The Upside to Uncertainty on Taiwan

By almost universal agreement, the Taiwan Strait has emerged as the most combustible flash point in the world. In recent years, China has dramatically increased the scale and intensity of its military operations around Taiwan, responding to what it claims are provocations by the island’s government and the United States. Taiwan, in turn, has increased its defense budget and enhanced its military preparedness, while the United States has upped the pace of its military activity in the region. Pundits, scholars, and even government officials spin out a dizzying array of apocalyptic scenarios involving Taiwan, from economic blockades that crash the global economy to a superpower nuclear war, whether triggered by an intentional invasion of Taiwan or an accidental collision of ships or aircraft. In a 2022 phone call with U.S. President Joe Biden, Chinese leader Xi Jinping issued a stark warning about the island: “Those who play with fire will perish by it.”

Not surprisingly, this sense of impending doom has spawned a flurry of policy prescriptions to avoid calamity. Some have called on the United States to make an unequivocal commitment to defend Taiwan (including with nuclear weapons, if need be) and declare that the island is not part of China. Others have focused on enhancing Taiwan’s defenses, offering vivid metaphors such as turning the island into a hard-to-swallow “porcupine” or creating an impassable “boiling moat” around it. A much smaller number of analysts have advocated cutting a deal with Beijing in which Washington ends its commitment to defending Taiwan and the island is left to fend for itself. Although the proponents of each boldly assert the superiority of their approach, the reality is that all these proposals are fraught with risk and uncertainty. All present difficult tradeoffs between competing U.S. interests and values.

How did the United States find itself in this predicament, and would a better understanding of the past help it chart a future course through the minefield? This is the motivating question behind Sulmaan Wasif Khan’s thought-provoking new book, The Struggle for Taiwan. Khan, a historian, makes his answer clear at the outset, arguing that “a full understanding of the triangular relationship between America, China, and Taiwan is needed if we are to avoid catastrophe.”

In providing his account of that relationship, Khan argues that “confusion has played the starring role in this tale so far.” U.S. and Chinese policies toward Taiwan, he elaborates, have hardly been informed by “grand strategy or even planning.” In his view, the real story is one of repeated missed opportunities by all sides. He criticizes presidents of both parties for failing to act boldly to definitively resolve Taiwan’s status, an outcome that he believes would have permanently eased the tensions that have dogged U.S.-Chinese relations. That prescription looks appealing in hindsight. But Khan underappreciates how the creative use of ambiguity and compromise allowed Washington to manage its fraught relationship with Beijing. Far from fueling conflict, uncertainty created the conditions for decades of peace and prosperity in East Asia.

WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN

Khan’s tale of American blunders begins with the 1943 Cairo conference. It was there that, as Allied leaders planned the postwar world, President Franklin Roosevelt decided to promise Taiwan, then still occupied by Japan, to Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader of China. Roosevelt could instead have pushed for a UN or U.S. trusteeship, which according to Khan would have prevented Taiwan from becoming a political football in the civil war between Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists. From there, Khan sees a series of further missteps. President Harry Truman decided on neutrality between the competing claims of Chiang and Mao, satisfying neither side during the Korean War and setting the stage for the prolonged tensions between the United States and China. The “divided, confused” administration of President Dwight Eisenhower settled on a Taiwan policy that was “a mess of indecision and militarism,” leading it to miss an opportunity for a compromise on Taiwan in which the United States would have recognized Communist control of mainland China.

Even President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, normally heralded for their genius in orchestrating the U.S. opening to China, are faulted for a lack of strategic clarity. Khan criticizes the Shanghai Communiqué, a joint statement issued at the end of Nixon’s 1972 trip to China, for “fudging the Taiwan question.” By failing to publicly state what Kissinger had privately assured the Chinese—that the United States would not stand in the way of the likely political evolution of Taiwan toward unification with the mainland—Washington, Khan contends, missed its “best chance to return the island” to Beijing and settle the matter once and for all. Only President Jimmy Carter is singled out for praise, for his “decisiveness” in scrapping the U.S. defense pact with Taiwan in favor of recognizing Communist China. But Congress pulled him back when it passed the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which asserted that any threat to Taiwan would be “a grave concern to the United States” and provided for continued arms sales to the island. For Khan, the act left Washington “hopelessly confused about how committed to Taiwan’s defense it really was.”

