Biden must end ‘strategic ambiguity’ on Taiwan

Taiwan’s presidential and legislative elections are just weeks away. China correctly sees them as a further repudiation of its rigid ideological stance that a Chinese society is incapable of handling democracy with all its free choices, checks and balances, and reliance on human rights. Beijing has made its wishes clear: It wants Taiwanese voters to reject William Lai, who pledges to follow the moderate policies of President Tsai Ing-wen favoring greater international space for Taiwan and opposing forced unification.

As in past elections, China has ramped up its rhetorical pressure against Taiwan and increased military exercises and forays near Taiwan. During their recent meeting, President Joe Biden and Chinese ruler Xi Jinping warned each other against provocative actions on Taiwan.

Xi reportedly told Biden that Washington should refrain from interfering in China’s “internal” affairs, such as by sending defensive arms to Taiwan. For his part, Biden said he “didn’t expect any interference at all” in Taiwan’s elections. But more is needed from the U.S. side to counter China’s already overt interference.  

If Lai and his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) colleagues are victorious and the DPP prevails for the fifth time in eight presidential elections, Beijing may well invoke its 2005 Anti-Secession Law. The ASL states that if “possibilities for a peaceful re-unification should be completely exhausted, the state shall employ non-peaceful means” to impose unification on Taiwan.

China would launch any of a range of actions, including a naval and air quarantine, embargo or blockade — which it practiced when then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited Taiwan; seizure of one or more of Taiwan’s outlying islands; or a full-fledged amphibious, air and missile assault and invasion of Taiwan.

Each military alternative holds operational advantages and limitations for Beijing and reciprocal challenges and opportunities for Taiwan. But all share a critical component: The pivotal but yet-to-be-determined role of the United States in defeating the aggression. 

Biden has declared four times that his administration would directly come to Taiwan’s defense. But each time, White House and State Department officials, or Biden himself, have diluted the deterrent value of the message by “explaining” there has been “no change” in U.S. policy on defending Taiwan. 

Unfortunately, that policy is explicitly and deliberately noncommital, as first enunciated by Assistant Defense Secretary Joseph Nye during the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, when China conducted live-fire exercises and fired missiles toward Taiwan.

When Chinese military officials asked Nye what America would do if China went further and attacked Taiwan, he responded, “We don’t know and you don’t know;  it would depend on the circumstances.”  

Weeks later, his boss, Defense Secretary William Perry, said Nye’s articulation of what became known as strategic ambiguity perfectly stated U.S. policy, and he repeated it verbatim.

Unlike Biden’s spontaneous responses to recent questions, the Perry-Nye statement was not “clarified” or walked back by other Clinton administration officials or any subsequent administration and remains the operative U.S. position today.  

It is also consistent with the indefiniteness in the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which calls for the U.S. to “maintain the capacity” to defend Taiwan but does not mandate that Washington exercise that capacity. Nor does it advance the direct U.S. commitment to Taiwan’s security beyond the Shanghai Communique, which stated Washington’s “expectation” that Taiwan’s future would be decided “peacefully.”

Unfortunately, just as the U.S. never committed to use force to defend Taiwan, Beijing never relinquished the use of force to subjugate it. Instead, it has spent the last 28 years since the Clinton administration’s muddled message to prepare “the circumstances” that would convince Washington that the costs and risks of defending Taiwan exceed the benefits of helping it remain free.

China’s counter-intervention forces include attack submarines and anti-ship ballistic missiles as key components in an anti-access, area-denial strategy.  

Beijing reinforces its deployed hard military power with equally hard information warfare — severe threats against America and any U.S. allies who dare to get involved in the defense of Taiwan. 

Chinese officials have warned of nuclear attacks on Los Angeles and “hundreds of U.S. cities,” destruction of U.S. bases in Japan and the sinking of an aircraft carrier or two with the loss of 5,000 to 10,000 sailors to “see how frightened America is” in a conflict over Taiwan.

Can China expect a direct and vigorous U.S. response if it attacks Taiwan? Not based on Biden’s prior record as opposed to his rhetoric. The only time he has taken decisive action in a situation involving U.S. military power was in Afghanistan, where he abruptly and disastrously ended the “forever war” he and former President Trump promised to abandon.

On Russia’s war in Ukraine, his threats of economic sanctions and his virtual invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin to take only a limited additional slice of Ukraine did not deter its latest major invasion. 

Only a credible, well-prepared and convincingly presented U.S. commitment to Taiwan will have any prospect of persuading Beijing that it will pay too high a price if it initiates aggression against Taiwan.

Achieving that deterrence requires clarity on two military levels — defending Taiwan against Chinese aggression as an act of collective self-defense and defending the U.S and its allies against Chinese retaliation as direct acts of war. Both objectives are dependent on achieving U.S. escalation dominance.

Biden should state that at the first sign of a Chinese attack or blockade against Taiwan, U.S. air and naval forces will be deployed to destroy the aggressor units. But if China retaliates against the defending U.S. or allied forces, the U.S. will immediately strike the source of the attacks in China.

It will then be up to China to escalate to World War III, but Xi and his colleagues have demonstrated in past crises that they are not suicidal. Once convinced Washington will adhere to its escalation dominance scenario, they will not initiate hostilities against Taiwan in the first place. That U.S. commitment to cross-Strait stability needs to be demonstrated during peacetime in a more nonconfrontational environment.

Though U.S. Navy ships transit the Taiwan Strait singly or in pairs on a regular basis (though less frequently recently), no carrier battle group has made the passage in 16 years. Sending one through now, on a low-key basis, before any hostilities have broken out, will deliver a message of U.S. seriousness, end the dangerous policy of strategic ambiguity and prevent a calamitous strategic miscalculation like the one North Korea made in June 1950 when it invaded South Korea.

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.