Straight—but Narrow—Talk about the U.S., Taiwan, and China

Abstract

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker begins Strait Talk with a striking claim: 'Today confrontation in the Taiwan Strait represents the single most dangerous challenge for the United States in the world/7 as a clash in this region the only conflict in which the US could confront a nuclear power with a huge military establishment (p. 1). Readers who perhaps shuddered when American candidates in 2008 called for open-ended backing of Georgia against Russia, or who view with foreboding recent developments in nuclear-armed Pakistan may be forgiven for taking Tucker's warning as hyperbole, not as straight talk. Her claim illustrates both a strength and a weakness of this meticulously researched book, which is based on the very latest declassified archival material and over 100 interviews. The strength is in showing how Tucker uses history to construct policy advice for American decision makers, in order to avert potentially dire consequences. The weakness is that in overstating her case and in treating diplomatic issues in the Taiwan Strait in relative isolation from events in other parts of the world, Tucker ultimately undermines aspects of her own study. Tucker is among the most prodigious writers and researchers about relations between the U.S., the People's Republic of China (more recently simply called China), and the Republic of China (now usually referred to as Taiwan). She first made her mark with Patterns in the Dust (1983), in which she argued that the Truman administration was open to continued contact with, and possibly even recognition of, the People's Republic after the Communist Party came to power, but that chances of normal relations ended after the Korean War began. Tucker emphasized in that book the mutual suspicions between American leaders and the Nationalist (Kuomintang) regime Chiang Kai-shek instituted on the island of Taiwan, about 100 miles off the mainland. Tucker, who served in the State Department and in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing during the mid-1980s, developed this controversial theme of strained relations between the U.S. and the ROC over a longer time-span in her second book,