To avoid history’s mistakes, Taiwan needs unambiguous protection, now

History is replete with examples of civil wars, wars of aggression and political revolutions altering power relations and sovereignty over once-stable states and territories.  

But not since World War II has there been such a confluence of aggressive powers seeking to change international borders and eliminate entire states.  

In addition to Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine and China’s escalating threats against Taiwan, Iran and its proxies are moving to destroy Israel. North Korea also remains in a perpetual state of quasi-war to end the existence of South Korea.

All four conflict or near-conflict situations involve democratic allies of the U.S. under attack, kinetic and otherwise, from proclaimed enemies of the U.S.-led international order.  

The Russia-Ukraine conflict offers the closest major-power analogue to the looming crisis in the Taiwan Strait. The West’s failure to deter Russia’s aggression and war crimes, and its subsequent failure to support a Ukrainian victory is the most important of the pertinent lessons for the looming China-Taiwan conflict. The response should start by confronting the information warfare that invariably precedes the outbreak of war. Adolf Hitler’s claim of German ownership of the Sudetenland is the most dramatic modern example. Likewise, Vladimir Putin distorts both recent events and the historical record in claiming that Ukraine was never a separate nation but a mere “fiction” created by Russia.

Putin conveniently ignores the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Russia, the U.S. and the United Kingdom formally committed “to respect the Independence and Sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.” The three powers also pledged “to reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.” The memorandum proved to be for Putin what the Munich Agreement of 1938 had been to Hitler: a mere “scrap of paper.”   

Similarly, Xi Jinping relentlessly talks of “reunification” with Taiwan, even though the Chinese Communist Party never ruled the island. He buttresses his false claim of sovereignty over Taiwan by relying on Henry Kissinger’s too-clever-by-half wordsmithing in the Shanghai Communique, which set the stage for a half-century of fraught China-U.S. relations over the status and future of Taiwan. 

That seminal document separately set forth both sides’ positions on Taiwan without agreement, the rhetorical equivalent of two ships passing in the night. But it allowed China to claim over the following decades that Washington had yielded to Beijing’s interpretation and accepted China’s “one China principle” — i.e., that Taiwan is part of China and not a separate political entity. The U.S. side simply “acknowledged” China’s position and neither “challenged” nor acceded to it. 

After then-President Carter shifted official U.S. relations from Taiwan (the Republic of China) to the People’s Republic of China in 1979, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, declaring that America will “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” Given that vital U.S. interest in Taiwan’s security, Washington pledged “to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character” and to “maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion.”  

The Act did not commit the U.S. to actively defend Taiwan by intervening in a cross-strait conflict, however. And when Chinese officials asked the Clinton administration for clarification, Assistant Defense Secretary Joseph Nye and Defense Secretary William Perry said the U.S. response “would depend on the circumstances.” For the next 30 years, China built the circumstances that would keep the U.S. out of the fight, with an arsenal of anti-ship ballistic missiles and a fleet of attack submarines.  

China’s anti-access-area denial strategy worked. Only one carrier battle group, the crown jewel of the Seventh Fleet, has traversed the Taiwan Strait since China’s 1996 warning that such a transit would meet “a sea of fire.” In recent years, the U.S. Navy has conducted Freedom of Navigation passages using smaller warships singly or in pairs.

Just as China has gradually expanded the scope and intensity of its naval and air exercise in and over the strait, the U.S. should incrementally increase the number and size of ships in the transits until they reach the full complement of a naval battle group. 

President Biden seems to have decided that the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity on defending Taiwan has not dissuaded China from planning to attack Taiwan. He has now stated on four occasions that the U.S. will intervene militarily. But Beijing has reason to doubt that those ad hoc remarks from the 81-year-old leader actually reflect considered U.S. policy. Biden’s administration has a few months left to move the policy in a clear and unambiguous direction.  

Had Putin believed America would directly defend Ukraine, as it promised to do in the Budapest Memorandum, Europe could have avoided another war. Xi Jinping must be made to understand the consequences of fresh aggression in the Indo-Pacific. 

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 is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute.