Biden’s Taiwan Strait Policy: Neoclassical Realism and Truman’s 1948 Election

• In Event: China-Taiwan Relations and World Politics

Abstract

Joe Biden’s emergence as the winner of the tumultuous 2020 U.S. presidential race raised the question on how his new administration would approach the Taiwan Strait impasse. A longtime foreign policy internationalist, Biden, whether serving as the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee or vice president of the Obama administration, has had a consistent record of promoting engagement with Beijing and strategic ambiguity with Taipei. Nonetheless, the 46th president inherits from his predecessor—Donald Trump—not only a highly divided country and the enormous challenge to contain a deadly pandemic and economic fallout but also the deepening of adversarial relations between the United States and PRC. Many in Taiwan have expressed angst and concerns that the Biden administration would deescalate Trump’s hawkish China policy and retract some of its pro-Taiwan initiatives. Some polls and surveys, prior to the U.S. presidential election in November 2020, showed that a strong majority of Taiwanese public sentiments was rooting for Trump’s victory believing the incumbent Republican president would continue to counter Beijing in the areas of trade imbalance, digital authoritarianism, human rights abuse in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Taiwan’s democracy and security. Using a neoclassical realist theory, this paper argues that international strategic imperatives are filtered through domestic political hurdles which would ultimately constrain Biden from drastically deviating away from Trump’s stance. The 1948 U.S. presidential election served as a comparable case study to illustrate how the Harry S. Truman administration, initially dismissed by the Nationalist government and pro-Chiang Kai-shek congressional forces as “soft” on Mao’s Communist revolution, coped effectively with the Taiwan Strait crisis in several similar situations confronted by President Biden today. This author will use primary/archival sources as well as comparative methods of agreement and difference to substantiate its analysis.

Author

• Dean Chen, Ramapo College of New Jersey