"How To Avoid A War Over Taiwan" By CWP Co-Director And 2 CWP Alum

As tension rises between Beijing and Washington over Taiwan, strategists on all sides seem to have forgotten what the American game theorist Thomas Schelling taught years ago: deterring an adversary from taking a proscribed action requires a combination of credible threats and credible assurances. Instead of heeding that lesson, a growing number of U.S. analysts and officials have called for the United States to treat Taiwan as if it were an independent state and to abandon the long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” in favor of “strategic clarity,” defined as an unconditional commitment to use military force to defend the island in the event of a mainland Chinese attack. These calls have intensified since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with some commentators even advocating for formal recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign country. Still others have called for a permanent (and significant) deployment of U.S. forces to Taiwan to lend credibility to the U.S. threat of a military response to a mainland attack. In testimony before the U.S. Senate last year, Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, implied that the United States could never allow Beijing to control Taiwan because such an outcome would make it impossible to defend other U.S. allies in Asia.     

But shifting U.S. policy toward support for Taiwan’s permanent separation from the mainland is more likely to provoke than to deter an attack on Taiwan. Deterrence requires credibility in both of its elements: threat and assurance. The threat requires signaling both the costs of a proscribed action and sufficient political will to impose those costs. The assurance requires conveying to the target, in a way that it can trust, that it will not be taken advantage of if it refrains from taking the proscribed action.

How to Avoid a War Over Taiwan: Threats, Assurances, and Effective Deterrence

By Thomas J. Christensen, M. Taylor Fravel, Bonnie S. Glaser, Andrew J. Nathan, Jessica Chen Weiss - October 13, 2022

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/how-avoid-war-over-taiwan

• THOMAS J. CHRISTENSEN is Director of the China and the World Program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

• M. TAYLOR FRAVEL is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• JESSICA CHEN WEISS is the Michael J. Zak Professor for China and Asia-Pacific Studies at Cornell University and a former Council on Foreign Relations Fellow on the U.S. Department of State Policy Planning Staff.

Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/arniechou82-6408689/