President-elect Donald Trump won the 2024 election in part by vowing to change the way the United States government works at home and abroad. With roughly 65% of registered voters believing that the United States is on the wrong track, Trump’s pledges to disrupt government policies and practices attracted broad public appeal.
On Taiwan, Trump has shown that he will not be bound by precise policy catechisms that his predecessors had developed and largely abided over the past 45 years. For better or worse, Trump and his advisors do not seem wedded to the intricate details of historical commitments or specific recitations of continuity in American policy toward Taiwan. They appear open to adjustments to make U.S. policy fit for the purpose of responding to China’s growing pressure in the Taiwan Strait. This paper aims to identify areas where new innovations to America’s declaratory policy could usefully be made, and importantly, where they should be avoided.
Peace and stability: The lodestar of American policy
The most fundamental measure of America’s strategy is whether it upholds or undermines cross-Strait peace and stability. Unlike most other global issues, the United States is not pushing to achieve a specific end-state in the Taiwan Strait. Rather, America’s aim is to keep open a path for people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to resolve their differences peacefully without violence or coercion.
To play this role effectively, Washington needs to be seen as a principled arbiter that is committed to pushing back against any threats to peace and stability. Seen in this light, Washington’s role becomes clearer. If Beijing intensifies pressure on Taipei, as it has done over recent years, then the United States should counter such bullying. If Taiwan takes future steps that erode cross-Strait conditions, then Washington should be prepared to respond to that threat to its interests as well.
This approach recognizes that the status quo in the Taiwan Strait is dynamic, not constant. Leaders in Beijing and Taipei have agency to alter the status quo. If they do, then the United States will seek to reestablish an equilibrium of peace and stability. Playing this role effectively requires the United States to maintain clarity and conviction about its goals, which are broader than countering China’s ambitions against Taiwan.
Taiwan’s undetermined legal status
The Trump administration should hold firmly to the line that Taiwan’s legal and territorial status is unresolved. While this distinction sounds legalistic, it holds significance to overall strategy.
If Beijing successfully convinces countries to accept that Taiwan is a subordinate part of China, then the world would treat Taiwan as China’s internal affair. If, on the other hand, it is understood that Taiwan’s legal and territorial status is unresolved, then Taiwan is viewed as a matter of international peace and security.
It is in America’s interest for Taiwan to be treated as an issue of global concern, rather than as an internal Chinese issue or an annex of U.S.-China strategic competition. After all, Taiwan is the beating heart of the global economy due to its production of the world’s advanced semiconductor chips. Taiwan’s security is also a fundamental factor in the preservation of peace and stability in East Asia.
Based largely on these considerations, more leaders from Asia, Europe, and the Americas have spoken out in recent years about the criticality of Taiwan’s peace and stability for their own interests. Many of these same countries also have dispatched high-level delegations to Taiwan and/or conducted military presence operations around Taiwan. The Trump administration should seek to build on this momentum by encouraging more world leaders to speak up more often about how Taiwan’s peace and prosperity inform their own national conditions.
The “One China” policy
American leaders have never accepted Beijing’s preferred “One China” principle. Instead, they have adhered to a “One China” policy, which acknowledges Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan without accepting it. U.S. policy does not buy into the proposition that the government of the People’s Republic of China controls Taiwan or speaks for the people in Taiwan.
Beijing has sought to reverse recent momentum in the direction of internationalizing the Taiwan issue in part by trumpeting when countries embrace Beijing’s preferred “One China” principle. By definition, a principle is immutable; a policy is mutable. Policies adjust to changing circumstances, whereas principles remain constant.
In essence, Beijing has sought to build a narrative that a growing number of countries accept China’s views that Taiwan is part of China and that China has the right to exercise control over the 23 million people of Taiwan and represent Taiwan on the world stage. Chinese official media regularly misrepresent U.S. leaders as embracing the “One China” principle in their meetings with China’s leaders.
