Then-Senator Joe Biden was not impressed. Speaking to the Washington Post about writing “Not So Skilled on Taiwan,” Biden chided the president. “Words matter, in diplomacy and in law,” he wrote. The fact was that the United States had no formal obligation to defend Taiwan. As Biden explained, the United States had deliberately reneged on such a commitment and passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which Biden had personally voted for in 1979. It is true that the law required the United States to help Taiwan to defended and declared a threat to the peace and security of the region to be “of great concern to the United States.” But it did not oblige American forces to fight on behalf of the island. For Biden, no small nuance was at stake. “There is a huge difference between reserving the right to use force and the obligation, a priori, to defend Taiwan,” he wrote. “The president should not give Taiwan, let alone China, the ability to automatically drag us into a war across the Taiwan Strait.” Bush soon learned the wisdom of following official US policy on Taiwan. By 2003, he publicly opposed Taiwan’s plans to hold a referendum, fearing it would stoke pro-independence sentiment. Two decades later, however, President Biden makes a potentially more consequential mistake than Bush ever did. The One China policy has always been unpleasant. It’s nobody’s idea of justice. But it is effective In comments broadcast Sunday on 60 Minutes, Biden said the United States has an obligation to defend Taiwan and would use force “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.” This is his fourth such statement in just over a year, making it less and less plausible that the president is simply committing a “blunder,” as the now-ritual White House digressions issued each time would have you believe. On this occasion, Biden went even further. While asserting that the United States continues to adhere to the One China policy forged in the 1970s, Biden in the same breath contradicted that policy. “Taiwan is making its own decisions about its independence,” he said. “We don’t move – we don’t encourage them to be independent. We’re not – that’s – it’s their decision.” Biden hinted that the United States is indifferent to Taiwan’s declared political status, views the issue as a matter for the Taiwanese people alone to decide, and will stand behind whatever decision Taiwan makes. Longstanding US policy says otherwise. “We do not support Taiwan independence” is the decades-old position, delivered verbatim by Foreign Secretary Antony Blinken just last month. Under the One China policy, the United States seeks to prevent both China and Taiwan from overturning the status quo—the former by using military force to bring about “reunification” and the latter by declaring independence and permanently withdrawing from the mainland. There is no reason to change this policy now. As America’s best diplomats have estimated, this uneasy agreement may be the only way to preserve the territorial status quo and avoid a catastrophic war. So far, every Chinese leader since Mao Zedong has proven willing to live with Taipei’s de facto separation from Beijing. Taiwan, for its part, has refrained from declaring independence, knowing that such a move would bring about a Chinese invasion while alienating the United States. The One China policy has always been unpleasant. It’s nobody’s idea of justice. But it is effective, and no one has proposed an alternative that would not bring the world’s two leading powers closer to war and 24 million Taiwanese closer to destruction. Instead of trying to propose a better alternative, Biden apparently chose to abandon the One China policy and see what happens. He may hope to gain an additional deterrent from seemingly costless rhetoric. He may be concerned that China’s President Xi Jinping is considering an attack and that Taiwan has not adequately prepared its defenses. Even if so, his comments are counterproductive. Chinese officials already have to account for the possibility that the United States will rally to Taiwan’s side if the People’s Liberation Army launches an unprovoked invasion. Biden’s statements probably add little to the military and economic dimensions of deterrence. They are doing more to undermine assurances to China that the United States will maintain the status quo and discourage Taiwan’s moves toward independence. In short, the president’s statements are provocative to Beijing without providing security to Taiwan or the United States. In this light, Biden expresses concern rather than confidence when he understands about additional deterrence through his so-called blunders. It reverses Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum to speak softly and carry a big stick. Or as Biden wrote in 2001: “We now seem to have a policy of ambiguous strategic ambiguity. It’s not an improvement.”
Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, please email it to [email protected]
