美國國務卿Blinken說: “世人實際上已經說: 台灣就是我們的事"
david chou
美國國務卿Blinken說: “世人實際上已經說: 台灣就是我們的事"
1
美國國務卿Antony J. Blinken日前接受The Foreign Affairs的Dan Kurtz-Phelan訪問, 他說: “支那人總是喜歡說, 台灣沒有其他人的事, 它是我們支那人的事. 但世人實際上已經說: 不, 台灣不干支那人的事, 台灣就是我們的事." (“The Chinese like to say Taiwan is no one else’s business, it’s our business. The world has said actually, no, it is our business.”)
2
Dan是這樣問的:
QUESTION: There’s lots of commentary and lots of arguments in places like Foreign Affairs about splitting this grouping, whether that’s a reverse Kissinger, bringing Russia away from China, or I guess a reverse-reverse Kissinger, where you again split China off from Russia. You’ve spent a lot of time working and sitting in meetings with your Chinese counterparts, some meetings with your Russian counterparts, trying to do this. What is your sense of whether there are policy options that the United States has that could lead to divisions in this grouping that over time would become real rifts?
我(美)國國務卿這樣回答:
SECRETARY BLINKEN:
[skip]
China has a different choice to make. It aspires to leadership, and in aspiring to leadership it also has to, I think, assess how its own reputation is seen around the world. And in our efforts to demonstrate, for example, that Chinese actions have helped keep the Russian war against Ukraine going, because, for example, China is by far the biggest provider – its companies are the biggest provider to Russia’s defense industrial base: 70 percent of the components going into things that Russia needs to make for the war, 90 percent of the microelectronics coming from China. It doesn’t like the fact that we’ve exposed this, because on the one hand it’s saying we’re for peace, we’re not taking sides, we want to get to peace; and yet, it’s taking actions that are continuing to fuel this war, a war that poses not only the obvious threat to the Ukrainian people, but probably the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War. So, I think China has to ask itself hard questions about some of the alignment that it’s engaged in with these adversarial countries. I don’t pretend to know what decisions it’s going to make.
[skip]
Look again at the war against Ukraine by Russia. The two biggest drivers right now of keeping that war going: I mentioned China’s contributions to Russia’s defense industrial base; North Korea’s contributions with missiles, with technology, and of course with now 10,000 or so North Korean forces. So the biggest drivers of keeping this war going are coming from the Asia-Pacific. European allies recognize that.
國務卿的回答---”The world has said actually, ------- it is our business.”---follows了台灣關係法的一個條款:
台灣建州運動與David Chou的觀念是:
Taiwan (Formosa) Matters Most
"A Taiwan contingency is a Japan contingency," declared Shinzo Abe, former Prime Minister of Japan. "It is also a contingency for the Japan-U.S. alliance," he followed.
The defense of Taiwan or a fight over Taiwan is a "4-in-1 war" or a "all-for-one-and-one-for-all war."
Taiwan is not dragging America and other liberal democracies into a war. The incoming or ongoing invasion of Taiwan is exactly the first operation of a global conquest agenda of the imperialist, expansionist, revanchist, and evil Empire of China.
To the people of Taiwan, it's a war of life and death, self-rule and submission, freedom and slavery, and dignity and humiliation.
For the United States, it's a war to safeguard "Pax Americana" ( "U.S.-led Liberal World Order"), "Free and Open Indo-Pacific," and, according to the Taiwan Relations Act, America's security, strategic, political, and economic interests in Taiwan.
As far as Japan is concerned, it's a war to keep its major sea lanes or maritime lifelines safe.
With regard to the liberal democracies in the world, it's a war to secure the supply chain of chips and other high-tech products and the "Liberal International Order."
可惜沒有證據顯示: 老川的腦袋裡有我們這種觀念.
David Chou
Founder
Formosa Statehood Movement
Secretary Antony J. Blinken With Daniel Kurtz-Phelan of The Foreign Affairs Interview
Interview
Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State
Washington, D.C.
December 18, 2024
QUESTION: I’m Dan Kurtz-Phelan and this is The Foreign Affairs Interview.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: I think what we’re handing over is a strong hand for the next administration to play. It will have to decide how it plays it.
QUESTION: In the four years since Joe Biden took office, the geopolitical landscape has radically changed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought war back to Europe; Hamas’s October 7th assault on Israel sparked a widening conflict in an already chaotic Middle East; and Chinese aggression in the Taiwan Strait has refocused attention on the Indo-Pacific as a possible theater of combat. Through it all, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, shuttling between capitals, negotiating with allies and adversaries, and helping to shape a vision for American engagement with the world – a vision he laid out in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs.