If Beijing continues to willfully misrepresent America’s policy position on Taiwan to imply that the United States accepts China’s “One China” principle, then Washington can begin signaling that it will start characterizing its approach as being guided by a “cross-Strait policy,” as opposed to its long-standing “One China” policy. The more Washington begins framing its approach as being guided by its “cross-Strait policy,” the clearer it will be that Beijing’s attempts to manipulate public perceptions by implying that America accepts China’s “One China” principle are compelling Washington to sharpen the distinction it draws with Beijing over its approach to cross-Strait issues.
America’s defense commitments to Taiwan
During the process of normalization of relations with Beijing, the United States agreed it would sever official relations with Taiwan, withdraw its mutual defense treaty with Taiwan, and refrain from permanently stationing U.S. forces in Taiwan. These are the baseline commitments for the continuation of the U.S.-China relationship.
At the same time, the United States also committed in 1979 to maintain unofficial relations with Taiwan. Washington vowed through the Taiwan Relations Act to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive nature and maintain the capacity “to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or social or economic system, of the people of Taiwan.” For the past four decades, this legislation has guided American policy and underpinned America’s strategic posture in the Taiwan Strait.
Leaders and experts on both sides of the Taiwan Strait agree that the status quo is being challenged, but they disagree on the source of the challenge. To many in Beijing, Taiwan’s leaders are testing the boundaries of China’s tolerance by incrementally advancing efforts to permanently separate Taiwan from China. Conversely, to many in Taipei, Beijing is undermining peace and stability through its unrelenting and escalating military and paramilitary pressure surrounding Taiwan. Officials in Washington are generally more sympathetic to Taipei’s diagnosis of the sources of stress on cross-Strait peace and stability. American officials generally do not judge that Taiwan President Lai Ching-te has taken steps to undermine peace and stability.
President Joe Biden sought to counter Beijing’s growing pressure on Taiwan by declaring publicly four times that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense if it was attacked by China. These declaratory statements were not matched by significant observable changes in America’s strategic posture, though. America’s attention and resources also were stretched by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Going forward, Trump’s instinctual inclination toward unpredictability best serves America’s interests. The United States has long maintained a policy of dual deterrence against threats to stability from either side of the Taiwan Strait. By not declaring when, how, and under what circumstances the United States would intervene in a cross-Strait conflict, the United States aims to deter actions from either side of the Taiwan Strait that could precipitate conflict. This approach has served America’s interests well for the past four-plus decades and should be continued.
Beyond preserving a posture of dual deterrence, Washington may also need to find new tactics for countering what Brookings expert Richard Bush has coined as China’s strategy of coercion without violence. If, for example, China increases coast guard pressure surrounding Taiwan, Washington should consider joint U.S.-Taiwan coast guard training patrols around Taiwan. If China significantly increases its military pressure around Taiwan, Washington and other like-minded countries should find asymmetric ways to offset Chinese pressure on Taiwan, whether by authorizing transfers of vital supplies such as materiel and energy products to support Taiwan’s domestic resilience efforts or increasing combined military presence operations in other areas of sensitivity to Beijing. The goal is to employ a range of tools to restore equilibrium.
Sustaining public confidence in Taiwan about its future
Trump administration officials will also need to nimbly preempt two other lines of diplomatic attack relating to Taiwan. The first is Beijing’s argument that the United States is pursuing alliance expansion in Asia, sometimes referred to as seeking to construct an “Asian NATO,” and is enlisting Taiwan in such designs. In framing this argument, Beijing seeks to suggest that NATO’s eastward expansion after the end of the Cold War sowed the seeds of the current Ukraine conflict. Left unchecked, according to Beijing’s argument, Washington could trigger a similar dynamic in Asia, with Taiwan serving as the flashpoint for a regional war.
In some respects, Beijing’s warnings about the emergence of an “Asian NATO” count as a back-handed compliment to the Biden administration’s breakthroughs in bolstering relations with and among America’s allies and partners in Asia. This progress serves as arguably the Biden administration’s top foreign policy achievement. Beijing also deserves some credit for this outcome. China’s predatory actions in East Asia have stimulated regional demand for alliance-strengthening with the United States. As a result, America and its partners have become more coordinated and capable of pushing back against revanchist and revisionist actions in East Asia that threaten regional stability. The Trump administration should sustain such efforts.
