employing and sustaining joint forces (Tkacik 2004). And seeing Taiwan as not doing
enough in its own military defence, Lawless urged Taiwan’s authorities to ‘enhance
interoperability’ with the U.S. and other potential security partners (Tkacik 2004).
Despite its pledged commitment to the ‘One China’ principle, the U.S. has maintained
its long-standing arms sales to Taiwan. In March 2002, for the first time in more than 13
years, Washington granted Taiwan’s defence minister a visa to attend a ‘US-Taiwan
Defense Summit’, and meet ‘privately’ with then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz and then Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs James Kelly.
As well as propping up Taiwan, the U.S. has strenuously and for now successfully
opposed the lifting of the arms embargo against China by the European Union. The
rationale, as one American official put it, is that in doing so, the Europeans would tip
the military balance of power in the Taiwan Strait in favour of China, and make it easier
‘for the Chinese to kill Americans’ (cited in Sheridan 2005a: 22). The underlying
message is obvious, that is, the U.S. is poised to intervene should there be a conflict in
the Taiwan Strait.
The neoconservative China policy as a self-fulfilling prophecy
None of the above-mentioned policies is unique to the neocons; each of them can find
support in other sectors of the U.S. political establishment. However, what is new is that
the neocons have systematically pursued all three policy paths. In doing so, however, I
argue that this policy triad, based on an exaggerated perception of the ‘China threat’ out
there, is no longer simply to respond to a pre-existing enemy, but to run the risk of
producing self-fulfilling consequences. In other words, it is more likely than not to help
bring the ‘China threat’ scenario into reality.
Take the neocons’ concern over China’s threat to U.S. energy security for example. In
2000, for the first time in history more than 50 percent of U.S. oil consumption came
from imports. Against this background, the U.S. National Energy Policy (or the Cheney
Report), released in May 2001, called for making ‘energy security a priority of our trade
and foreign policy’ (quoted in Klare 2004: 4). Closely linked to big energy corporations,
the neocons have long identified oil price volatility as ‘one of the biggest threats to
American power’ (Roberts 2004: 110). On the other hand, already the second largest oil
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Convention