How to Avoid a War Over Taiwan

Threats, Assurances, and Effective Deterrence
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.