Should Strategic Ambiguity Be Saved?
Washington must decide whether its old Taiwan strategy can survive a new world order.
Taiwan has begun distributing a new civil defense handbook to its citizens this year. It’s thin, bright orange, and full of cartoons depicting emergency kits, lines at relief stations, and a mother explaining war to her child, among other images. All things considered, it’s not overly dramatic.
And yet, there has been a dramatic shift. Unlike previous public safety guides, this new booklet teaches citizens what to do if they come face to face with enemy soldiers. It states, “In the event of a military invasion of Taiwan, any claim that the government has surrendered or that the nation has been defeated is false.”
The Indo-Pacific is full of signals that the old balance is slipping. Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi recently came under fire for saying Japan would consider a military response to a Chinese military invasion of Taiwan. The minor revision of Japan’s policy of strategic ambiguity has caused a severe diplomatic row. China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi says Takaichi “crossed a red line.” That’s a tame response in comparison to the Chinese consul general of Osaka’s remarks; in a now-deleted post on X, he asserted that Takaichi’s “filthy head” ought to be “cut off without a moment’s hesitation.”
The U.S. itself also holds a policy of strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan, maintaining as an open question whether the United States would come to the island’s defense if China were to invade. In theory, this both deters Taiwan from declaring independence and China from invading. The recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) seems to reaffirm this policy, stating that the U.S. will “maintain our longstanding declaratory policy on Taiwan, meaning that the United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”
The policy has existed since the United States replaced the American-Taiwanese mutual defense treaty with the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) in 1979, so that the U.S. could have formal relations with the People’s Republic of China. The TRA stipulates that the U.S. will provide defensive arms to Taiwan, but not that the U.S. would defend the island in the case of an invasion. While strategic ambiguity has so far withstood its trials and tribulations, the world is changing in ways that test its viability. The old assumptions and power dynamics that once ordered it are no longer certainties.
China’s rapid military modernization and investment in “reunification,” Taiwan’s shifting national identity, and an evolving world order have all challenged the assumptions that originally made ambiguity workable. American politicians themselves have undermined it. During the last administration, President Joe Biden repeatedly said the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion of the island, only for each statement to be walked back later by the White House. After Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the house at the time, visited Taiwan in 2022, Beijing went so far as to launch ballistic missiles over the island. Reunification still remains a major theme for Beijing. In a recent phone call, Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly told President Donald Trump that Taiwan’s unification with China is “an integral part of the post-war international order” and that it is important for the leaders to “jointly safeguard the victory of WWII.”
Despite the policy’s erosion, American strategic ambiguity has survived to the current Trump administration, but whether it can—or should—continue to guide Washington’s approach is now a central and divisive matter. The overarching question has become, What posture toward Taiwan best serves American interests today? This can be broken into at least a few particular questions: whether Taiwan constitutes a vital U.S. interest, whether ambiguity or clarity better serve stability, and, if clarity is chosen, whether the United States should pledge to fight or not to fight in the event of a Chinese invasion.
It is not controversial to say that war over Taiwan would impose a negative cost on the United States. Bryan Burack, a senior policy advisor for China at the Heritage Foundation, told The American Conservative that, regardless of whether the U.S. were to become involved after a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, “it would almost certainly still have a global recessionary impact…. We’re talking literally store shelves being empty, manufacturing shutting down in the United States—the sorts of effects we didn’t feel from the War on Terror, for example.”
More generally, Burack argues Taiwan is a vital interest because mainland control of the island would “dramatically worsen” America’s economic posture relative to China’s. He says the United States has already been “brought to our knees by Chinese economic coercion… exacerbated by our own deindustrialization.” Taiwan’s production capacity, particularly in critical technology, is not transferable to another location within a reasonable timeframe, he says. Geography, too, weighs heavily in Burack’s assessment. “Being able to leverage Taiwan as an air base and a submarine base and a naval base would be incredibly useful for the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] and would completely change the geography of the Asia-Pacific in a way that really hasn’t been the case since the conclusion of World War II.”
Michael Swaine, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute’s East Asia Program, disagrees. While Swaine believes that deterring a Chinese attack is important, he told The American Conservative that Taiwan “is an important but not a vital interest justifying a full-fledged war with China.” In Swaine’s view, proponents of intervention “exaggerate Taiwan’s strategic value and China’s military threat to East Asia.” He maintains that possession of Taiwan “would not give China [the] capacity” for regional hegemony, and that Beijing views the issue primarily through a political lens, not an expansionary one.
