What's behind the China-Taiwan air dispute?

Relations between China and Taiwan have hit an arguably decade-plus low in recent weeks, as an intensifying row over acceptable civilian air routes over the Taiwan Strait has apparently jeopardized all current and future transport integration of the island with the mainland. What could be behind such a drastic deterioration of the atmosphere?

Beijing's displeasure with the self-ruling island's independence-leaning president, Tsai Ingwen, stems from the latter's refusal to reaffirm the so-called "1992 consensus" that posits that Taiwan is an inseparable part of "one China" even if it practically interprets this differently from the communist-ruled mainland. Since taking office in spring 2016, Ms. Tsai has held the line on this core campaign pledge to her liberal Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) base, to gradually formalize the island's de facto independence by removing recognition of Beijing's wish for eventual reunification as a precondition for cross-strait relations.

In recent months, Tsai's defiance has acquired a more urgent undertone for the communist authorities, who since October's 18th Party Congress which cemented the authority of Xi Jinping have made nationalism even more prominent as China's primary ideological organizing principle and foundation. This is in no small part because Taipei has increasingly turned to its main ally - the United States - for backup.

By approving a $1.5 billion arms package for Taiwan in mid-2017, the Trump administration has signaled its willingness to continue America's role as the island's security guarantor per the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act; meanwhile various military and civilian contacts between Taipei and Washington have accelerated since the second half of last year, adding to the growing impression that a new push is underway to support the island as a principal buffer against red Chinese expansionism in the Western Pacific.

This kind of US-Taiwan engagement would not be particularly troublesome for Beijing except that it's happening in the context of a Taipei administration which has made no secret of its desire for formal independence - or at the very least, refused to rule that out as a viable option.

Especially because Beijing considers the Taiwanese people as belonging to its own, it has always been loathe to assert itself too intrusively on their internal affairs - and this is especially so in the present moment, when pro-reunification sentiment on the island has dipped to an all-time low as younger Taiwanese in particular bask in their separate identity apart from China. But as Beijing sees it, it is nonetheless still Taipei which is upsetting a carefully balanced and mutually agreed upon status quo of non-independence in exchange for non-interference; it thus behooves it to put the Tsai administration in its place by showing it that its aspirations for internationally recognized statehood are no closer today than they were during the first DPP-led independence bid of the early 2000s.

For the Taiwanese people's distinctly forged identity is not the only major change that has occurred since then: China itself has also risen dramatically. In economic, political, and military terms, the balance of power has tilted to the mainland's advantage so much that even as Taiwan seeks its own way, that way is increasingly defined by how it recalibrates its relationship with China.

To put it another way: the 1992 consensus may be long defunct, but if Taipei pushes the envelope on shoving this fact in Beijing's face, it will find that the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act with the US is also practically untenable in its status quo format.

America can no longer save Taiwan from China. Previously, it pledged to do so only within the context of acknowledging Beijing's own "one China principle" - never permitting let alone encouraging independent Taiwanese statehood, even as a separate "Republic of China" which in fact it had recognized as the legitimate government of all China until the 1970s rapprochement with the communists.

And so, as Tsai's Taiwan has nurtured and acted upon hopes of American support for its assertion of a separate destiny, the Xi regime has moved to constrict the actual free space that the island still affords to do so. In unilaterally declaring new routes for its civilian airliners over the Taiwan Strait, the mainland intends to show that it doesn't need any permission from Taipei - and Washington for that matter - to change facts on the ground (i.e. in the air) to match its claims of sovereignty over all Taiwan.

The Taiwanese retaliation - canceling earlier approved mainland carrier flights to its territory - will not succeed in altering the communist regime's calculations. With two-fifths of the island's exports going to the mainland, there is little doubt who holds the upper hand in the economic relationship - especially as Taiwan's long vaunted technological edge over its increasingly sophisticated and capable rival further diminishes. And any attempts by the Taiwanese military to (re)establish control of the truncated airspace will immediately trigger a more powerful PLA response.

Ms. Tsai for the first time last week grudgingly acknowledged the possibility, even likelihood, of a mainland attack should Taiwan move towards formal independence; that it took her so long - and required such a concrete crisis imposed by China - to wake up to the harsh reality, indicates how patiently and confidently Beijing has been playing its hand against her.

