How We Can Avoid a War Over Taiwan

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.

Avoiding war in the Taiwan Strait requires all sides to be deterred. At a minimum, Taiwan must be deterred from declaring formal independence, Washington must be deterred from recognizing Taiwan as an independent state or restoring a formal alliance with the island, and Beijing must be deterred from using military force against Taiwan to compel unification. All sides must not only be threatened with harm for crossing these redlines but also be assured that they will not suffer catastrophic losses to their interests if they refrain from these actions. Triangular deterrence has succeeded for over 40 years in keeping the peace across the Taiwan Strait. But rising tensions have made this delicate arrangement more fragile.

CRUMBLING DETERRENCE

Since the beginning of the Trump administration, deterrence has begun to break down on all sides. Taiwan’s threat—its ability to exact a military cost from mainland China in case of an attack—has never been strong, and it is only now acquiring mobile weapons that might enable it to hold off an attack for a matter of weeks. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s assurance—that it will not eventually declare independence if it is not attacked—has weakened over time. Public opinion polls suggest that a growing number of Taiwan’s citizens see themselves as

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