There’s no shortage of commentary connecting the war against Iran to the future of Taiwan. But talking about the past might serve our present moment better. There are lessons from the Taiwan Strait Crisis of the 1950s that can help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and rescue the global economy.
The commentariat’s view of the future is narrowly focused on assembling military capabilities and demonstrating the resolve to use them. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times believe the war in Iran created a “munitions gap” that has “significantly drained” the store of weapons the United States needs to deter China and defend Taiwan. The Atlantic suggested Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz might teach China how a blockade of Taiwan can paralyze a conflicted US president. The Japan Times said senior US defense officials struggled to convince skeptical Asian allies that US security guarantees remain credible.
This circumscribed discussion of the Taiwan-related implications of the Iran war is encouraging a reluctant US Congress to reconsider President Trump’s request for a massive increase in defense spending. Opponents continue to argue it would further undermine an already shaky US economy. No one imagines it would help reopen the Strait of Hormuz or relieve the economic pain of its ongoing closure.
Declassified US and Soviet accounts of the Taiwan Strait Crisis suggest that understanding Iranian intentions may be more productive than increasing US capabilities. The Eisenhower administration refused to talk to China’s communist leaders and consequently misunderstood their language and behavior. That led to a military conflict in the Taiwan Strait that carried a greater risk of nuclear war than the Cuban missile crisis.
The parallels between these two situations are striking and instructive.
Aggressive allies with powerful lobbies
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press that President Trump decided to attack Iran because Israel planned to strike Iran on its own. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly met with Trump on multiple occasions to press the case for war. Senator Lindsay Graham, building on years of lobbying by hawkish Republican Party donors and right-wing religious organizations, worked hard to help Netanyahu secure Trump’s acquiescence.
In the mid-1950s, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who led a Republic of China (ROC) government that fled to Taiwan after losing control of China, lobbied President Eisenhower to support a major military offensive to reclaim the mainland. Powerful allies in Congress and the US military, like Senate Majority Leader William Knowland and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Arthur Radford, helped Chiang make his case. Influential media barons including Time’s Henry Luce and right-wing religious zealots from the John Birch Society amplified calls to “unleash Chiang” in the fight against communism.
Rubio repeated this McCarthy-era slogan when describing the US-Israeli bombing of Iran. Over the years it has become a euphemism for the core Republican Party belief in the efficacy of aggressive military solutions to geopolitical problems.
Isolation and embargo
For decades, the US government actively helped suppress the revolutionary movement that led to the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran in November 1979. After Iranian students seized the US embassy and took hostages, President Carter froze Iranian assets, imposed economic sanctions, and severed diplomatic relations with the new Iranian government. Successive administrations continuously tightened those sanctions, with a modest respite after President Obama negotiated an agreement to place limits on Iran’s nuclear energy program in 2015. President Trump abrogated the agreement and imposed even tighter economic sanctions three years later.
The US government also helped suppress the revolutionary movement that led to the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. It continued to recognize Chiang’s rump government in Taiwan as the sole legitimate sovereign of all of China. It imposed an economic embargo and policed it with a naval blockade. The brutality of the Korean War, as well as the long and acrimonious negotiation to end it, convinced Eisenhower that talking to the Chinese communist leadership was a waste of time. After the armistice ending the fighting in Korea was signed, the United States continued to aid and encourage Chiang’s repeated military attacks from ROC-held islands close to the Chinese coast.
In both cases the US government used a combination of economic warfare, military threats, and diplomatic isolation that led to the marginalization and impoverishment of a sovereign adversary. Severe restrictions on social and cultural contact inhibited constructive communication, making it extremely difficult to develop the mutual understanding and respect needed to manage adversarial relationships without resorting to violence.
Bad-faith negotiations
In addition to withdrawing from the nuclear agreement with Iran, President Trump attacked the Islamic Republic—twice—during what appeared to be encouraging talks about a substitute agreement. A ceasefire intended to pause the second and more extensive round of attacks was supposed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but Trump immediately undermined that possibility by imposing a naval blockade on any ships entering or exiting Iranian ports. He made a series of unsubstantiated statements the Iranians claimed were misleading and manipulative. He spoke as if his goal was to compel Iranian capitulation.