Meanwhile, the US under the bombastically "America First" banner of Donald Trump could hardly notice the China-Taiwan spat less; its Asia focus appears to continue to be consumed by the singular problem of North Korea, and even that in a highly insular and even ad-hoc manner.

China - even under the stridently nationalistic Xi regime - has always seen itself as playing a long game that the sheer force of history assures it of winning; its intent for Taiwan's independence proclivities - which it has soberly come to recognize as a permanent fact of cross-strait relations - is to merely disabuse them of what they don't in fact render possible for the self-ruling island. That is to say, it ultimately matters not a whit how much the less than 25 million people of Taiwan may feel they are a separate people and nation deserving of recognition as such by the international community - so long as the communists rule the mainland, the nearly 1.4 billion people there will have a final veto.

The US empire's last stand in the Asia-Pacific

Even as the Koreas begin historic new peace talks, here in the US the neocon hawks are making sure their case for war is still heard loud and clear. Perhaps this is nothing beyond the obvious substitution of a war of words for a war of bombs and missiles; but in fact there is something more profound behind it.

If the North-South detente succeeds, it will mark a new chapter in US-Korean relations: one that diminishes the seven-decade role of Washington as Seoul's security guarantor, perhaps to the point of a complete pullout of US forces from their remaining outpost on the Asian mainland. In the immediate term at least, this will be viewed as a major blow to American power and prestige.

Even without such a pullout - which will likely be the concession given to the North in exchange for the latter's nuclear disarmament - from now on the US will no longer be in the driver's seat with respect to Korean security policy. Already, its freedom of action is sharply constrained by South Korean politics; if and when a North-South thaw really takes hold, unless some corresponding policy shift also occurs in Washington, the US will find itself left out in the cold and wondering why it has to continue defending an ally who so much no longer sees eye-to-eye with it on very fundamental matters.

Inertia is the most powerful force in politics - but especially in international relations. As a whole, the US policy class inside the Beltway has completely failed - in reality, refused - to adjust to the new glaring realities of a China-centric East Asia (with Russia an effective satellite of Beijing in the region which also happens to be the latter's ultimate security enforcer). This new environment is one in which US free-market democracy is not the dominant socioeconomic system, but increasingly an also-ran clawing for any bit of traction in whichever small would-be dependency it can; and an environment in which the high-priced US military so deeply worshiped by the Washington policy class is simply not an effective tool anymore to deter authoritarian expansionism.

That second part was already pretty much clear to common-sense observers around the beginning of this decade; that they still haven't sunk in in the minds of the career bureaucrats making decisions about US policy in the Far East shows the depths to which American leadership and initiative in the region has decayed and atrophied.

To his great - but politically posthumous - credit, Barack Obama understood that any continued and indeed expanded US military presence in the Asia-Pacific would only be effective in countering China's imperial ambitions if it were integrated into a more overarching geoeconomic strategy to compel Beijing to open its markets on US terms or risk being isolated into its own command-economy bloc. While he ended up being unrealistic about the actual achievability of this objective, he at least understood its practical necessity: in the Asia-Pacific policy void that his administration has left behind it, there is now little left but a series of haphazard and uncoordinated American reactive measures to retain influence in a critical part of the world that Trump effectively handed to China on his third day in office by leaving the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The unfolding of the North Korean crisis has been but the logical outcome of an America gone AWOL in the region in every sense except brandishing its sheriff's guns - as if there weren't already a new sheriff in town there. The neocons are dead right in one respect, even if they won't admit it: this is for all practical purposes the US postwar empire's last stand in the Asia-Pacific...and yes, it carries profound implications for the US empire elsewhere, especially the Middle East, where Iran's Ayatollahs are inevitably drawing the lesson from Kim Jong-Un that Washington is powerless to stop a determined foe from acquiring the means to render itself invulnerable to imperialist bullying.

The neocons may be paranoid, but behind every paranoia is a quite rational fear of loss - the object feared to be lost may well be blown completely out of proportion to its actual value, but the very process of undergoing loss itself is the true issue at hand for any mind or mindset that has for so long been accustomed to thinking of world domination as its birthright.