Question: Would you support the following “grand bargain” for the cause of peace? The United States withdraws its defense of Taiwan. In exchange, China gives up all its other territorial claims in the East and South China Seas and also recognizes the right of the American military to maintain a presence in Asia.

1. Yes
2. No

One of the most seductive ideas in diplomacy is the notion of a “grand bargain.” That is, an agreement that ends all disagreements among adversaries who often have sharply different ideologies and agendas and just as often hold deeply entrenched positions.

Over the course of history, grand-bargain phraseology has been used to describe everything from the successful Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the failed Treaty of Versailles in 1919 that set the stage for World War II. The term “grand bargain” has even been used to characterize the implicit deal China made with its people—prosperity in exchange for silence—after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre crushed China's prodemocracy movement.

In truth, the idea of a grand bargain is so seductive precisely because it offers the promise of a silver bullet and a severed Gordian knot all rolled up into one big happy ending. The question before us now, dear detectives, is whether such a grand bargain might once and for all settle the increasingly sharp differences between China and the United States—and thereby serve as an ultimate, one-stop-shop pathway to peace.

As to what such a grand bargain might look like, George Washington University professor Charles Glaser has put perhaps the most concrete—and controversial—proposal on the table.1 Because this proposal, summarized in the lead question to this chapter, offers a very specific pathway to what may well be a permanent peace—and because a deeper analysis of the proposal's pros and cons will further illuminate the complex nature of tensions in Asia—it is well worth our strong consideration.

Professor Glaser's “Grand China Bargain” begins with the realist-school assumption that countries like the United States pursue “grand strategies” to advance their national interests. In Glaser's view, America's grand strategy may be characterized by the pursuit of a hierarchy of at least three major goals.

At the very top of this hierarchy is national security. This is, of course, the most important pursuit not just of the United States but of any nation.

Next, and only slightly less important, is that of economic prosperity. To Glaser, these two goals—national security and economic prosperity—are, and very well should be, the major driving forces of US foreign policy today.

As a third, but significantly lower-ranked, pillar of US foreign policy, Glaser also sees the pursuit of a set of ideals associated with the ideology of “American exceptionalism.” These goals are defined by the belief that the world will be a better, safer, more prosperous, and more just place if it is organized according to democratic principles in the political arena, free trade and free markets in the economic arena, and free expression and free will at the individual level. Implicit in these ideals is the collateral belief that America has a strong moral obligation to protect weaker nations from tyranny and to help individuals during global humanitarian crises.

It should be immediately clear that Glaser's realist assumptions immediately open the door to a coldly pragmatic America willing to sacrifice its ideology and moral obligations on the altar of achieving its economic and national security goals. In Glaser's world, while we have “an interest in supporting democracies and promoting them, it's not our highest interest.” This means that in some cases “on net, we will be better [off] breaking our commitment.”²

As to where Taiwan and its thriving democracy come into this strategic calculus, Glaser starkly portrays the dispute over the island as the single most important irritant in the US-China relationship. In his words:

It is not only the possibility that down the road we will actually protect Taiwan in a military confrontation. The commitment itself strains the relationship because the Chinese see us as meddling in their affairs. That's not our view, but it is their honest view. So it strains the relationship and it strains the relationship even more when we sell arms to Taiwan.3

Now here is Glaser's ultimately key grand-bargain assumption: Because Taiwan is of such paramount importance to China—a “core interest” in China's diplomatic parlance—it should be willing to deal on the issue. Glaser further assumes that the territorial disputes China has with other countries like Japan in the East China Sea and the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea do not rise to the level of a core interest that China is willing to go to war for.

Based on these assumptions, it follows that China should also be willing to effectively renounce all its other claims in the East and South China Seas in exchange for the ultimate prize of Taiwan. In addition, China should be willing to recognize a permanent American presence in the region, if for no other reason than the American navy has played a stabilizing role and thereby facilitated economic trade and growth. As for the United States, in Glaser's realist world, it should be equally willing to sacrifice Taiwan on the altar of a lasting peace.

In evaluating the prospects of any such grand bargain ever being struck, Glaser readily admits that it would require big, and likely quite painful, political sacrifices on the parts of both Chinese and US leaders. In China's case, its leaders would have to convince its citizens—including a rabid community of nationalists that the Chinese government has already whipped into a frenzy—that such a deal would not constitute any surrender on China's part or, worse, yet another “humiliation” at the hands of foreigners.

As for the United States, the American president and US Congress would have to renounce what has been often portrayed as a “moral” commitment to Taiwan. By abandoning Taiwan, the United States would also have to confront the likely severe damage any such cold and calculating grand bargain would do to America's other defense-treaty alliances, not just in Asia but also in Europe.

In the end, however, Glaser view is that:

If we get a Grand Bargain, I think that it would be an unhappy one but a very good deal.4

The two big questions, of course, surrounding any such “very good deal” are: (1) whether the deal would actually work in practice to keep the peace; and (2) would China and the United States ever really sell their respective nationalist and moral souls to the Grand Bargain devil and sign on the dotted line of any such treaty?

