Commentary
In a speech on Aug. 24, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed several issues regarding Asia, most notably China. In the speech, Harris criticized China’s illegal South China Sea grab, but hastened to say that she was not asking countries to take a side. This was her first strategic mistake.
Like President Biden, she called for “action” but was non-specific about what this action ought to be regarding China. And, she surrendered a critical point of leverage that the United States and allies have over China: its dependence on export trade. This was big mistake number two.
By encouraging, through her pronounced silence, our allies to ally and trade with China, Harris sets the stage for America’s failure in Asia, and therefore the failure of democracy on a global scale. Countries globally are de-recognizing democratic Taiwan in China’s favor because China is very much asking those countries to take a side. The number has fallen from almost all major countries recognizing the Republic of China (Taiwan) rather than communist China in 1949, to almost all of them exclusively recognizing communist China today. Just 14 brave and principled countries, including Switzerland, continue to recognize Taiwan today.
This Taiwan metric is critical to tracking China’s global influence. If we do not want the world to go entirely red, we ought to focus on asking countries to again recognize Taiwan, at the very least. That means asking countries to take sides for democracy, and against totalitarianism. This is what the Biden-Harris team is so far unwilling to do.
The opportunity to ask countries to take sides will soon be gone. The more China expands, economically and militarily, the harder it will be to cohere an alliance of countries that do take a stand against China. Eventually, when China is powerful enough, it will be impossible to keep our allies onside.
At that point, China will be able to push the United States and its allies, including their military and businesses, out of Asia entirely. China will then become a regional if not global hegemon. We will have lost the opportunity to protect ourselves, because we foolishly failed to appeal to our allies to make hard choices, and really be allies when we still could.
Either you are with democracy, or you are against democracy. You cannot ally with China, and trade with China, and also support democracy. Since it became clear that engaging China through business and cultural endeavors failed disastrously as a strategy for democratizing China, the two are mutually exclusive.
The Harris speech should have been closer to that of George W. Bush in 2001. He said, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Today, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are the terrorists. They support state-sponsors of terrorism, like Pakistan, which supported the Taliban, and they engage in their own terrorism in the South China Sea, through for example sponsoring a “maritime militia” that sinks fishing boats from other countries.
In her speech, Harris did not mention China’s maritime militia, or its support for state-sponsors of terrorism. Instead, she retread the same old worn path, but more lightly and on eggshells, compared to the prior administration.
“Our vision includes freedom of navigation, which is vital to us all,” said Harris. “The livelihood of millions of people depend on the billions of dollars in trade that flow through these sea lanes each day.”
Her speech to this point was all so obvious as to be entirely uncontroversial and beside the point.