Now, on the eve of Donald Trump’s return to office, Blinken reflects on the geopolitical challenges facing the United States today and offers lessons from his own tenure for American foreign policy going forward.
Secretary Blinken, thank you so much for taking the time for this conversation, given all going on in the world, and for the essay you wrote for the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thanks, Dan. Good to be with you.
QUESTION: The essay starts out by noting how contested and complicated the world is today, and so I want to start with your analysis of this pretty challenging, to put it mildly, moment in the global landscape. I don’t imagine that when you started this job almost four years ago you imagined you’d be contending with major wars in the Middle East and in Europe, that you’d see the kinds of provocations we see almost daily from the Chinese in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, that you’d be hearing nuclear threats from Vladimir Putin that are serious enough that you have at least most of the American Intelligence Community spooked. And so I thought before getting into responses and the policy response from this administration, it’d be useful to step back and get your sense of what brought us here over these past years or decades – what forces or decisions account for this not especially orderly moment in geopolitics.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Dan, I think it’s evident that we’re in a new era, a new phase. The post-Cold War era is over, and there is a very robust competition on to shape what comes next. And we have a number of revisionist powers in different ways but nonetheless joined in wanting to exert their own spheres of influence, wanting to perpetuate their autocratic rule, wanting to reshape the international system in ways that benefit them – whether that’s Iran, whether that’s North Korea, whether that’s Russia, or in different ways, China – all coming to the fore. I think you have the extraordinary rapidity of technological change, which has also contributed to this.
And then you have to look at when we came in what we inherited, because it’s easy with distance now to forget where we were. We had the worst economic crisis going back to the Great Depression. We had the worst global health crisis going back at least 100 years. We had democratic divisions in our own country, and we had alliances and partnerships that were fraying and partners that were looking to hedge their bets in different ways and a perception around the world – including from these adversaries that were aligning in new ways – that the United States was in inexorable decline. And I think that’s easily forgotten.
And what’s also taken for granted is what we were able to do to put the United States back in a position of strength: historic investments at home, whether it was through infrastructure, whether it was through the CHIPS and Science Act, whether it was through the IRA, that restored our competitiveness. And if you just look at where we are now, leaving aside the extraordinary macro numbers on unemployment, on getting inflation down to the point that we’re the envy of other major economies, on household incomes going up – people still hurting because they’re not fully feeling the benefit, but it’s moving in that direction.
Foreign direct investment, which I see as one of the most important measures that we sometimes overlook in both directions – we’re the largest recipient, we’re also the largest contributor. Those relationships on foreign direct investment exhibit trust and confidence in the future. People don’t make the investments without it. It also reduces our dependencies in significant ways on, for example, China.
So we were able to do that and restore our competitiveness and at the same time – and we can come to this – re-engage, reinvest, and re-energize, and even reimagine our alliances and partnerships. The result is, despite the fact that you have a world that does have a greater multiplicity, a greater complexity, a greater interconnectedness of challenges than at any time since I’ve been doing this over 32 years, we’re in a much stronger position to contend with those challenges.
QUESTION: Let me focus on the dimension of this that I think is most surprising to many people, which is just the return of a kind of war that seemed like it was a relic of the past. There’s obviously a political version of this debate, which you hear from people in Trump world. But if we go a little bit deeper, this does seem like a real systemic change and something that people in your position and policymakers in the United States more generally will be grappling with going forward. How do you understand that systemic change? What has brought – both in the Middle East and Ukraine – the kind of war that, again, seemed like a thing of the past, back to a really central preoccupation of American foreign policy?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: You have a number of countries that for a variety of reasons have calculated that, first of all, their own interests could be advanced in that way, and they’ve also sought to align in different ways with themselves, mostly marriages of convenience if not conviction, but ones that have an impact. And this is the product of choices that they’ve made.
But let’s take each of these individually. The Russia aggression against Ukraine didn’t start in 2022; it started in 2014. And the Russian aggression against neighbors and in an attempt to recreate a greater Russia, or certainly to exert a sphere of influence, goes back well before that – 2008 and Georgia. Now, at that time the United States had 200,000 troops who were either in Iraq or Afghanistan, so we were tied down in ways that we no longer are, as a result of ending the war in Iraq and ending America’s longest war in Afghanistan, freeing up resources, freeing up focus. But Russia’s been on this effort for some time, culminating in the reinvasion of Ukraine in 2022.