At the same time, Washington ignores China’s propaganda about an “Asian NATO” at its own peril. However tenuous the logic may seem to an American ear, the argument holds sway in parts of Southeast Asia and much of the developing world. The more such an argument becomes accepted in other capitols, the less political space there will be for countries to demonstrate support for Taiwan, lest they see themselves as contributing to rising instability or worse.
To puncture Beijing’s information campaign, Washington will need to become more plainspoken and assertive in explaining its Taiwan strategy. Senior American officials will need to reject assertions that the United States views Taiwan as a tool in strategic competition with China. Instead, American officials should make clear that America’s aim is to preserve cross-Strait peace and stability and keep open space for leaders in Beijing and Taipei to eventually resolve their differences peacefully. Nothing more, nothing less.
Second, Beijing will make hay out of any cessation of hostilities in Ukraine whereby President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is forced to concede land for peace. Beijing will use such an event as an opportunity to erode public confidence inside Taiwan about Taiwan’s future. Beijing will launch information campaigns in Taiwan to suggest that America’s support is limited and unreliable and that it would be a fool’s errand to resist unification on expectations of America defending a distant partner. Chinese propaganda outlets also will hype the fact that America exhausted itself in Ukraine without even being involved in active combat there, implying that the United States lacks the stomach for a fight over Taiwan.
American officials will need to be prepared to highlight distinctions between Taiwan and Ukraine in ways that demonstrate Washington’s overriding prioritization on preserving peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. For example, America’s economic well-being and the credibility of its security commitments rely on Taiwan in ways that they do not with Ukraine. The United States government is required by law to maintain “the capacity to resist any resort to force or coercion that would jeopardize Taiwan’s security.” No such legal obligation applies to Ukraine. In other words, America’s national interests are directly and deeply implicated by events in Taiwan in ways they were not in Ukraine, thus rendering any comparison between Ukraine and Taiwan superficial at best.
Clarity on purpose of strategy
This brief set of recommendations is intended to highlight two key points. First, Washington should be honest, straightforward, and consistent about its goals in the Taiwan Strait. The United States does not seek Taiwan independence or unification. America’s foremost objective is to preserve peace and stability and keep a path open, however narrow, for an eventual peaceful resolution of cross-Strait differences.
American leaders should not fear the possibility of near-term unification. There is perhaps more consensus in Taiwan in opposing near-term unification than there is on any other public policy issue. Beijing’s proposed “one country, two systems” formula for Taiwan is a dead letter, particularly following Beijing’s imposition of its will on the people of Hong Kong. Furthermore, any change to cross-Strait relations would almost certainly require Taiwan to amend its constitution. Taiwan’s threshold for constitutional amendments is among the highest in the world.
In other words, America does not need to oppose unification. To the extent that American leaders swing against this phantom risk, they undermine America’s principled position of being acceptant of any peaceful resolution of cross-Strait differences that is endorsed by the Taiwan people, who have democratic agency to express their preferences.
The second key point of this survey of potential adjustments to America’s posture toward Taiwan is that actions beget reactions. The United States needs to demonstrate unwavering determination in protecting its national interests in the Taiwan Strait. The more Beijing seeks to isolate, coerce, and weaken Taiwan, the more that America and other partners will bolster Taiwan’s confidence, resilience, and well-being.
As tensions rise in the Taiwan Strait, it will become ever more important for America to clearly state its intentions and credibly commit to preserving an equilibrium. The coming years may be a time of testing. Firmness and resolve will be necessary ingredients for protecting American interests, but so, too, must the Trump administration inculcate a broadly-held understanding that the purpose of American strategy toward Taiwan is to preserve peace and stability and keep open a path for an eventual peaceful resolution of cross-Strait differences.
This post was originally published on here
