US ‘strategic ambiguity’ invites war over Taiwan 

One of President Biden’s assistant secretaries has now effectively told Congress to disregard his boss’s four express commitments to defend Taiwan. 

In August 2021, Biden was asked by Scott Pelley of CBS, “So unlike Ukraine, to be clear, sir, U.S. forces — U.S. men and women — would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion?”  Biden replied, “Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.” Presumably, he meant unprovoked. 
 

That same month, the president told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos that the U.S. had a solemn commitment to act “if in fact anyone were to invade or take action against NATO … Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan.”   

In October 2021, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked the same question about defending Taiwan. Biden answered, “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.” 

And in May 2023, during a Tokyo interview alongside Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Biden repeated his statement on defending Taiwan: “That’s the commitment we made.” But, when asked whether “the policy of strategic ambiguity towards Taiwan [is] dead,” he replied “No.” Asked if he “could explain,” he again said “No.” 

After each of the Biden statements, officials from the White House, the State Department and the Defense Department stressed that the president was not making any change in U.S. policy. 

Ely Ratner, who heads the office of Indo-Pacific security affairs in the Defense Department, testified last week before the House Armed Services Committee and attempted to make sense of it all. He said that U.S. policy on Taiwan is premised on the Taiwan Relations Act, the Six Assurances, and the Three U.S.-China Communiques. He asserted that U.S. policy has been clear on this over six administrations led by both parties over the past 40 years. “[T]his longstanding policy that has preserved peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait for more than four decades.” 

But the continuity in articulating U.S. policy has not been as clear or consistent as suggested.  

In the Clinton administration, when Ratner’s predecessor in the position, Joseph Nye, was asked by Chinese officials during the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995-1996 what America would do if China attacked Taiwan, he responded, “We don’t know … it would depend on the circumstances.”   

He made no mention of any of the documents Ratner cited as scripture. Nye’s failure to cite the 1979 TRA was especially glaring since it is the legislative authority for U.S. arms to support Taiwan’s self-defense and for the U.S. “to maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion” against Taiwan without actually committing it to do so. 

While subsequent administrations have come around to invoking the TRA as the basis for fortifying Taiwan’s defenses weapons, only in recent years have officials cited the TRA language implying the possibility of a direct U.S. defense of Taiwan.  

And none has ever taken notice of the following potentially tectonic sentence: “[T]he United States decision to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means;.” 

Ratner was asked whether the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity on defending Taiwan enhances or undermines deterrence of Chinese aggression. He responded that replacing it with a policy of clarity — which is what Biden was attempting to do with his four comments — would not be useful in deterring China from attacking Taiwan. 

“We see the PRC anticipating a U.S. response to an invasion of Taiwan. They train against it. They assume it’s going to happen. Therefore, we don’t think there would be additional deterrence value in terms of changing our position away from strategic ambiguity.” 

The assessment that China expects some kind of initial U.S. kinetic response is probably correct. The determinative question, however, is what Washington does after Beijing predictably counters the U.S. response — that is, how far Washington is prepared to escalate to defend Taiwan. China’s leaders may well calculate that Biden’s paralyzing fear of any great-power conflict escalating to all-out war will serve as an effective counter-deterrent to U.S. military action on behalf of Taiwan.  

Concerned about damage to U.S. credibility after Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden sent an unofficial delegation of former U.S. defense and national security officials to Taiwan to show that the U.S. commitment to Taiwan “remains rock solid.” 

Yet, the perception of Biden administration weakness persists, especially after the calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Biden inhibition has been demonstrated repeatedly by his reluctance to provide Ukraine with the weapons it needs to inflict decisive damage on Russia’s invasion forces. Ratner’s co-witness at the HASC hearing, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Mira Reznick, stressed the inextricable relationship between U.S. actions on Ukraine and deterrence of aggression against Taiwan. Being “an unreliable partner for Ukraine would send exactly the wrong message to China.”   

She was warning against a threatened congressional cut-off of U.S. funding for Ukraine, but the lesson Beijing is learning about U.S. resolve also applies to Biden’s hesitant and halting arms deliveries to Ukraine and the severe limitations Washington places on what it does provide.   

It may well see parallels in the frequent interruptions and delays in the flow of U.S. arms to Taiwan. For Vladimir Putin and his “no-limits strategic partner,” Xi Jinping, having seen Western acquiescence to the first Russian invasion in 2014, U.S. slow-walking of arms transfers to Taiwan adds to doubts about Western resolve on both Ukraine and Taiwan. 

But Ratner argued not only that strategic clarity on Taiwan would achieve little or nothing to deter Chinese aggression — he asserted that it would be both ineffective and dangerous. 

“In fact, doing that would upset our commitment to the status quo and to opposing unilateral changes to the status quo,” he said. “So we think there is political cost that would be borne by the people on Taiwan for that kind of political action and very little value in terms of deterrence.” 
 

Yet, China has been changing the status quo on almost a daily basis with its escalating deployment of aircraft and warships around Taiwan. Before he finds himself reacting to a Xi fait accompli like Putin’s on Ukraine, Biden needs to consolidate and formalize his extemporaneous pledges to Taiwan’s democratic security. Only a clear and coherent policy statement reflecting a unified U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan will prevent calamity in East Asia. 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.