China has also made, I think, no mystery of the fact that certainly going back to 2015, economically, it was determined to dominate the industries and technologies of the future. But beyond that, we saw emerge over that period of time a policy that was much more overtly aggressive abroad as well as repressive at home. So again, that’s been in the making for some time.
These things don’t happen like with a light switch. It’s an evolution of things. And again, I think because these countries – as well as others – had a perception of the United States as being in decline when we took office, they were moving forward in those ways. I think we’ve put a big dent both in that perception and in – to the extent there was a reality to it – in that reality. The pushback against Russia has been quite remarkable, but so was the pushback against China. We now have greater convergence among allies and partners in Europe, in the Indo-Pacific, and beyond on how to deal with Russia and how to deal with China than we’ve had at any time since I can remember.
QUESTION: The central focus of the Foreign Affairs essay in many ways is this grouping of countries that many people call an axis, though you do not use that word – the China, Russia, Iran, North Korea grouping. And as you noted, that group is cooperating in fairly alarming new ways that really seek to alter some of the basic principles of the international system and undermine U.S. leadership in that system.
As you project forward 15 years, long beyond your tenure here at the State Department, if they have succeeded, if we see that axis succeeding, grouping succeeding, what will the world look like? What will that world that they seek to shape look like? And what will the decisions or mistakes that the U.S. and its allies have made that have allowed them to get there?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: I think if you’re projecting forward and they have their way, you’ll certainly see at the very least a reassertion of spheres of influence that the United States and likeminded countries are kept out of. You’ll see greater bifurcation, greater divisions in the world. You may see – metaphorically, at least – different kinds of iron curtains coming down, whether it’s on the way people are treated within countries, or technology and the way it’s used among countries.
And I think it also portends potentially a world of conflict, because I think what history teaches us, among other things, is that if you get into a spheres-of-influence world where countries are allowed to treat their own people, as well as treat each other in ways that are inimical to everything we’ve tried to establish after two World Wars to make sure that there wouldn’t be a third, you’re likely heading for a world of conflict, a world where – because whether we like it or not, we’re going to remain interconnected, where we simply can’t put our heads in the sand and think that these things are going to happen and leave us immune, leave us unscathed. It will inevitably draw us in.
So I think the challenge is we’ve – in my estimation, at least – had a period of renewal, a renewal of our engagement around the world, a renewal of American leadership, a renewal of our alliances and partnerships but using them in new ways, building a bridge between the Euro-Atlantic theater and the Indo-Pacific theater, creating a greater understanding that there is really an indivisibility of security that affects allies and partners in all of these areas. I think if we lose that and if we retreat, then far from protecting ourselves and staying out of wars and conflicts, we’re going to see more of them emerge and inevitably we’ll be drawn in.
So that’s what I would be concerned about if we regress from this period of renewal. And the foundation that we’ve set, I think what we’re handing over is a strong hand for the next administration to play. It will have to decide how it plays it.
QUESTION: There’s lots of commentary and lots of arguments in places like Foreign Affairs about splitting this grouping, whether that’s a reverse Kissinger, bringing Russia away from China, or I guess a reverse-reverse Kissinger, where you again split China off from Russia. You’ve spent a lot of time working and sitting in meetings with your Chinese counterparts, some meetings with your Russian counterparts, trying to do this. What is your sense of whether there are policy options that the United States has that could lead to divisions in this grouping that over time would become real rifts?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Look, I think many of these countries have made an affirmative choice, made an affirmative decision that’s less reflective of what we’ve done and is more the result of their calculation of what their self-interest is, what their weaknesses are. And that, in some ways, has brought them together, but it’s really been an affirmative choice, not a response to us.
I think Russia’s on a course where that’s likely to continue. And I suspect North Korea, given some of the benefits that it’s getting, is likely to continue on that course. Iran, which as a result of actions we’ve taken and others have taken, is in a position of increased weakness, is going to be even more dependent on some of these new relationships – particularly, for example, the relationship with Russia.
