This book constitutes a solid historical overview of eight decades of relations between the United States, China and Taiwan. But reader beware: the volume has both quirks and limitations. For a book ostensibly about security relations between Washington and Taipei, it is very US-centric and heavily China-focused. The result is that Taiwan receives surprisingly modest attention and the historical details about US-Taiwan defense cooperation are far too few.
Certainly, complete coverage of the subject requires cogent discussion of Taiwan's primary security threat – China. Yet greater attention to US-China interactions means less coverage of US-Taiwan engagement. What the reader receives is closer to a 30,000-foot view of US-Taiwan security than a close-up look. Moreover, the author cites almost no Chinese-language sources. While Sun appears to cite several sources in Chinese in chapter three, their status is unclear because all the information on these citations appears solely in English – the author provides neither Chinese characters nor romanization of titles and publication details. This omission will come as a great disappointment to readers of this journal. The exclusion of any meaningful research in primary Chinese-language materials belies the author's upfront claim to be revealing the “inside story of the U.S. security relationship with Taiwan” (p. 1).
The core of this book are 14 chapters which examine in chronological order the China policies of every US presidential administration from Harry S. Truman to Joseph R. Biden with particular attention to the place of Taiwan. For each administration, Sun considers three levels of analysis: the president himself, the bureaucratic state and the international system. Unfortunately, this approach fails to produce any significant insights.
Together, these chapters provide a generally solid but largely unexceptional survey of US-China relations with most sources cited being secondary ones. Hedging the China Threat will be of greatest use to historians of US foreign policy but of less interest to those wishing to familiarize themselves with the history of US-Taiwan relations. Historians aside, most potential readers will likely benefit more from consulting the recent book by Ryan Hass, Bonnie Glaser and Richard Bush titled US-Taiwan Relations: Will China's Challenge Lead to a Crisis? (Brookings Institution, 2023), which is a concise and authoritative volume that possesses a contemporary policy-relevant focus and a succinct historical overview along with multiple handy appendices.
