Reviving Strategic Ambiguity: The Importance of Abiding by a Long-Established Principle

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (the left one) and Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen (the right one) are waving to those in attendance during their meeting on August 03, 2022.
Credit: Chien Chih-Hung, Office of the Republic of China (Taiwan) / Wikimedia Commons

In recent years, the possibility of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) using violence as a means to enforce the One China Principle has led to much consternation around the world, and debates over how countries should respond to such an attempt have become front and center of foreign policy discourse worldwide.

Ever since the late nineteenth century, issues of trade and defense in East Asia have been of significant material concern for the United States, and as such, there have been particularly intense debates in the U.S. about how the country should respond to an attempt by the PRC to alter the status quo vis-à-vis a de facto autonomous Republic of China (ROC). Even before the Second World War, but especially after, members of various policy-influencing fora in the U.S., including Congress, the State Department, and civil society, have had intense deliberations about what U.S. policy toward the PRC and the ROC should look like. One of the most important outcomes of these deliberations was the April 1979 signing into law of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) by then-president Jimmy Carter. However, over the past decade, as the U.S. has increasingly and more overtly behaved as though the ROC is a country separate from the PRC, the importance of the TRA in U.S. foreign policy has diminished, which in turn makes it more difficult for the U.S. to ensure the status quo across the Taiwan Strait endures. 

To understand why the current course of U.S. foreign policy will be ineffective, it is important to understand the nature of and intentions behind the TRA. Although the legislative scope of the Act covers issues as disparate as cultural exchanges and trade mechanisms, the conventional agreement is that its most important provision lies in Clause 4 of Section 2, which states that the U.S. deems it necessary “to consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” The Act then establishes that it is necessary for the U.S. to have a latent ability in the region “to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion…” These two clauses form the bedrock of the policy of strategic ambiguity that governs American engagement with the PRC and ROC. 

The policy of strategic ambiguity, as the name suggests, was designed to make it ambiguous as to whether the U.S. would intervene in a conflict over Taiwan if the PRC were to use coercive methods to alter the status quo. The policy allowed the U.S. to maintain strong informal relations with the ROC, and at the same time facilitated the normalization of relations between the U.S. and the PRC in 1979. Over the past 40 years, strategic ambiguity has been instrumental in strengthening U.S.-PRC relations, improving economic ties, and the maintenance of the status quo across the Taiwan Strait, especially during times like the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis when tensions ran high and the threat of a war in the Pacific loomed large. During that crisis, the transit of the USS Nimitz and her carrier group through the Taiwan Strait, as well as the positioning of the USS Independence near Taiwan, allowed the U.S. to deter the PRC from using violence as a means of “unificiation” and to preserve the status quo without having to undertake any drastic action. 

However, over the past couple of years, starting especially earnestly during the first Trump administration and carrying on into Biden’s tenure, U.S. legislators and policymakers have increasingly de-emphasized strategic ambiguity as a core principle of U.S. policy. Furthermore, a growing number of decision-makers seem to have normalized the position that the overt recognition of the ROC as a separate political entity would in fact strengthen the position of the U.S. For example, in July 2016, Peter Navarro, a future member of the Trump administration, wrote an opinion piece in the National Interest criticizing U.S. policy toward Taiwan in the period after the passage of the TRA. In another case, John Bolton, future National Security Advisor to President Trump, published a commentary with the Wall Street Journal in January 2017 arguing for a reexamination of the suitability of strategic ambiguity as a pillar of U.S. foreign policy and calling for a far more aggressive U.S. strategy to contain the PRC and support the ROC’s defense capabilities. Most significantly, in December 2016, about a month and a half before his inauguration, then-president-elect Trump spoke to ROC president Tsai Ing-wen, the first time an American president spoke with his counterpart in the ROC since 1979. Such engagement with the ROC continued under the Biden administration and can be seen in events like Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to the island of Taiwan. 

These changes in how the principle of strategic ambiguity is implemented in U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis the PRC and ROC, especially during the past two administrations, are detrimental to American efforts to prevent the PRC from establishing a sphere of hegemony over East Asia and the Indo-Pacific. This emanates from the problem that the reactions of many U.S. partners in the region, including countries such as Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Vietnam, toward a Taiwan contingency will vary based on a number of factors. Foremost among these factors is the question of whether the PRC initiates an armed invasion of the ROC’s islands of its own accord or if such an invasion occurs following a proclamation of independence or another manner of separation issued by the ROC. 

When the U.S. actively overlooks the provisions of the TRA and acts more like an ally of the ROC than a mediating party between the ROC and the PRC, it loses both the goodwill the U.S. has cultivated in Zhongnanhai over the years and the benefits of strategic ambiguity. Furthermore, regardless of how one thinks about the issue of ROC autonomy, it is indisputable that it emboldens the increasingly prevalent desires among the Taiwanese people to move along the path toward full statehood. This will inevitably cause distrust of the U.S. to go up in Zhongnanhai and for the PRC to become increasingly aggressive in its policies toward the ROC, and for the ROC to become more recalcitrant with the PRC in turn. What’s more, we have already seen this issue play out to some extent. For example, on May 26, 2024, the PRC’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the country’s highest court, along with other bodies like the PRC’s Ministry of Justice, released a document entitled “Opinion on punishing according to law crimes of splitting the country and incitement to split the country committed by ‘Taiwan independence’ die-hards”, calling for increased assertiveness and for further strengthening Article 8 of the PRC’s 2005 Anti-Secession Law. The opinion calls for the “ringleaders” of groups that participate in “secessionist” activities to face capital punishment, for there to be no statute of limitations on “secessionist” activities, and for in absentia prosecutions of individuals suspected to have participated in “secessionist” activities. While it is impossible to say that it is only the weakening of the principle of strategic ambiguity that has caused this issue, it presents another front where it is indisputable that changes over the past decade or so have contributed to some of the more radical aspects of such policy-making in the PRC. 

As the U.S. has moved away from implementing strategic ambiguity over the past decade, the PRC has retaliated in ways the U.S. had not entirely expected. As the PRC’s economy continues to grow and as it spends an ever-increasing amount of money on improving its military capabilities, sending a carrier strike group through the Taiwan Strait during a contingency is looking less and less like a viable strategy to guarantee the maintenance of the status quo across the Strait. The move away from strategic ambiguity also complicates how U.S. partners in the region engage with the U.S. and how they will choose to engage with the U.S. during a possible Taiwan contingency. Furthermore, it also contributes to the ROC moving further and further away from the PRC, a move that is likely to cause significant consternation and frustration in Zhongnanhai. It is therefore in the best interest of the U.S. to abide by the long-established principle of strategic ambiguity so as to keep the PRC interested in a peaceful unification, and to diffuse rising tensions in East Asia and the Indo-Pacific so as to ensure that the partners of the U.S. are comfortable cooperating with and aligning their policies with the interests and policies of the U.S.