A sweet story of election day in a newish democracy

I don't know anything substantive about Taiwan. This island, populated by 23.5 million inhabitants, exists in a kind of sovereign limbo, claimed by China and inhabited primarily by people of Chinese ethnicity, but outside the domain of Beijing. How this anomalous situation came to be is a tangled story. 

Since China's current ruler, Xi Jinping, presses China's claim to rule the island, it's not crazy to fear the big country might try to absorb the little one. And U.S. foreign policy (non-Trumpified) pushes back, though cagily. The situation seems appropriately scary, given what China has done to democratic aspirations in Hong Kong and U.S. anxiety over our overstretched global power. Poor Taiwanese, balanced between monsters!

Taiwanese historian Albert Wu offers a presents a succinct pre-primer on how the island became what it is and some sense of its people's current opinions in an interview with political scientist Yascha Mounk. But what warmed my heart was his account of participating in the recent presidential election. Democracy is new and valued in Wu's Taiwan.

"What I've been really moved by the past couple of days is how democratic culture really has come to take root here. On Saturday, we went to the polls with my wife and her parents and, like many families, there are generational divides in Taiwan but also political disagreements. We've long had political disagreements, and we’ve talked about them. But on Saturday, we all went to the polls together. And the polling station was a five minute walk from us. We took our little daughter with us.

"In this election, 70% of people turned out, which is actually considered low for Taiwan. Normally it's between 75 and 80 to 85%. But 70% turned out. And when we got to the polls, there were multigenerational families, people pushing their elderly parents or grandparents. I'm sure many of them disagreed. But they just went to the polls. And many of those people had lived for forty years without ever having the chance to vote for their own president.

"There are always local elections, but people really take this privilege of being able to choose their elected leader seriously, and it was orderly: people were just lining up. When I was growing up, election day was really just a chaotic mess, people were still campaigning outside. I sort of missed that personally.

"But everybody got the day off. And afterwards, in Taiwan, eating is very important. So we strolled to this hotel and had a really delicious and wonderful meal. And even though we disagreed politically, we sat down and ate and talked about the future of our country and our hopes and dreams and desires for the country. And even though we know we've had some disagreements, we cherished that moment of voting together and being together.

"Coming out of the ‘70s and ‘80s, when there was a lot of ballot stuffing during the authoritarian era, vote counting is now completely transparent. And what they do is they open up the voting booths, and everybody can go and observe. And people will just open up the ballots and count them out, and so we went and watched the count.

"The polls closed at 4, and, by 7:30, all the votes were counted. By 9:30, we had a new president, and there was just this wonderful victory rally and all this confetti. And what really moved me is that by the end of the victory rally, everybody stayed behind and picked up confetti: they wanted to keep the streets clean, they picked up confetti, they stacked all the chairs. And the next day, it was as if nothing happened. It was just part of the normalcy of everyday life.

"My grandfather never in his life was able to vote for his own president. My grandmother died before the transition to a fully democratic country. And I think everybody, at least in my parents' generation, and in my generation, knows that. And I think that love for democracy is sort of baked into the current landscape."

As we strive to ensure our own aspiring dictator goes down to defeat in November, the experience of people newly able to make choices about their lives through voting can be inspiring.

A little Cassandra-ing of my own: war with China?

Every obituary for recently deceased General Colin Powell leads with his recognition that, at the pinnacle of a stellar career, he lent his prestige to the catastrophe which was the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  He called his war advocacy "a blot" which "will always be part of my record." Indeed.

A whole lot of U.S. foreign policy sages (and old guys who play them on TV) seem to be seeking resurrection after the War on Terror's collapse by once again looking abroad for "monsters to destroy."

And this time, if they don't manage to conduct some deft diplomacy, they could very well lead us into mass casualties and even a nuclear exchange -- as well as losing the war.

Journalist Peter Beinart was a sucker for the Iraq war, but he's not going there again. He warns against a developing bipartisan call for the U.S. to declare our willingness to fight to preserve the independence of Taiwan from China as crazy dangerous.

Since the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I’ve often wondered how much US foreign policymakers have learned from the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq. This week offered fresh evidence that, when it comes to US policy toward China, the answer is: not nearly enough. 

