On May 23, 2022, when asked whether he was "willing to get involved militarily
to defend Taiwan", Joe Biden bluntly responded
"Yes, that's the commitment we made."
This seemingly broke with the standard U.S. policy on Taiwan, known as "strategic ambiguity".
In theory, the United States does not have a well-outlined
expectation for how it would respond to a war between the PRC and Taiwan,
This is a noteworthy contrast with what Article 5 outlines for NATO countries,
committing them to come to a common defense for an ally.
But in practice, this is messy. First, we had Biden’s comments. Then,
right after, officials from the executive branch sent out clarifications.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin bluntly said that the
U.S.'s "One China policy has not changed."
Taking a step back, all of this seems weird. The United States has friendly relations with Taiwan.
Meanwhile, it has a growing---if somewhat muted---competition with the PRC. Why wouldn't
the U.S. want to signal to mainland China its strongest plausible commitment to defend Taiwan?
To be clear, none of this new. Back in October 2021, when asked a similar question
on defending Taiwan from a mainland attack, Biden gave almost a duplicate response:
"Yes, we have a commitment to do that."
This didn't get as much attention as the more recent comments,
perhaps because now the War in Ukraine has everyone a little more on edge.
Regardless, like today, the White House quickly tried to clarify.
Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that
"The president was not announcing any change in our policy,
nor has he made a decision to change our policy."
Back in 2001, George W. Bush said that he would do "Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself"
but would later affirm the One China policy.
Yet on December 2, 2016, president-elect Donald Trump phoned Taiwan's president Tsai Ing-wen,
something that hadn't happened in 37 years.
In sum, ironically, the strategic ambiguity policy is itself ambiguous.
But it still doesn't explain why the U.S. isn't more forceful in challenging the PRC.
And oddly, the answer to this question is not about a U.S. antagonist.
Not directly anyway. It's about a friend: Taiwan.
But before we address that point, let's first get a better understanding for the
argument behind a firmer anti-PRC policy. To do that, we go to our trusted friend.
That's right: it's time for lines on maps!
Normally, when we visualize what would happen in a war, we conceive of the good
in dispute as territory, a lot like what we are seeing with the ongoing war in Ukraine.
This white line might represent the expected division of territory given that the war
goes to a complete military conclusion. Everything to the west remains Ukraine,
and everything to the East goes to Russia. But we can do this for any good that is in
dispute. For Taiwan and China, the story is more about sovereignty and autonomy.
A white line down here means that Taiwan becomes a fully integrated part of China.
The more we move the white line up, the more autonomy Taiwan expects to maintain.
Here, this might capture Hong Kong today.
Meanwhile, this could be equivalent to Hong Kong’s status from the year 2000.
Moving further up, this is de facto independence while still paying lip
service to the One China policy and having embassy-like things but not actually.
Finally, this is full independence—member of the United Nations,
actual embassies, and everything else.
Suppose this is the expected amount of Taiwanese autonomy from a bilateral war,
where the United States stays on the sidelines.
As pictured, this would roughly correspond to a 20% chance of complete Taiwanese victory
and an 80% chance of complete PRC victory.
Now imagine that with maximum effort from the United States,
the expectation would look like this instead. This is better for Taiwan and therefore better
for the U.S., right? Why wouldn’t the president want that to be the message?
This takes us to the first reason for strategic ambiguity: emboldenment.
Let’s go back to the bilateral situation.
War is costly. We can use this red line to represent
Taiwan’s financial losses, casualties, and so forth.
The space between the red and white lines is that amount, converted to terms of sovereignty.
However, it might not be so easy for Taiwan to estimate the PRC’s costs of war. After all,
the regime is autocratic and somewhat opaque. Perhaps the PRC cares a lot about the issues
and therefore internalizes its cost of war at a low rate.
The space between the yellow and white line captures that quantity,
If Taiwan knew this to be the case,
then any division between the red and yellow lines would be mutually preferable to war.
Taiwan could just demand to keep this percentage of sovereignty and call it a day.
But it’s not that easy. Maybe the PRC is less resolved and has costs that extend out to here.
Now Taiwan has a dilemma. It can either make safe demands, guarantee some level
of sovereignty, and avoid war. Or it can make larger demands,
get richly rewarded if the PRC is unresolved, but pay the price of war if the PRC is resolved.
One key determinant of which demand strategy Taiwan will choose is its own cost.
The bigger the cost, the bigger the downside risk of the large demand,
the more likely Taiwan is to play it safe. Now let’s go back to including U.S.
participation in the war. The obvious effect here is to make Taiwan more likely to win.
But it also insulates Taiwan from some of the costs of war.
This incentivizes Taiwan to make riskier demands.
Side note: It can also make matters worse by expanding the PRC’s costs,
but that’s complicated and warrants a separate discussion for another day.
In any case, the United States faces a tradeoff. It wants Taiwan to extract more sovereignty
from the PRC. But Washington also does not want to embolden Taiwan into risking a war.
