The US needs to clarify its stance on Taiwan — before it’s too late

Two U.S. officials recently made new statements intended to clarify U.S. Taiwan policy amid China’s mounting aggression against Taiwan and “no limits” support for Russia in its increasingly genocidal war against Ukraine.

For years, U.S. officials, including those in the Trump and Biden administrations, have tried to mollify Beijing’s Taiwan paranoia by declaring, “We do not support Taiwan independence.” Kurt Campbell, director of China affairs at the Biden White House, has repeated the ritualistic statement on at least two occasions, intended to temper what Beijing sees as Washington’s growing pro-Taiwan sentiments.

No U.S. official has ever been heard to say that the U.S. does not support unification. Washington opposes any use of force, but is not likely to welcome even peaceful unification because of Taiwan’s geostrategic location in the Indo-Pacific. It was the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” from which Imperial Japan launched World War II in Southeast Asia and from which China would potentially trigger World War III.

Instead, the U.S. position through nine administrations has adhered to the mantra that America “supports the status quo” across the Taiwan Strait. Over the decades, however, the status quo has constantly changed — sometimes imperceptibly, other times more dramatically. It is not a static status quo but a dynamic one.

Neither Beijing nor Taipei can feel confident that time is on its side; each tries to move events in its own preferred direction, triggering an equal and opposite reaction.

Taiwan’s older, China-oriented population is being replaced by Taiwanese who have known only life in a free and democratic Taiwan, independent in all respects except formal diplomatic relations and participation in international organizations. Emotional and cultural ties to the China mainland are inexorably fraying as loyalties to the Taiwan motherland deepen for younger Taiwanese. The Tiananmen massacre turned even older Taiwanese against Beijing’s dictatorship, and its betrayal of the one country/two systems formula for Hong Kong has repelled Taiwan’s young people.

This demographic evolution is a major reason Xi Jinping is pressing for unification sooner rather than later: the Taiwan question, he says, “cannot be passed on from generation to generation.” It is also why Henry Kissinger warned Taiwan in 2007 that “China will not wait forever” and why he told the World Economic Forum that U.S. policy cannot assume “that China will continue to exercise the patience that has been exercised up until now.”

Kissinger, 100, thought he and Richard Nixon had sealed Taiwan’s fate in 1972 and has chafed at having to wait half his lifetime for consummation of the deal. Nixon, on the other hand, wrote in 1994 that cross-Strait circumstances had fundamentally changed: “The separation is permanent politically.”

Last month, the commander of the U.S. Navy’s Indo-Pacific Command added a new wrinkle to Washington’s position on Taiwan’s future. Adm. John Aquilino told a security conference in Singapore, “We do not seek an independent Taiwan.”

The verb change — “seek” instead of “support” — sets a lower, more passive sense of Washington’s intentions regarding Taiwanese independence — it is not actively pursuing it, as opposed to simply refraining from encouraging it. Whether this is a meaningful policy nuance will be determined by its potential repetition.  

In any event, Beijing already sees the U.S. as changing the status quo by a creeping emergence under both the Trump and Biden administrations of a one China/one Taiwan policy. Kissinger, ever vigilant in protecting China’s interests, warned against this eventuality as well, after Biden’s extemporaneous pledge to defend Taiwan. “The United States should not by subterfuge or by a gradual process develop something of a ‘two-China’ solution.”

Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan, in an interview with Fareed Zakaria last week, added his own take on the question of U.S. intentions under the longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity.

Zakaria asked: “Is President Biden trying to alter the policy of strategic ambiguity about what the United States would do in this circumstance [of China attacking Taiwan] and be very clear about it, and if that is the case, is that not a change in policy?”

Sullivan’s response further muddled the situation: “President Biden has answered this hypothetical question on multiple occasions, as you say. He has also on multiple occasions, including in the very same breath, said that our policy toward cross-strait relations towards China and Taiwan has not changed. […] The president himself has said that. He said it directly to Xi Jinping.”

The most succinct, and opaque, statement of Washington’s “policy” on whether America would defend Taiwan goes back to the Clinton administration: “We don’t know. […] It would depend on the circumstances.” No subsequent administration has gone beyond that explanation, which concedes that there are some “circumstances” surrounding a Chinese attack under which the U.S. would notcome to Taiwan’s defense. As Sullivan said, Biden inherited the ambiguities in U.S. policy from his Democratic and Republican predecessors.

“The entire Taiwan policy of the United States is built on a series of internal tensions,” Sullivan stated. “The One China policy […] is about dealing in a world of internal tension within the policy and trying to manage those tensions. […] This is not a model of clarity, the One China policy. That is not a Biden administration issue, that has been true from the moment of the Shanghai communique.”

All true, but it is Biden’s responsibility now, and hiding behind past mistakes and confusion does nothing to reduce the risk of conflict with China based on strategic miscalculation. In fact, under present China-created “circumstances,” it increases the danger.  

What Sullivan saw as an enhancement of security from the ambiguity is rapidly vanishing. “The thing is what it lacks in clarity the One China policy has succeeded in actually achieving the practical objective of decades of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. That is why our policy hasn’t changed.”

“Peace and stability” hardly describes the escalating military pressures China is aggressively imposing on Taiwan and on the United States, such as its recent actions in the Taiwan Strait.

When Sullivan and others comfort themselves with the notion that “there is nothing inevitable about some kind of conflict or cold war between the U.S. and China,” they ignore the reality that we are already in a cold war with China (and its strategic partner, Russia) — and have been for quite some time.

As for the likelihood of conflict, unless Washington clearly and firmly declares that further Chinese aggression will make it inevitable, it almost certainly will be.

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.