In the months before America overthrew Saddam Hussein’s government, America’s leaders recklessly downplayed the war’s potential costs. ... Prominent figures, including prominent Democrats, are doing the same thing today. They’re downplaying the potential costs of an even more dangerous war, this time over Taiwan. ... 

Representative Elaine Luria ... wants to proactively give Biden, and all future presidents ... [authority for] war with China over Taiwan.  

What might such a war entail? For one thing, the US would likely lose. As Fareed Zakaria has noted, “The Pentagon has reportedly enacted 18 war games against China over Taiwan, and China has prevailed in every one.” ... The US could lose as many troops in the first few days of a war over Taiwan as it lost in the entirety of the Afghan and Iraq Wars. There’s also a genuine risk of nuclear war. ...

As was true after 9/11, the U.S. is profoundly ignorant of the passions that our big-footing about in someone else's complex historical context could (and does) evoke. China is an emerging military and economic superpower, the equal to anything we've got, in the grip of intense nationalism. To the great advantage of its current authoritarian leader, masses of Chinese appear to be very ready to subsume any domestic grievances to repudiate the "century of humiliation," the exploitative encounter with the West -- that means us. Chinese genuinely consider Taiwan merely a secessionist province, a relic of the Chinese civil war of the late 1940s, which should rightly be reabsorbed by the mainland.

Here's the best I can do for an analogy: Think how we'd react if a bunch of right wingers forcibly took over the state of Hawaii, repressed the present Hawaiian population, and then thumbed their noses at the U.S. mainland. And if, from across the Pacific Ocean, China backed up the wingers now ruling Hawaii. I suspect we'd have feelings.

A significant difference is that Taiwan is only 100 miles from the Chinese mainland, not 2500 miles.

And another difference is that the Taiwanese managed to claw their way to building their own vibrant economy and an enviable liberal democratic state since breaking off from the mainland. Modern Taiwan is a success for that rule-of-law idea we claim to aspire to. This seems to be a desirable outcome to most Taiwanese. China, on the other hand, seems to be getting more oppressive by the day. If mainland China gets its way, Taiwan would go the way of Hong Kong, its freedoms eviscerated and its distinctiveness erased.

Former U.S. foreign service officer Chas Freeman, who happened to be serving as an interpreter on President Nixon's ground-breaking trip to China, offers his nuanced account of the tangled U.S. commitments and interests in Taiwan and China in the linked article. We have not been sure-footed and if we are to avoid war, we will need to be. And Taiwan looks to be in very rough seas.

Beinart begs for more U.S. sophistication before we let our leaders take us into another "dumb war, a rash war."

... through many Afghan or Chinese eyes, the US doesn’t look like a champion of freedom at all. It looks like the most recent foreign power seeking to violently subjugate their nation.

In official Washington, in fact, the legacy of Western imperialism is even more absent from discussions of China than from discussions of Afghanistan, where people at least occasionally trot out cliches about the Hindu Kush being a “graveyard of empire.”  

... But without discussing China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of Britain, France, Japan and yes, the US—which dated from roughly the First Opium War in 1839 until the end of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s—it’s hard to understand why the CCP can convince many of its constituents that America’s rhetoric about democracy, economic fairness, and the “rules-based order” is a smokescreen for its efforts to keep China subservient and divided. “Every schoolchild in China and every educated Chinese person knows about the ‘century of humiliation,’” the historian Stephen R. Platt told The New York Times a couple of years ago. Has a top Biden administration official ever publicly used the phrase?

So here we are again. Are the people of the U.S. ready to be led into a war on the other side of the Pacific in circumstances about which most of us know exactly nothing?

We have built up some resistance. By 2008, most of us knew Iraq and probably Afghanistan were futile adventures, more crimes than mistakes. So we elected Obama and discovered how little power politicians have to overcome the inertia of wars once they get underway. (Kudos to Joe Biden for cutting the cord on Afghanistan.)

But as was true after a similar popular evolution from jingoism to revulsion about the Vietnam war, enough time has passed so we're looking inward, not outward. Once again, our leaders threaten to get us embroiled in a context about which we are ignorant. Once again, as in 2001, there's no popular organized mass peace movement. Maybe we could start early this time -- inform ourselves as best we can -- and let the powers-that-be know we want them to navigate these shoals without war!