On January 20, 2025, the United States will get a new president and administration that is anti-war, especially nuclear war. If that seems like a well, duh! statement, it’s not. For four years, the Blob, the Washington foreign policy establishment, has been playing with nuclear war in two places, Ukraine and the western Pacific. Both our proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and our commitment to defend Taiwan against China, the latter voiced repeatedly by President Joe Biden, carry a non-trivial risk of going nuclear.
President Trump will move quickly to remove this risk. How can he do so without the U.S. looking weak? The answer begins with what should be the starting question in any foreign policy situation: what would Bismarck do?
After unifying Germany in 1871, Bismarck was a man of peace. He saw Germany as a satisfied power, whose rise was threatened only by war. In one European crisis after another, he called a conference and successfully defused the ticking bomb. In doing so, he made use of two principles. The first was that the Great Powers decide what is going to happen and lesser powers are simply informed what will happen to them. The second principle is compensation: If a country loses territory in one place, it gains something somewhere else. The goal was a deal that left no one fully satisfied but that everyone could live with.
Channeling Bismarck, how could President Trump bring the war in Ukraine to an end? It has become a war of attrition, which Ukraine is bound to lose because it is smaller than Russia. Recognizing reality, an American peace proposal would cede to Russia Crimea, the Donbas, and a corridor connecting the two. But Ukraine would receive compensation. Russia would have to buy the previously Ukrainian lands and would not receive de jure recognition of its ownership until the payments were completed. Second, Russia would cede East Prussia and its port of Königsberg to Ukraine and build a heavy-haul railway connecting western Ukraine to that port city. This would give Ukraine not only a second port through which to export its grain, but a second sea, in this case one wholly controlled by NATO since Sweden and Finland joined.
Ukraine’s primary economic vulnerability is its dependence on the Black Sea to ship out its main product, grain. Giving it not only a second port but a second sea for its grain exports would be a strategic Ukrainian victory, one big enough to counterbalance its territorial losses. From Russia’s standpoint, Russian-occupied East Prussia, called the Kaliningrad oblast, is a strategic liability. It has no land border with Russia, which makes it indefensible. The trade of East Prussia for lands adjoining Russia would be truly Bismarckian, which is to say everyone would benefit. Such a peace would remove the danger of escalation to the nuclear level from Europe.
That brings us to the other potential trigger for nuclear war, Taiwan. Bismarck was always aware of the historical context within which he had to make his deals to keep the peace. In this case, history both explains why the Taiwan situation is dangerous and offers a way to resolve it.
China’s history is one of repeated internal disunion and breakup into warring states. The Chinese Communist Party fears an independent Taiwan could inaugurate another such period of disunion; if one province can become independent, so could others. That makes Taiwanese independence a core interest for China, one for which it will go to war if it has to.
But history also offers a model for a solution. In the early 900s, a steppe tribe of nomads, similar to the later Mongols, conquered northern China. That tribe was the Khitans, and its brilliant leader, Abaoji, suddenly found himself ruling two very different peoples, one nomadic and the other, culturally Chinese, made up of settled farmers. In his magnificent book, Imperial China, F.W.Mote writes,
[BLOCK]he immediately set about transforming the Khitan Great Khanate, the instrument of rule that he had just gained, into something without precedent in steppe history. He attached a foreign administrative system to the Khitan nomadic state. His was to be a dual empire, part sedentary and part nomad, one part adapting to Chinese modes of governing and the other part remaining true to steppe tradition.[/BLOCK]
To Chinese people, ancient precedent is highly important for legitimacy. By offering the precedent of Abaoji, we could offer China a deal where Taiwan would join the People’s Republic of China, fly its flag, sing its anthem,etc. But it sould have a separate administration in Beijing that would oversee a Taiwan that retained freedom of speech, democratic elections, and a free-market economy. Beijing offered Hong Kong a 50-year guarantee of “one people, two systems,” but then abrogated the agreement. Taiwan would be given meaningful guarantees. One would be the separate administration, a second would be that no armed forces or police from the mainland would be stationed on Taiwan (which would retain its current armed forces as a provincial militia, something else with long precedent in Chinese history), and third that the Taiwanese administration in Beijing would be run by the Kuomintang, just as Abaoji’s administration for his conquered Chinese territory was mostly run by former Tang dynasty officials. The Kuomintang is just as insistent on a unified China as is the Chinese Communist Party.
As Mote wrote, “The new government of dual institutions was a brilliant concept. Moreover, in actual practice it functioned with stability for more than two centuries.” That’s probably enough time for us to defuse our current military confrontation with China. And keep Bismarck smiling.
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