To answer these questions, let's look at what some of our other experts specifically have had to say on the matter—starting with one of the most preeminent Taiwan scholars in the world, Richard Bush of the Brookings Institution. In Bush's decidedly unminced words:

My initial impulse when I hear a suggestion like a Grand Bargain is to pull my hair out because it's just not going to work. First of all, the Taiwan people have a say in the outcome that's being proposed. Second, China has its own reasons why it is pushing out into the East and South China Seas. It wants to have greater strategic depth as a way of building its national defense and to propose a Grand Bargain would be to ask China to act in ways that are contrary to its own conception of its own interests.⁵

Raising the issue of bad faith, Bush further notes:

The Chinese are very good at taking a deal and interpreting it in ways that suit them and in ways that are contrary to what we think the deal means; and so deals like this just end up in more disagreement and argument.”⁶

This problem of bad faith is further compounded by the fact that, as Bush tells it, “the United States and China right now” simply “don't trust each other,” and “China has serious doubts about our intentions.”⁷ So even if Washington proposed a grand bargain, to Bush:

Beijing would probably see this as a trick that somehow is designed to fool them, and simply for that reason, they would not be interested.⁸

As for any moral obligation of America to defend Taiwan and its flourishing democracy, former US Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell expresses his own form of outrage:

I do not believe it is in the US strategic interest to even contemplate nineteenth century-like deals like: “We'll give you Taiwan in exchange for some other regional set of circumstances.” I mean, who does that?9

There is also the very real issue of how America's allies would view any such American abandonment of Taiwan. On this point, Heritage Foundation scholar Dean Cheng is unequivocal:

The idea that the United States would walk away from a commitment that it has maintained for some 40 years is absolutely the sort of thing that would make America's allies, not just in Asia, but around the world, deeply question our willingness to be there. This is the sort of thing that would affect not just America's position in Asia, but America's position in Europe.¹⁰

Brookings Institution scholar Michael O'Hanlon drills down even deeper into this theme of destabilized American alliances:

Yes, we do have a commitment to Taiwan largely on moral grounds which gets you in an uncomfortable place: Are you really prepared to risk American lives for a moral commitment in this kind of situation? But even if you were prepared to abandon Taiwan, what's the rest of the world and the rest of America's Asian allies going to do? What are they going to deduce? And how many of them are going to build nuclear weapons along the way? And Taiwan itself is going to be tempted to start building a nuclear weapon which China has already said in advance would be a cause for war. So, by trying to avoid danger, you actually increase the danger.¹¹

Here, Professor John Mearsheimer is equally clear in explaining how both rising Chinese nationalism and what Beijing may now view as its inevitable march toward supremacy would likewise cut against the grain of any grand bargain. Asserts Mearsheimer:

The Chinese are simply not going to be willing to make the concessions that are necessary to placate the United States and its allies. They are not going to be willing to give up on the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. They are not going to be willing to make concessions on the South China Sea. There are two reasons for this. One is just good old-fashioned nationalism; the Chinese believe that this territory belongs to them, and they're not interested in compromising. But furthermore, the Chinese believe that time is on their side, and they will eventually become so powerful that they can dictate the terms of any settlement.12

Perhaps the most philosophical critique is offered up by long-time Pentagon advisor Michael Pillsbury. He describes the idea of having a grand bargain with China to be “a very American approach”:

To put it in a common phrase, let's make a deal. Why can't we make a deal? And this approach has been tried with many difficult problems in the past, where unfortunately the outcome has been war…. And some of the assessments of the origins of World War I and World War II are very similar to that. There were good willed people, who proposed: “Can't we work together?” And this was misunderstood by the other side in a way that had tragic consequences.¹³

In light of these expert critiques, it is unlikely that Professor Glaser's grand bargain would ever gain traction in the real world of Asian diplomacy, making it the proverbial “nonstarter.” Nonetheless, Glaser's proposal does serve a very important purpose in this inquiry. This is because it more brightly illuminates the very clear strategic and ideological differences that exist between China on the one hand and America and its Asian allies on the other hand.

Through such brighter illumination, Glaser's grand bargain reinforces perhaps the most important insight that has emerged thus far in our enquiry. To wit: The rising tensions in the “cauldron” of Asia are not primarily the result of any cultural misunderstandings, any misreading of China's intentions, or any strategic miscalculations on the part of the various would-be combatants. Rather, these tensions are the result of very real and stark differences between China and much of the rest of Asia regarding China's increasingly strident territorial claims and its apparent quest for hegemony in the region. As Georgetown University professor Oriana Mastro has put it in seeking her own version of a pathway to peace:

The sooner that we are honest about the fact that it's not that we [China and America] misunderstand each other's positions but that maybe we just don't like them, I think the sooner we can move past some of these tensions and actually move to some of the areas of cooperation.14

The question before us therefore remains: What are the appropriate policy responses to China that will help us best “move past some of these tensions” and ensure the peace? Unfortunately, from our “pathways to peace” chapters thus far, we have only been able to rule out a number of otherwise promising options.

In particular, we have learned that economic engagement, economic interdependence, and nuclear weapons are unlikely either alone or together to keep the peace. We have also determined that a neoisolationist US–military withdrawal may well lead to more, rather than less, conflict and instability while fruitful negotiations with an opaque and truculent China are likely to be very, very difficult.

It follows from these sobering conclusions that if a grand bargain is also infeasible—indeed, perhaps well-nigh impossible—the only option seemingly to consider is that of “peace through strength.” It is to this pathway—and the many dangers it may bring as well—that we turn to in the next and final part of our detective story.