Eisenhower treated the Chinese communists with an equal measure of arrogance and contempt. In the spring of 1955, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and Vice President Richard Nixon publicly threatened to attack the Chinese mainland with nuclear weapons if the Chinese military did not stop shelling the ROC forces harassing Chinese air and naval traffic from the offshore islands. Radford, Dulles, and other anti-communist ideologues convinced Eisenhower that if those islands fell, the rest of East Asia would follow like dominoes. Eisenhower was fully prepared to strike, but a request from Indonesia to the PRC to represent China at the Bandung Conference prompted him to wait. Diplomatic entreaties from almost every other participating nation convinced Eisenhower to finally agree to PRC requests to open negotiations aimed at resolving the crisis in the Taiwan Strait.
The negotiations dragged on for three years. Every time the Chinese communists made concessions to US demands, including a commitment to forgo the use of force to dislodge the ROC government in Taiwan, Secretary of State Dulles moved the goal posts. He instructed US negotiators that the only US objective in the talks was to avoid being blamed when they broke down. After Dulles unilaterally downgraded US representation at the talks, the Chinese communists resumed shelling the offshore islands.
Lessons from Taiwan’s past for Iran’s present
Misunderstanding, miscommunication, and an unwillingness to negotiate in good faith with the Iranian leadership are serious problems that require both immediate and sustained US attention.
President Nixon, in secret negotiations that were vociferously opposed by the Taiwan lobby and its many supporters in Congress, decided to speak respectfully with the Chinese communist leadership about its concerns. Those conversations encouraged Nixon to make meaningful concessions in the interest of the greater good of both nations. His visit to China in 1972, amid the ideological fervor and political violence of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, changed US public perceptions of the country overnight. The subsidence of US public hostility towards the communist Chinese opened the door for a decades-long geopolitical realignment that produced economic and security benefits for both countries that greatly outweighed the domestic political costs.
Something similar can take place between the United States and Iran today. Like China, Iran is an equally proud and ancient civilization led by a radical revolutionary government that would have a compelling interest in responding to a conciliatory change in US behavior.
Another lesson Taiwan holds for Iran is that bilateral breakthroughs to resolve an urgent situation—in this case restoring the free flow of a critical set of global commodities—shouldn’t be negotiated in secret without informing other countries and peoples that have a vital stake in the outcome.
Nixon lied about the deal on Taiwan he struck with Mao. He lied to Congress, to US allies, and to the American public. Today, many of the economic and security benefits accrued from the US-China rapprochement are now in jeopardy because the concessions Nixon made were not acceptable to many of the external constituencies he deceived.
The third lesson is that successful diplomatic outcomes take a long time to negotiate and can only be sustained with constant and unending effort. One of the benefits of abiding by the Cold War–era adage that “politics stops at the water’s edge” is that it helps protect negotiated results across administrations. US adversaries can’t enter substantive agreements if they fear future US administrations won’t honor them.
Seven years passed between Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and the establishment of formal diplomatic relations with communist China. Carter was unsettled when he discovered the secret concessions Nixon made, especially his failure to get the Chinese communist leadership to agree to forgo the use of force to reunify the two rival Chinese governments. In the end Carter decided that the United States should keep its word. Congress, which was not only never consulted but also intentionally deceived, tried to impose its will through the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which broke every significant commitment that Nixon and Carter made by maintaining de facto diplomatic relations with a rival Chinese government and providing it with arms.
One final lesson is that our troubles in Taiwan and Iran are intimately connected to the state of US domestic politics. There can be no peace abroad without some degree of consensus at home.
The long-term future of the Strait of Hormuz is now bound up in complex multinational religious, ethnic, economic, and territorial disputes with long and complex histories. It will take decades of sustained diplomacy to resolve these disputes peacefully. If the US government is unwilling or unable to commit to seeing that process through, the only other choices available are to continue suffering the political, economic, and moral costs of participating in the violence, or to withdraw.