Notably, the NSS states that “deterring a conflict over Taiwan” is “a priority,” citing the importance of access to the South China Sea and the “Second Island Chain”: “Given that one-third of global shipping passes annually through the South China Sea, this has major implications for the U.S. economy,” the document says. Yet the NSS stops short of asserting that Taiwan is a preeminent interest.
The disagreement over the strategic importance of Taiwan contributes directly to another division: whether Washington should even continue the nearly five-decade practice of strategic ambiguity or replace it with an explicit policy. Burack argues the policy still has value, but wants the type of ambiguity “that we’ve maintained for 40 years” to be placed within a consistent policy framework. Ambiguity becomes dangerous, he said, when mixed signals, looser rhetoric, walk-backs, or talk of mutual defense guarantees erode deterrence or invite miscalculation.
Others see strategic ambiguity as increasingly untenable, heightening the risk of misinterpretation between Washington and Beijing. In a crisis, this uncertainty could accelerate escalation by convincing each side that the other is preparing for conflict when it is not. Clarity, they argue, would diminish the space for miscalculation by giving all parties a better understanding of American intentions before a crisis. But even among advocates of clarity there is disagreement over what that explicit policy should signal.
Advocates of strategic clarity to fight argue that ambiguity has become less stabilizing as China’s power has increased. They contend that a firm declaration, combined with the capabilities to make it credible, would convince Beijing that the cost of war would be catastrophic and the prospects of success uncertain. If the U.S. doesn’t take this firm stance, they argue, China will continue to chip away at Taiwan’s sovereignty through disinformation campaigns and military “microaggressions.” Based on war games conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a U.S.-Taiwan-Japan alliance would defeat a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan, but at a very high cost for all parties. In light of this, a clear stance from the United States to fight would deter Beijing from invading, they say.
Others have suggested a more calibrated form of clarity. Charles Glaser, an international-relations theorist and author of the forthcoming book Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America’s Future Against a Rising China, has previously argued that the United States should pledge not to fight China over Taiwan while continuing to arm and train Taipei for its own self-defense. But in an interview with TAC, he floated the idea of conditional clarity: Washington would state that it will not defend Taiwan if Taipei provokes a conflict, but will “definitely” do so in the event of an unprovoked Chinese attack.
In the interview with TAC, Glaser steelmanned the case for an unconditional clarity to fight, arguing that if the United States genuinely plans to come to Taiwan’s defense, ambiguity is dangerous. “The worst situation to be in would be to actually be planning to come to Taiwan’s defense, and then have China think otherwise, because we didn’t make that clear,” he said.
Opponents of this kind of interventionist clarity argue that declaring an intention to fight if China invades could provoke the war it seeks to deter. They argue that such a policy risks convincing Beijing that its preferred resolution is slipping out of reach, increasing the incentive to act sooner rather than later. Analysts like Swaine have argued that Taiwan, while important, is not a vital U.S. interest that would justify a great-power war—one that could devastate the global economy and carry a nuclear escalation risk. In this view, after a strong deterrence groundwork is laid, a policy of explicit non-intervention should be announced. Advocates of this approach believe the U.S. can dissuade Beijing from rash action through diplomacy, economic measures, and incentivizing Taiwan to avoid declaring independence. For them, clarity toward restraint offers a path to stability, and American interests are best served by preventing a conflict, rather than promising to win if one were to arise. They note that, should a war break out, “the fate of Western democracy does not depend on the independence of Taiwan,” as international relations scholars Andrew Byers and Randall Schweller put it in this magazine.
A wider recalibration is happening across the Indo-Pacific. The United States no doubt plays a role in the evolving regional dynamics, but other actors shape the trajectory of the Taiwan Strait in ways Washington cannot fully control. Glaser notes that the U.S. holds leverage over and is an “important player in the security calculus” of Taiwan and Japan, but ultimately, any American posture, ambiguous or clear, must contend with this more complicated reality.
For now, it seems as though the status quo will hold. The NSS reaffirms strategic ambiguity, and statements by Trump suggest a preference for continuity over transformation. Still, Taiwan’s distribution of the new civil defense handbooks, Japan’s rhetoric under Takaichi, and Xi’s messaging all underscore new power dynamics and possibilities. As the world order evolves, the durability of ambiguity and whether it still serves American interests have become open questions. Going forward, the policy will need to contend with a world that looks increasingly different from the one it was born into.
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