There is a massive economic relationship between the
two countries, and the U.S. would prefer playing things safe in that regard.
This is where strategic ambiguity comes into play.
If the PRC and Taiwan are unsure how much support the U.S. will commit to,
Taiwan’s expected cost reduction goes down.
So does Taiwan’s power, but that is the tradeoff
if the U.S. wants to reduce Taiwan’s incentives to take risks.
In this framing, strategic ambiguity strikes a balance between coercing the PRC
and reducing the probability of war. The U.S. just can’t have it both ways.
Moving on, the second reason for strategic ambiguity is moral hazard.
Taiwan has some weird borders.
We usually think of it as the Taiwan island itself.
But it is actually made up of more than 160 islands.
The most noteworthy of these for our purposes are the Kinmen and Matsu Islands.
Very inconveniently, they are located right next to mainland China, and they
are an obvious flashpoint in a future conflict.
This has an important implication for how best to design an alliance relationship.
Alliances come in many shapes and sizes.
With Taiwan, the U.S. is interested in a defensive alliance—Washington
does not want to gather troops to directly invade mainland China.
The concern for U.S. policymakers is that Taiwan will do something to provoke the PRC anyway,
perhaps by shelling mainland China in role reversal of the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.
Many alliance treaties try to get around this issue by offering “conditional” support.
The conditional alliance you are likely most familiar with
is NATO and its vaunted Article V provision, which says that
“an armed attack against one … shall be considered an attack against them all”.
It only triggers given the opponent initiates.
In principle, these types of conditions sound great.
In practice, following those conditions may not be so easy.
Things move fast when a war starts. It might not be feasible to sort
out who initiated the conflict in time for the alliance intervention to matter.
Back when the focus of a potential conflict was on Taiwan itself,
the U.S. wasn’t as worried about the time pressure. There was an entire strait to cross.
The island also housed the U.S. military’s center of gravity,
meaning that Washington felt it could adequately monitor Taiwan’s actions there.
That was not the case for the islands in question. They are right next to mainland China.
This is also why we call this mechanism “moral hazard”, connecting back to a centuries-old
problem with insurance and the inability to monitor what a purchaser might be doing.
This is the same principle, except the “insurance” is U.S.-intervention.
As time progressed,
the focus shifted away from Taiwan and over to the Kinmen and Matsu.
In turn, policymakers feared that a firm commitment would
entice Taiwan to entrap the U.S. by provoking a war with the PRC.
Strategic ambiguity was a way to strike the balance:
something that might still deter the PRC while not giving Taiwan too much leverage.
It appears that such ambiguity works as intended on average.
Among defensive alliance commitments, about 28.5% are unconditional in nature.
53.7% are conditional.
And the remaining 17.8% are ambiguous,
like the U.S. and Taiwan. Now let’s talk about the likelihood of conflict.
The baseline probability that a given country initiates
a dispute with another given country in any given year is just 0.31%.
That might seem low, but a lot of possible conflicts just aren’t plausible. Bulgaria
isn’t going to be instigating a fight against Rwanda any time soon.
War is also expensive, which incentivizes even those with tensions
to find a way to handle their problems peacefully.
If we restrict attention to cases where the initiator has a grievance,
that default probability jumps to 1.85%.
Add in an unconditional defensive alliance arrangement, and it goes up to 2.07%.
“Defensive” is not unassailable.
Put conditions on the agreement, and it drops to 1.91%.
Still higher than the default, but not as bad.
Make it ambiguous, and it’s at 1.87%, and not statistically distinguishable from the baseline.
This is an important reason why the U.S. takes the ambiguous route with Taiwan. Provoking a war
with the mainland does not sound as attractive if you don’t know what the U.S. will do afterward.
The final reason the U.S. tries to toe the strategic ambiguity line is preventive war.
This is basically what we are watching happen in Ukraine right now.
If you listen to Putin’s original pitch for the invasion, his claim is that Ukraine was
at risk to join NATO, which would shift power away from Moscow. By that logic,
it was better to fight now than suffer the consequences later from Russia’s point of view.
We have covered this logic in a past video at length,
but the short version is that bargaining can break down if the possible shift
is too large compared to the costs of war.
Patron states can disincentivize that type of conflict by acting
relatively disinterested in the protégé state.
Once again, strategic ambiguity strikes the balance between deterring the opponent
over the short-term incentives while not inducing a war over the long-term incentives.
This is not all to say the current strategic ambiguity is here to stay forever.
As the Chinese military continues to modernize and grow,
the United States will need to decrease ambiguity to keep parity.
Biden has pushed this a little more than previous presidents have.
This may be a sign of things to come, even if there will still be some ambiguousness.
Do you have any other reasons why a state might want some strategic ambiguity?
Let me know in the comments. I hope you enjoyed this video.
And if you did, please like, share, and subscribe, and I will see you next time.