LAST FRIDAY, Richard Lawless, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, told a congressional commission that Taiwan faces a significant military threat from China, and that Taiwan consequently needs to improve its defenses. Regarding the referendum that will be held on March 20 on whether Taiwan should acquire more advanced anti-missile systems, Mr. Lawless commented that Taiwan needed to achieve a consensus on defense spending and military reform. “There clearly is a requirement for this nation to find a common will and to bring itself together. . . . It is a free country, it is a democracy; it’s a functioning democracy. And so however they manage to instill the national will to do what they have to do, that is the responsibility . . . of the Taiwanese people, and we don’t want to impose ourselves on that process.” This was welcome straight talk from a senior administration official.

However, this is not the only message the administration is sending about Taiwan’s pending referenda. (There are two referenda scheduled for March 20; the second concerns an initiative to start a cross-Strait dialogue on reducing tensions between China and Taiwan.) While visiting Beijing two weeks ago, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was asked by his hosts to torpedo the referendum on Taiwan’s defenses. Mr. Armitage both declined to criticize the Chinese missile build-up and went on to imply that Taiwan’s referenda were dubious. Senior State Department official Randall Schriver made similar statements to a congressional commission last week. The net effect of Armitage and Schriver’s statements has been to keep alive a “crisis”–Taiwan’s referenda–that is not a real crisis, and the administration should not be treating them as a crisis just because Beijing wants it to do so.