China has a different choice to make. It aspires to leadership, and in aspiring to leadership it also has to, I think, assess how its own reputation is seen around the world. And in our efforts to demonstrate, for example, that Chinese actions have helped keep the Russian war against Ukraine going, because, for example, China is by far the biggest provider – its companies are the biggest provider to Russia’s defense industrial base: 70 percent of the components going into things that Russia needs to make for the war, 90 percent of the microelectronics coming from China. It doesn’t like the fact that we’ve exposed this, because on the one hand it’s saying we’re for peace, we’re not taking sides, we want to get to peace; and yet, it’s taking actions that are continuing to fuel this war, a war that poses not only the obvious threat to the Ukrainian people, but probably the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War. So, I think China has to ask itself hard questions about some of the alignment that it’s engaged in with these adversarial countries. I don’t pretend to know what decisions it’s going to make.
There’s another aspect to this, Dan, too. What we’ve seen very deliberately on our part is this effort to, as I say, build these bridges between the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific theaters to show that what happens in one place is inevitably going to have repercussions in the other. And as a result of that, we have broken down silos in ways that I haven’t seen before. We have in NATO now four Indo-Pacific partners who are part of NATO discussions, come to the summits, and are working on concrete projects. This is not an effort to bring NATO out of area. It’s because out-of-area is coming to the NATO countries.
Look again at the war against Ukraine by Russia. The two biggest drivers right now of keeping that war going: I mentioned China’s contributions to Russia’s defense industrial base; North Korea’s contributions with missiles, with technology, and of course with now 10,000 or so North Korean forces. So the biggest drivers of keeping this war going are coming from the Asia-Pacific. European allies recognize that.
Similarly, what we’ve been able to do in opening people’s eyes is get a much bigger focus and much bigger interest from the Euro-Atlantic area on, for example, Taiwan. There’s a greater understanding now, since we took office, that were there to be a crisis over Taiwan as a result of actions that China takes, this would not leave anyone immune. You’ve got 50 percent of commercial container traffic going through the Taiwan Strait every day, 70 percent of the microchips made on Taiwan. You would have a crisis for the global economy if there were to be a crisis over Taiwan, and that has gotten these countries in Europe much more invested in going to China and saying no, we need to maintain peace and stability. The Chinese like to say Taiwan is no one else’s business, it’s our business. The world has said actually, no, it is our business.
So even though there is greater adversarial alignment out of necessity – the Russians desperately needed it after their initial efforts to erase Ukraine from the map failed – even though we see that, I think that’s far outweighed by what we’ve been able to do in bringing allies and partners much closer together with U.S. leadership and also, as I said, creating bridges between them in ways we haven’t seen before. There is now much greater derisking when it comes to China that we see both in Europe but also in the Asia-Pacific area, the Indo-Pacific area. And all these things don’t just happen. They’re a result of very sustained diplomacy to focus countries on these common interests that we have. And we now see that playing out in ways that, I think, set a much stronger foundation for the future.
[skip]
QUESTION: And it’s military support; it’s the very creative use of declassified intelligence. That failed to deter him. What are the lessons that you draw from that deterrence failure in some sense?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Yeah.
QUESTION: Not to say it was possible to deter him, but we did not succeed in deterring him. And when you apply those lessons to China, and to the Taiwan Strait especially, what does that mean about where we are in deterrence in the Taiwan Strait and what we need to be doing more of?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: So when we had this extraordinary information and we were able to use it in ways that we’d never been able to use it before – I wish we’d been able to do the same thing in 2014. We weren’t. There was so much that we knew but couldn’t share in 2014 – not ahead of time, but for example with the downing of the airplane – to try to rally the world in different ways. We were able to do it and it was quite remarkable.
But even as we worked to deter the Russian aggression, including by testing out whether Russia was actually serious about alleged security concerns it had, we engaged them. I spent a lot of time with Mr. Lavrov on this. We engaged them at NATO; we engaged them at the OSCE. And then it became apparent that this was not about purported Russian security concerns posed somehow by Ukraine or NATO, but all about Putin’s imperial ambitions.
But even as we were working to deter by exposing, by engaging, we also used that time to prepare and, as I said, to put Ukraine in a position where it could defend effectively against the Russian aggression. And it did, given what Russia’s ambitions were in taking over the country. It stopped it, it pushed them back, only because we had incredible courage on the part of Ukrainians but also because we were prepared. We’d given them things that they needed; we’d gotten the world ready. And then we were able to move on sanctions, on pressure against Russia immediately. We were able to move on reinforcing NATO’s eastern flank immediately, which I think helped deter any kind of wider aggression that could have taken place.
