The CFR Taiwan task force report: advice and dissent, with Maggie Lewis and Paul Heer

Sinica Podcast

Kaiser Kuo

Culture, China News, Hangzhou, Chinese, International Relations, Chongqing, Beijing, Sichuan, Currentaffairs, China, Politics, Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, China Economy, News, China Politics, Business, Film, Shenzhen

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2023

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on Sinica, Kaiser is joined by Margaret (Maggie) Lewis, professor of law at Seton Hall University and veteran Taiwan observer, and Paul Heer, former national intelligence officer for East Asia in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) under the Obama administration. Both were members of the Council on Foreign Relations’s task force on U.S.-Taiwan policy, which produced a report titled “U.S.-Taiwan Relations in a New Era: Responding to a More Assertive China.” Both also wrote dissents, included in the report, about some of its findings and recommendations. They discuss what they think the report got right — and what it got wrong.

01:01 – Introduction to the CFR’s report U.S.-Taiwan Relations in a New Era: Responding to a More Assertive China

05:09 – The mechanics of producing the report

06:46 – Areas of common consensus among participants

08:48 – What is the significance of the PLA’s centennial in 2027 in view of the CFR task force?

10:54 – Is the report too focused on the military at the expense of political, diplomatic, and economic considerations?

14:22 – Taiwanese perspectives in the report

16:36 – Strategic ambiguity and President Biden’s “gaffes” as a new baseline for U.S. declaratory policy

20:48 – The issue of deterrence: American and Chinese approaches

25:48 – What has the United States done to move the status quo in terms of the Taiwan issue?

41:06 – Is there evidence yet of Chinese preparation for a military action against Taiwan?

A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Maggie: Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin by John Sudworth (podcast)

Paul: Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan

Kennan: A life between Worlds by Frank Costigliola

Kaiser: The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline by Yasheng Huang

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Cynica podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with the China Project.
0:15.8	Subscribe to access from the China Project to get, well, access, access to not only our great newsletter, the Daily Dispatch,
0:22.6	but to all the original writing on our website at theChinaproject.com.
0:27.2	We've got reported stories, essays, and editorials, great explainers, regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts.
0:35.0	We cover everything from China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious
0:38.5	entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China's Xinjiang
0:43.3	region to Beijing's ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing.
0:49.4	It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China
0:55.9	with neither fear nor favor. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
1:02.1	Last month in June, the Council on Foreign Relations CFR published a report called U.S. Taiwan
1:08.1	relations in a new era, responding to a more assertive China.
1:13.0	The task force was chaired by Susan M. Gordon and Michael G. Mullen, and David Sacks was the
1:18.0	project director. It brought together 26 participants, many of whom will be known to listeners
1:23.0	of this podcast. As the task force was bipartisan, it included people's views on Taiwan, on China,
1:30.0	and on many other issues were quite far apart, shall we say. And so it is not at all surprising
1:35.7	that there were a number of dissenting views on both the more hawkish and doveish sides, as it were.
1:42.1	This week on Seneca, I've asked two of the Task Force participants,
1:45.6	both of whom I've had on the show talking about Taiwan in recent years before, and both of whom
1:49.9	penned dissents to the CFR report that were published along with that report.
1:55.2	Maggie Lewis is Professor Law at Seton Hall and has been on the program before to talk not
2:00.0	just about the Taiwan elections of
2:01.8	January 2020, where she was there, along with Shelley Rigger and a lot of the sort of
	...

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