Office of the Historian

323. Memorandum From the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs (Barnett) to Harry E.T. Thayer of the Office of Republic of China Affairs1

Washington, August 7, 1968.

SUBJECT

  • Study in Anticipation of Foreign Crises: Taiwan Straits2
1.
Tom Shoesmith has put together an excellent first draft on the Offshore Islands.
2.

Tom’s assumptions stated on page 7 serve his purpose. I believe, however, that the Offshore Islands present awkward and even dangerous problems under some contrary assumptions. I mention, illustratively:

a.
A GRC attack; or,
b.
A Taiwan in which the Generalissimo’s control of the GRC is challenged by effective opposition.

Under these and still other assumptions, we would not, I think, be deflected from the conclusions to which Tom’s general analysis leads.

3.
As to one of Tom’s recommended courses of action, I doubt the wisdom of a U.S. attempt, under any circumstances, to persuade the GRC to remove its forces on Quemoy and Matsu. If this is done, the GRC should do it itself and for its own reasons. United States pressure would invite a process of bargaining in which the United States could be trapped into paying a price to the GRC, financially, politically, and in degree of strategic involvement, that might not be desirable or necessary to pay.
4.
I do not believe that to establish, credibly, United States indifference to the future of the Offshore Islands would stimulate Peking to take them over. Peking and Taipei view the Offshores in an identical historical and strategic context, seeing them as the linchpin that locks the future of Taiwan into the future of the China Mainland. Both capitals know that a change of status of the Offshores—limiting effective jurisdiction of the GRC at Taiwan and the Pescadores alone and putting 100 miles of ocean between that area and the Chinese Communist territories on the Mainland—would become powerful justification for the people of Formosa—and advocates of peace everywhere in the world—to proceed, in terms of both recognition and UN representation, from the present de facto “One China”/“One Taiwan” situation towards de jure arrangements which would make notion of a “One China”, including Taiwan, appear even more fanciful than now. Neither Peking nor followers of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in the GRC could welcome that development.3
  1. Source: Department of State, Central Files, DEF 1 CHINAT. Top Secret.↩
  2. An undated paper entitled “Studies in Anticipation of Foreign Crises: Taiwan Strait Crisis,” drafted by ROC Country Director Thomas P. Shoesmith, was sent to the East Asia and Pacific Interdepartmental Regional Group on November 9 and discussed by the group on November 20. The discussion reached no conclusions except that further studies on the subject were needed. The paper and the record of discussion are ibid., FE/IRG Files: Lot 70 D 56. The memorandum printed here comments on a draft that has not been found. Memoranda by Brown, Barnett, Clough, Kreisberg, Greene, and Oscar V. Armstrong of EA/P, dated between August 2 and 13, commenting on the same draft are ibid., Central Files, DEF 1 CHINAT and DEF 6 CHINAT.↩
  3. The following paragraph is handwritten on the source text following the typewritten text: “While I remain somewhat skeptical about this argument, it is difficult to discount entirely. It certainly is relevant to the question of whether a sign of U.S. unwillingness to defend OSI would encourage CC to attempt to seize islands by force.” This paragraph and other marginal notations on the source text and some of the memoranda cited in footnote 2 were apparently written by Shoesmith.↩