayatollah Khomeini: “We are not afraid of economic sanctions or military intervention. What we are afraid of is Western universities.”[8]
There is just one last problem. “To arrive at a situation in which Nazis have conquered Europe,” Berman writes, “you not only need to have the Nazis themselves, you need to have all the other right-wing movements that look on Nazis in a friendly light, and you need to have left-wing opponents like the anti-war French Socialists, who cannot see that Nazis are Nazis.”[9] Applying this pearl to our new world war, we must recognize that to defend America—to defend Western civilization—we infidels need the proud, moral confidence and certainty of our enemies. We must recognize that our ideas uphold life, that ours is the morality of liberalism and hence liberty. Likewise, we must recognize that our enemies’ ideas uphold death, that theirs is the morality of terror and hence tyranny. As two writers for the Ayn Rand Institute put it, “We cannot combat . . . fanatical faith with timid self-doubt, no matter how many bombs we possess.”[10]
Footnotes
[1] Paul Berman, “The Philosopher of Islamic Terror,” New York Times Magazine, March 23, 2003.
[2] Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: Norton, 2003 [2002]), p. 260.
[3] Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “Understanding the Global Crisis Reclaiming Rand’s Radical Legacy,” Free Radical (New Zealand), May-June 2003.
[4] As quoted in [Unsigned], [Untitled], New Republic, November 26, 2001.
[5] Pope Innocent III, “On the Misery of Man,” in Bernard Murchland (trans.), Two Views of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), pp. 5, 9.
[6] Harry Binswanger, “America vs. Death-Worship: The Moral Meaning of the Coming War,” Lecture, Columbia University, October 2, 2001.
[7] As quoted in Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush Pledges Attack on Afghanistan Unless It Surrenders bin Laden,” New York Times, September 21, 2001.
[8] As quoted in Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 122.
[9] Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 206.
[10] Stephen Siek and Tore Boeckmann, “America’s Battle with Moral Uncertainty,” Ayn Rand Institute, September 24, 2001.
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