When it comes to China and the lessons learned, there are a few things that really stand out. One of the, I think, extraordinary moments was when, early on in the aggression against Ukraine, the Japanese prime minister at the time, Kishida, stood up and Japan stood strongly with Ukraine. And he said we’re doing this because what’s happening in Europe today could be happening in Asia tomorrow. And there was this recognition that it was so important to stand together against an aggression not only against Ukraine and its people but against the principles at the heart of the international system that had been put in place to prevent conflict in the first place: territorial integrity, sovereignty, independence – these concepts that are at the heart of the United Nations Charter. Countries understood that it was strongly in their interest to stand up for those principles, even if the violation of those principles was happening half a world away.
And I think that’s been readily apparent to China, is they’ve seen the response to the Russian aggression, as they’ve heard increasingly a chorus of countries saying we have to preserve stability; we have to preserve the status quo; we have to preserve peace across the Taiwan Strait, because were that to change it would deeply affect our interests. And our diplomacy has very much worked on that. And then, again, because countries are seeing that the Russian war effort has been fueled in part by China’s support for Russia’s defense industrial base and what North Korea’s doing, that’s caused them to shift, I think, dramatically in their approach to China.
If you look at where we were when we took office, because we were so divided from allies and partners, they were all hedging their bets. Europe was on the brink of signing a trade agreement with China. You had countries that were joining Belt and Road. You had the BRICS process as well. But fundamentally what we’ve now seen is a convergence, a convergence in how to approach the challenge posed by China. If you read what European leaders are saying and major leaders in Asia are saying about how to deal with China, we’d basically be reading from each other’s talking points.
And the efforts to de-risk, the efforts to come together on everything from investment screening to export controls, to secure supply chains, all of these things, as well as protecting technology, protecting, as well, our workers against unfair trade practices and against overcapacity, the convergence is extraordinary. And I think that’s been a product of the fact that eyes have been opened to this fact that so much of this is really indivisible.
QUESTION: You write in the essay about the need to compete intensely but responsibly with China, which means, in your words, “making clear that the United States’ goal is not regime change and that even as both sides compete, they must find ways to coexist.” At a high level, that seems very sensible. But when you look at China’s role in the world and the way that role is changing over time, it is hard to imagine how you could change the current leadership in China or how you could have the current leadership in China and have a China in the world that is powerful and prosperous and quite active that would be consistent with the kind of world the United States wants to see. Do you see a path to that, given where Chinese behavior is now? And how do you see the arguments – Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher made this in our pages – that you really need to change the nature of government in China in order to have true coexistence?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: We cannot, will not in my estimation, change the nature of China’s governance, its regime – call it what you want. And embarking on that course would be a fool’s errand. But we can, we must, and we are standing up strongly and building convergence with other countries to make sure that China can’t do what it’s setting out to do, which is to reshape the rules of the road, to reshape the international system in ways that allow it to advance its interests where they’re in conflict with ours, to advance its values where they’re in conflict with ours. And that’s exactly what we’ve been able to do over these last four years. China is not going anywhere; we’re not going anywhere. And we have to start from that premise. But I think the notion of regime change policies is incredibly misguided.
Policy change – that’s different, and that’s what we’re focused on. And we’re going to be much more effective in doing that when we have this convergence with other countries. When we’re dealing, for example, with some of the unfair trade practices or overcapacity that China’s engaged in and countries – not just the United States – are deeply fearful of another China shock that we experienced a decade or 15 years ago – when any one of our countries is trying to deal with that alone, that’s one thing. Even the United States, dealing with it alone as the most powerful country in the world where we have greater GDP than the next three countries combined – nonetheless, we’re still 20 percent or so of world GDP. When we’re aligned with major partners in Europe, with the European Union, with partners in the Indo-Pacific, we might be 50 or 60 percent of world GDP, a much heavier weight that’s going to have a much greater impact on China changing its policies.
China also has reputational concerns. As I said, if it pretends to leadership, well, it can’t do it in a way that is simply through coercion and through bullying, because other countries eventually will stand up against that. Its own soft power is something that it takes seriously, even if it’s not been especially effective yet in asserting it. And that also gives you an ability to shape its policies and approach. The support for Russia’s defense industrial base, we’ve exposed that. China is very uncomfortable with that.
And I’ll say this. I’ve spent a lot of time with my Chinese counterpart Wang Yi – many, many, many hours. And every meeting – almost every meeting – starts the same way. It starts with him complaining about a litany of things that we’ve done, which to me is the greatest evidence of the success of our approach. And it often focuses on everything we’ve done to bring these other countries into some kind of alliance against China, which he says is anachronism of the Cold War. Well, the very fact that they spend so much time complaining about it is the most powerful evidence of the success that we’ve had.