WASHINGTON – If anything can turn the global power struggle between China and the United States into actual military conflict, many experts and administrators say it is the fate of Taiwan.
Beijing has increased its military harassment on what it believes to be rogue territory, including threatening flights by 15 Chinese fighter jets near its coast in recent days. In response, Biden government officials are trying to calibrate policies that will protect the democratic, tech-rich island without creating an armed conflict that would be catastrophic for all.
Under a long-standing – and notoriously confused – policy stemming from America’s “One China” position, which supports Taiwan without recognizing it as independent, the United States provides political and military support for Taiwan, but makes no explicit promises to counter it to defend a Chinese attack.
However, as China’s power and ambition grow, and Beijing views Washington as weakened and distracted, a debate is ongoing as to whether the United States should be more committed to defending the island, in part to reduce the risk of China’s miscalculation doing this could lead to unwanted war.
The debate reflects a key foreign policy challenge that the Biden government is facing as it draws up its broader Asia strategy. At the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon, which is reviewing its military stance in Asia, officials are reassessing the rationale of American strategy for a new and more dangerous phase of competition with China.
American officials warn that China is increasingly able to invade the island democracy of nearly 24 million people, located about 100 miles off the coast of mainland China, whose status has been since the retreat of Chinese nationalists and the formation of a government after the communist of Beijing 1949 has owned revolution.
Last month, the military commander for the Indo-Pacific region, Adm. Philip S. Davidson on what he sees as a risk that China may attempt to retake Taiwan by force within the next six years.
The United States has long avoided saying how it would react to such an attack. While Washington supports Taiwan with diplomatic contacts, arms sales, fixed language, and even the occasional military maneuver, there are no guarantees. No declaration, doctrine, or security arrangement compels the United States to save Taiwan. A 1979 Congressional law simply states that “any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by means other than peaceful means” would be “a serious concern of the United States.”
The result is known as “strategic ambiguity,” a careful balance so as not to provoke Beijing or encourage Taiwan to make a formal declaration of independence that could lead to a Chinese invasion.
Biden government officials formulating their China policy are paying special attention to Taiwan, trying to determine whether strategic ambiguity is sufficient to protect the increasingly vulnerable island from Beijing’s drafts. But they also recognize that after two decades of bloody and costly conflict in the Middle East, Americans may be unfavorable to new, distant military commitments.
For this reason, Admiral Davidson raised his eyebrows last month when, under questioning, contrary to usual government news, he confirmed that the policy “should be reconsidered” and added, “I look forward to hearing from you.”
“I think there has been a change in the way people think,” said Richard N. Haass, former director of policy planning at the State Department under President George W. Bush and now president of the Foreign Relations Council. “What you have seen over the past year is an acceleration of concern in the United States about Taiwan.” He described the feeling that “this delicate situation, which for decades seemed to have been successfully mastered or refined, suddenly awoke people with the possibility that this era has come to an end”.
Mr. Haass helped stimulate conversation on the matter last year after he published an article in the September issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine declaring that strategic ambiguity had “taken its course”.
“It is time for the United States to adopt a policy of strategic clarity: one that makes it clear that the United States would respond to any Chinese use of force against Taiwan,” wrote Haass with colleague David Sacks.
Mr. Haass and Mr. Sacks added that after four years under President Donald J. Trump ranting “endless wars” and openly questioning United States relations, Chinese leader Xi Jinping may question America’s willingness to its alliances to defend security commitments. A clearer promise, while more hawkish-sounding, would be safer, they argued.
“Such policies would reduce the likelihood of misjudging China, which is the most likely catalyst for a cross-strait war,” wrote Haass and Sacks.
In the past few months the idea has grown in prominence, including on Capitol Hill.
Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott has tabled a bill that would authorize the president to use military action to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack – no longer making America’s intentions ambiguous. When Mr. Haass testified last month before a committee on the Foreign Relations Committee of the House of Representatives on Asia, he was filled with questions about how to deter the Chinese threat to Taiwan.
Speaking at a Washington Post event in February, Robert M. Gates, a former Secretary of Defense and CIA director who served under presidents of both parties, including Bush and Barack Obama, identified Taiwan as the facet of US relations and China, that was what concerned him most.
Mr. Gates said it “may be time to abandon our longstanding strategy of strategic ambiguity with Taiwan”.
The thought gained another unlikely support when former Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat and longtime diver in military matters, argued in an opinion piece in The Hill newspaper last month that the United States must guarantee, for human rights reasons, that one flourishing Asian democracy is protected from “being violently immersed in an outrageously brutal regime that exemplifies the denial of basic human rights”.
Mr. Frank cited China’s “imperviousness to other considerations” as violence as a reason “to save 23 million Taiwanese from the loss of their basic human rights.”
Though Taiwan has limited territorial value, it has also gained greater strategic importance in recent years as one of the world’s leading manufacturers of semiconductors – the high-tech equivalent of oil in the nascent supercomputing showdown between the US and China microchip supply shortages .
These factors combined have led the Biden government to back Taiwan, which some experts call surprisingly haunting.
When China sent dozens of fighter jets across the Taiwan Strait days after Mr. Biden’s inauguration in January, the State Department issued a statement declaring America’s “rock-solid” commitment to the island. Mr Biden raised the issue of Taiwan during his phone conversation with Mr Xi in February, and Foreign Secretary Antony J. Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan raised their concerns about the island during their meeting in Anchorage last month with two front-line Chinese officials.
“I think people lean back to say to China,” Don’t get the math wrong – we strongly support Taiwan, “said Bonnie Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Ms. Glaser said she was surprised at the Biden team’s early stance on Taiwan, which so far has maintained the Trump administration’s heightened political support for the island, a stance some critics have described as overly provocative. She noted that Mr Blinken had recently made a phone call calling for Paraguay’s president to maintain his country’s formal relations with Taiwan despite pressure from Beijing, and that the US ambassador to Palau, an archipelago state in the western Pacific, had recently joined a diplomatic delegation from that country to Taiwan.
“This is really outside of normal diplomatic practice,” said Ms. Glaser. “I think that was pretty unexpected.”
However, Ms. Glaser does not support a more explicit US commitment to Taiwan’s defense. Like many other analysts and American officials, she fears that such a policy change could provoke China.
“Maybe then Xi will be pushed into a corner. This could really lead to China making the decision to invade, ”she warned.
Others fear that a concrete American security guarantee would encourage Taiwan’s leaders to officially declare independence – an act which, given the island’s over 70 years of autonomy, symbolic as it may seem, would cross a clear red line for Beijing.
“Taiwan independence means war,” a spokesman for the Chinese Defense Ministry, Wu Qian, said in January.
Some analysts say the Biden government could manage to deter China without provoking it with more forceful warnings on the brink of explicit promises to defend Taiwan. US officials can also issue private warnings to Beijing that will not put Mr. Xi at risk of losing face in public.
“We only need China to understand that we would come to Taiwan’s defense,” said Elbridge A. Colby, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and troop development under Trump.
The United States has long provided Taiwan with military equipment, including billions in arms sales under the Trump administration that included fighter jets and air-to-surface missiles that Taiwanese planes could use to attack China. Such devices are designed to reduce Taiwan’s need for American intervention if attacked.
But Mr Colby and others say the United States needs to develop a more credible military deterrent in the Pacific to keep up with recent advances by the Chinese military.
HR McMaster, a national security advisor to Mr. Trump, testified before the Senate Armed Forces Committee last month that the current ambiguity was sufficient.
“The message to China should be, ‘Hey, you can assume the United States won’t answer” – but that was also the assumption made when North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, “McMaster said.
