2019 Volume 2019 Issue 197 Pages 197_42-197_57
Was the Sino-American Rapprochement a turning point that changed everything? In 1969, the ROC changed the military strategy from “Offensive Posture” to “Unity of Offensive and Defensive”. Certainly, the advent of Nixon gave a big impact to the ROC’s national security, which heavily relied on the US. However, the ROC Government might decide to change its military strategy from “Retaking the Mainland,” which had been attempted for over a decade, to building up the consolidation of Taiwan’s defense when encountering the escalation of the PRC’s military threat even at the peak of the chaotic Great Leap Forward and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The chaos in Mainland China in the 1960s provided a chance for the ROC to retake the mainland. The ROC would have been able to initiate military operations if received support from the US Nevertheless, US Government after the Kennedy administration was seeking coexistence with the PRC and therefore rejected all ROC’s requests.
At that time the PRC was strengthening its nuclear capability and conventional forces despite being in a state of political chaos. In response to the growing military threat of the PRC, improvement of the ROC government’s defense capability to secure “Taiwan” became its top priority. Moreover, when the US abolition of Military Assistance Program was announced, the ROC Government was forced to improve military advancement at the expense of its own economy and spend the limited budget on defense in priority. Therefore, the ROC Government had begun to reform the “Offensive Posture” strategy that it adopted since 1949, and decided to change to the “Unity of Offensive and Defensive” strategy that focused on defense more than before. This was before Nixon put forth the “Guam Doctrine” and started to approach the PRC.
Division of “China” was incorporated into the Cold War and immobilized. Although the chaos in Mainland China in the 1960s was likely to develop into “hot war” if ROC took military action. The US suppressed the ROC’s action for changing the status quo and avoided military conflict with the PRC. There is no doubt that the current US-China-Taiwan relations was formed in the 1970s, beginning with Nixon’s rapprochement to the PRC. However, the structure of maintaining the status quo of the ROC’s endeavor to acquire the US military commitment to resist the PRC’s continuous military expansion was gradually formed through the 1960s.