In Khan’s view, the fatal flaw in U.S. policy has been its failure to go either all in for or all out against Taiwanese independence. There were opportunities to pick a side, but they were passed up. In a July 1949 memo, the American diplomat George Kennan argued that the United States (by itself or with others) should forcibly evict the Nationalists from Taiwan and establish an international regime that would hold a plebiscite to determine its future—an idea that had been mooted two years earlier by Truman’s envoy to China, General Albert Wedemeyer. The plan never came to fruition, but Khan argues that the Communists might well have gone along with it. It “seemed extreme at the time,” he writes, but “would certainly have been easier than dealing with what followed.”

Khan also faults China’s leaders for repeated missteps. He cites their continued insistence that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, even though they long ago acquiesced to the independence of Mongolia, which was also once an imperial outpost of the Qing dynasty. He also points to the tone-deaf threats to the Taiwanese people made by Zhu Rongji, China’s premier from 1998 to 2003, which only strengthened the arguments of Taiwanese who opposed unification with China. “Had Beijing steered clear of threats and bluster,” Khan writes, “it might conceivably have achieved peaceful unification.”

Far from fueling conflict, uncertainty created the conditions for decades of peace and prosperity in East Asia.

Khan sketches a series of counterfactuals that could have led to a more clear-cut—and, in his opinion, more stable—outcome. He doesn’t seem to care much which way things had gone, as long as Washington had picked one decisively. For him, had the United States fully embraced Taiwanese independence (at Cairo or during the Chinese Civil War) or fully acquiesced to Beijing’s claim (at the time of the Communists’ 1949 victory or during the rapprochement of the 1970s), it would have been spared the conundrum it faces today: opposing China’s efforts to coerce reunification yet skittish about committing to Taiwan’s defense and risking a war with Beijing. Khan is particularly critical of the many times U.S. administrations have failed to speak with one voice on Taiwan policy, not to mention the further muddles made when Congress has also gotten involved.

Of course, for those who defend U.S. policy, uncertainty is a virtue, not a vice. Often derided as “strategic ambiguity,” Washington’s approach is in fact a nuanced strategy that has promoted prudence on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, by declining to specify under what circumstances it might intervene militarily in a conflict between Taipei and Beijing. Accordingly, U.S. policy toward Taiwan lacks categorical obligations. There is no collective defense commitment, à la NATO’s Article 5 or the U.S.-Japanese security treaty. Rather, in accordance with the Taiwan Relations Act, the United States commits to treat “any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means” as “a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” The act also commits the United States to provide Taiwan with defensive military equipment.

The Taiwan Relations Act is at the core of the United States’ long-standing “one China” policy. Under this policy, Washington provides Taiwan no official diplomatic recognition, but U.S. officials work closely with their Taiwanese counterparts on a variety of issues, from public health and economics to, increasingly, military and security matters. It offers no support for Taiwan’s membership in the UN or international organizations for which “statehood” is a criterion, but it does advocate for the island to play an active role in many multilateral arrangements and encourages other countries to have full diplomatic ties with Taiwan even if the United States doesn’t. Perhaps most important, the policy is built on the principle that Taiwan’s ultimate status must be resolved through peaceful means and enjoy the support of its people.

IN DEFENSE OF AMBIGUITY

Khan isn’t the only one bothered by strategic ambiguity; a growing number of pundits and former officials have also called for a shift to a more categorical policy of military and diplomatic support. On a number of occasions, Biden himself has explicitly stated that the United States would be willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan, although other officials subsequently qualified those statements, insisting that there had been no change in U.S. policy.

Khan has a point in questioning the U.S. approach. Ambiguity has its costs. As the Texas political activist and pundit Jim Hightower once observed, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” Muddling through, kicking the can down the road, splitting the difference—all can easily be seen as evidence of a lack of strategic clarity, tactics for getting by in the short term that ignore the long-term consequences of indecision. Ambiguity can embolden adversaries and unsettle friends.

