Strategic Ambiguity*

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Political scientist Viktor Pirozhenko on why the U.S. is failing to manage the risk of confrontation with China

The Biden administration is having less and less success in managing the risk of confrontation with China. In the absence of its former global hegemony, U.S. efforts to constrain China have resulted in contradictory and often reckless acts, increasing the risk of a direct confrontation with China. Washington’s policy of “strategic ambiguity” toward Beijing, intended to deter Taiwan’s unification with the mainland, is especially dangerous.

The policy has recently been in significant flux, reflecting America’s misgivings that military intervention in the Taiwan crisis would lead to a successful outcome for the United States.

In a television interview in mid-September, the president of the United States again said that American troops will defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. But when a journalist recently remarked that Joe Biden had exceeded America’s avowed policy of “strategic ambiguity,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin declined to directly endorse Biden’s statement. Austin emphasized that America remains committed to helping Taiwan develop the capability to “defend itself.”

This was not the first time Biden has made such remarks. The pattern is always the same: The president promises to defend Taiwan, which could be interpreted as a promise of direct intervention in the conflict, and his advisers follow up with mitigating explanations.

It appears that this is the new brand of “strategic ambiguity” in America’s Taiwan policy. Contradictory statements from top officials in the White House obscure any clear picture of U.S. intentions with respect to China’s actions. But now the “ambiguity” is more likely the result of Washington’s bewilderment at having lost conventional military superiority over China in the Western Pacific.

The Brookings Institution’s recent policy brief on the subject proposes some interesting conclusions and recommendations: First, experts at the Brookings Institution believe that the United States will not be able to restore the conventional military superiority in and around Taiwan that made achieving U.S. military-political goals in the region possible in the past. Second, China’s qualitative and quantitative improvements to its nuclear arsenal have deprived the United States of the power to threaten “nuclear escalation” in the event of a serious crisis.

Consequently, the policy brief recommends that Washington explore new forms of “integrated deterrence” with respect to China; for example, increasing investment in conventional weapons suited to the “geography of the Western Pacific,” clearly signaling “the economic and political consequences of aggression against Taiwan,” and minimizing U.S domestic vulnerabilities to Chinese “embargoes and cyber attacks.”

These recommendations for containing China differ little from policies long employed by the United States that have brought the two countries closer to a direct clash over the Taiwan crisis. They are incompatible with the legitimate interests of China (as well as other sovereign states) because they all strive to maintain American hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region. That is why any American effort at managing the risk of confrontation with China that promotes a division between the island of Taiwan and mainland China is fundamentally flawed and unrealistic.

So, Washington is forced to double down on “strategic ambiguity,” bluffing from time to time, by signaling to Beijing that a war with Taiwan would mean war with the United States. Such actions are backed by the ramp-up of the U.S. military presence in the Western Pacific in late September to early October, which was intended to compel China to come to terms with Taiwanese separatism.

At the end of September, U.S. and Canadian warships sailed through Chinese territorial waters in the Taiwan Strait. At the same time, a U.S. aircraft carrier strike group led by the USS Reagan arrived at the Busan naval base in South Korea for joint military exercises with the South Korean navy. This could be viewed as part of the agreement to deploy U.S. strategic assets on the Korean Peninsula. In addition to military activity, the U.S. State Department recently approved a new Taiwan arms sale and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed the Taiwan Policy Act.

Against this backdrop, Elon Musk recently suggested that the Taiwan question could be resolved by creating a special administrative zone for the island — an interesting proposal that in effect comes close to Beijing’s official “one country, two systems” model for unification.

Meanwhile, as the Taiwan question grows more acute, China is preparing for the worst-case scenario. At a seminar on national defense and military reform in Beijing, China’s President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Xi Jinping, called on the People’s Liberation Army to “focus on preparing for real combat operations.”

The author is an expert at the Intercultural Research Center of Huzhou University

The position of the editorial board may not be the same as the opinion of the author