Assessing the Role of the TRA in Deterring Cross-Strait Economic Coercion in the Long Run

Abstract

This article looks into the future role of the U.S. Taiwan Relations Act (TRA). which was designed from the outset to prevent conflict rather than promote cooperation between Taiwan and China. Since the likelihood of a military clash between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait is dwindling while growing cross-Strait economic interdependence is providing opportunities for economic coercion as well as expanded economic benefits, the TRA`s role in forestalling confrontation through economic means is of mounting consequence in the long run. Specifically, this article explores to what extent the TRA, having contributed to cross-Strait peace and stability what extent the TRA, having contributed to cross-Strait peace and stability over the last three decades, will remain efficacious in forestalling any future conflict between the two sides. Using conceptual and empirical anatomy, this article argues that whereas the TRA`s effectiveness in constraining military coercion will continue to rest on the dynamics at work since its inception. Such as dual deterrence and weapons transfers to Tai wan, its utility in preventing economic coercion, a mechanism explicitly highlighted in the TRA but never put into effect, is nonetheless enfeebled by a problematic policy design and daunting, if not insuperable, obstacles to its implementation. The policy design, premised on the logic of double deterrence and strategic ambiguity applicable to both military and economic coercion, is fundamentally flawed because only Beijing but not Taipei is likely to take such coercive action, And there has been no effort to invoke the TRA in the case of Beijing`s actual disruption of Taiwan`s private in vestments in China, even though this action was coercive toward Taiwan, The lack of a TRA-BASED U.S. response in these cases may be blamed on the vagueness of the TRA`s definition of economic coercion, as well as its misleading requirement that for an action to be defined as coercion it should carry an explicit government articulation of coercive intent. Finally it will be difficult to actually implement the TRA`s policy design of deterring future economic coercion by Beijing even if these weaknesses in policy design are remedied. The extant literature and the case study in this article highlight two factors hindering the United States from preventing such coercion: the prohibitively high economic cost involed for the United States, and the difficulty Washington might encounter in persuading private U.S. corporations to conform with initatives designed to inflict economic punishment on China in order to bail out Taiwan.