But to say that ambiguity is often wrong does not mean that it is always so. There is something to the essayist H. L. Mencken’s aphorism “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” Particularly when the United States has multiple interests at stake, it is simply not possible to craft a policy that maximizes all of them. Washington has a compelling interest in supporting those who fight for human rights and democracy, as the courageous citizens of Taiwan have done for decades, first against the authoritarian Nationalist governments and now in the face of pressure from Beijing. It has a strong interest in the peaceful settlement of disputes and the rejection of political, economic, and military coercion. And it is rightly concerned about China’s potential control of the strategic waters around Taiwan and of Taiwan itself. But the United States also has a compelling interest in avoiding a war, or even merely the profound economic disruption that would result from an escalating dispute with China. And many global challenges, from climate change to public health to the risks of AI, require U.S. cooperation with China.

Khan reaches back into history to argue that Taiwan never really was part of China, contrary to official Chinese statements today that assert that it “has been China’s territory since ancient times.” Rather, he contends, the island was merely a colonial possession of the Qing dynasty and, as such, should have been allowed to benefit from the United States’ Wilsonian commitment to national self-determination and the broader post–World War II push for decolonization. It’s a nice debating point, one with considerable resonance in a country that was born by casting off colonial rule. But the United States has always wavered in its support for separatist movements. Compare, for example, its formal recognition of Kosovo’s independence in 2008 with its continuing refusal to support a similar claim by Iraqi Kurds. Often, U.S. leaders have favored political autonomy rather than de jure independence as a more prudent course.

When one looks at what has transpired in Taiwan over the past 80 years that Khan chronicles, it is rather mystifying why he and other critics consider U.S. Taiwan policy such a failure. Over that period, Taiwan was liberated from Japanese occupation, overcame authoritarian rule, and experienced breakneck economic growth. The island now features a vibrant democracy, ranks 14th globally in per capita income, and leads the world in one of its most crucial sectors, semiconductor manufacturing. Granted, the situation today is perilous, but seen from the perspective of 1943, where Khan begins his saga, it’s hard to argue that the outcome wasn’t a pretty good one for Taiwan—and the United States.

A powerful case in point demonstrating the value of the United States’ calibrated approach to Taiwan came in 1995 and 1996, when China fired missiles close to Taiwan to intimidate its leaders. To deter Beijing without provoking it, President Bill Clinton dispatched U.S. aircraft carrier groups near Taiwan but not into the Taiwan Strait. Khan acknowledges that this response successfully defused the crisis. “Had the United States put the carriers in the Taiwan Strait during the crisis (as is commonly misremembered), Beijing might well have found itself unable to back down,” he writes, adding that the situation could have “escalated all the way to general warfare.” Through this measured reaction, as well as a subsequent reaffirmation of the “one China” policy, the Clinton administration was able to create the context for a reengagement with China. That, in turn, led not only to more stable U.S.-Chinese relations but also facilitated Taiwan’s admission to the World Trade Organization and its continued pursuit of democratic reforms.

Given strategic ambiguity’s track record, it shouldn’t be surprising that the policy was pursued by presidents of both parties, including Ronald Reagan, who on taking office abandoned his earlier support for restoring the security guarantee for Taiwan, and George W. Bush, who made a similar course correction during his presidency. Although Khan is right to force readers to think critically about past choices, judged overall, U.S. policy toward Taiwan surely warrants a high passing grade, despite all the blemishes.

RUNNING OUT OF TIME?

But past performance is no guarantee of future results. U.S. policy has succeeded in part because all sides were content to push off a definitive resolution to the future, believing that time was on their side. For decades, China’s leaders hoped that its growing economic dynamism and prosperity would make unification increasingly attractive to the people of Taiwan and more acceptable to the United States. This belief was reinforced by an observation Kissinger made to the Chinese during a 1971 meeting in Beijing: “As a student of history, one’s prediction would have to be that the political evolution is likely to be in the direction which Prime Minister Zhou Enlai indicated to me. . . . We will not stand in the way of basic evolution.” From the U.S. perspective, the passage of time was thought likely to narrow the differences between Taiwan and the mainland, so that the two sides could come to an understanding in which Taiwan could preserve its democracy and respect for human rights, perhaps under the rubric of “one country, two systems.”

Today, many argue, the situation is far different, with none of the three parties believing that time is on its side. From the perspective of some in the United States and in Taiwan, China’s growing military and economic might means that Beijing will soon have the capability to prevail in a military conflict; even today, many argue, a successful defense of the island would be problematic. According to this camp, only by dramatically enhancing deterrence through an unambiguous commitment to Taiwan’s defense, including both military and political support, can a takeover be forestalled. From the perspective of China, political trends in Taipei and Washington are moving in the wrong direction. In January, Taiwan’s voters elected Lai Ching-te as president, a leader whom Beijing considers much more pro-independence than his predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen. That, coupled with Congress’s increasingly militant support for Taiwan, means that the island is at risk of slipping from Beijing’s grasp. In a mirror image of the U.S. debate, hawks in China advocate accelerating their country’s military capability to subdue Taiwan.

It is this very mirror imaging that contributes to the current sense of crisis, a familiar pattern in which anxiety and insecurity lead one side to take preemptive measures that induce even more fear on the other side—what international relations theorists call the “security dilemma” or the “spiral model.” The more China flexes its muscles toward Taiwan, the more the United States promotes arms sales and Congressional visits to Taiwan to bolster deterrence. And the more it does that, the more China feels the need to escalate its threats to forestall future actions.

It’s easy to assert that strengthening deterrence by granting Taiwan a firm military guarantee would offer the best of all worlds, protecting Taiwan’s democracy while avoiding war by convincing China that any military venture would fail. Maybe—like all counterfactuals, it is impossible to disprove—but maybe not. This theory implies that China will use force only if it can be sure it will prevail, but who is to say that faced with an increasingly remote possibility of peaceful unification, China’s leaders won’t simply roll the dice? Even if the United States and Taiwan concluded that their combined forces were sufficient to repulse an attack, it is hardly certain that China’s generals would share that bleak assessment and convey it to their civilian overseers. Equally important, if Taiwan became more confident in the efficacy of deterrence, its leaders might feel more freedom to push the bounds of sovereignty and independence.

KEEPING THE PEACE

For all these reasons, there are risks to clearing up ambiguity about how the United States might respond to Chinese provocations. Instead, the United States is right to continue its long-standing policy of effectively making a “threat that leaves something to chance,” in the memorable phrase of the economist and game theorist Thomas Schelling, generating uncertainty on one side about how the other will respond. Despite its ambiguity, then, there is much to commend in Taiwanese leaders’ focus on preserving “the status quo,” a term used by Lai both during the campaign and in his inaugural address. This approach is the very opposite of the lesson Khan draws from history. But not surprisingly, it is the one that most of Taiwan’s people prefer. In a February 2024 poll, more than 80 percent of respondents favored maintaining the status quo, whether temporarily or permanently.

Given the suspicions on all sides, maintaining the status quo is no easy feat. China has been reluctant to embrace such an approach, reflecting its growing unwillingness to accept indefinitely postponing unification. Nonetheless, each side can take concrete steps to shore up the status quo. China could withdraw its objections to the participation of Taiwan in international organizations in which statehood is not required and accept it as an informal participant in organizations in which statehood is required. (Beijing has taken that approach in the past; it accepted Taipei as an observer in the World Health Assembly from 2009 to 2016 and as a guest at the International Civil Aviation Organization Assembly in 2013.) Taiwan, in turn, could suspend its flagging efforts to gain formal diplomatic recognition from other countries. Each side could agree to respect tacit, if not formal, limits on military activities, such as staying on its side of the midline in the Taiwan Strait when conducting air operations. Most important, China could agree to resume dialogue with Taiwan’s government—which was halted after the election of Lai’s predecessor in 2016—in light of Lai’s stated commitment to the status quo.

Perhaps the most powerful lesson of Khan’s book concerns agency. Repeatedly, Khan reminds readers that the path to the present was not inevitable but was rather the product of choices made by leaders in Beijing, Taipei, and Washington. That history should serve as both a cautionary tale and motivation for leaders in all three capitals. Conflict in the Taiwan Strait is neither inevitable nor unlikely, but avoiding it depends on prudent policy choices by each of the three governments. As Khan and other critics of U.S. policy toward Taiwan are fond of pointing out, decades of ambiguity and compromise have left neither Taiwan nor China nor the United States fully satisfied. But almost by definition, any outcome that fully satisfied one party would be unacceptable to another, so Washington’s goal should be to find a status quo that all sides can live with. It’s a fine balancing act, but that is what diplomacy is all about.