“US clarity key in Strait: ex-commander. SECURITY: The head of the US Indo-Pacific Command has said nothing is vague about helping Taiwan, while a researcher said ‘strategic ambiguity’ prevents conflict, “ Taipei Times. Geostrategery and world history classrooms. My first reaction to Admiral Harris is “Well duh ….” But that’s not very scholarly I suppose. As a world historian what I am reminded of is how often seismic, institutional, complex changes in history take place – and how slowly the supposedly smartest most expertly people adjust to changing, different realities. Often stubbornly refusing to accept these changes. You add in the very human, self-serving tendency to rewrite and smooth out the historical narrative after the fact, and then we tend to forget that almost all major world events came as a massive surprise to leading experts and policymakers. The age of empires. The age of modern nation-states. The two world wars. The communist and fascist movements. 9-11. Globalization. De-Globalization ….
Strategic ambiguity, whether it was all that great to begin with, has become one of those not very useful, cult-like phrases (like porcupine defense) that policymakers and the mandarins of Western imperialist IR circles cannot let go of. Taiwan’s first president Lee Teng-hui articulated the earliest, in the mid-1990s, the end of strategic ambiguity’s applicability and usefulness. Unlike scholarly, word-obsessing, catch-phrase laden arguments the think tanks and policymakers often get stuck in, Lee was not as much a genius as he was pragmatically responding to rapidly changing realities in Taiwan (democratization) and in the then not quite yet named Indo-Pacific region – namely the rise of communist China as a menacing global belligerent, funded and aided by Western consumers. The world of 2024 has changed radically enough that it is self-serving now to forget how lonely Lee was – Western democracies, even after the Tiananmen Massacre – remained attached for decades to the naïve idea that consumerism and materialism would mellow the communists. An even deeper problem is this hubris that somehow these global autocrats could be “managed” with words, soothing, ambivalent, jargony words.
All of this makes President Biden and his liberal hawks worthy of high praise – while they are a part of this longstanding official and academic IR circle in the West, they are also sensibly changing longstanding US policies regarding the Indo-Pacific, communist China, the meaning of “status quo,” and without actually saying so outright, rendering strategic ambiguity meaningless. At least five times now President Biden has stated that the US would militarily defend democratic Taiwan – at least the first four times mandarins of DC policy-making circles had a massive self-indulgent tantrum, spoke as if they had more right to decide national security policies than a democratically elected president of the United States of America. It takes even the most powerful democratically elected leader of the world saying something five times to finally get through the thick skulls, and healthy egos, of these folks.
But the key idea is probably what Biden and his officials understand. These are not parlor games. These are not monks arguing over words in sutras. The most important lesson comes from Ukraine. Why did the West fail to convince dictator Putin that an invasion of democratic Ukraine was not in his dictatorship’s interest? Because for too many years the US and NATO have given Moscow mixed signals – “strategic ambiguity,” European edition. No matter how much IR professors and think tank scholars wish, I don’t think dictators respond to dialogue and treaties and so on. If you think about the careers of dictator Putin and dictator Xi (remember the same mandarins having a cow when Biden called both dictators? ….) – the kind of ruthless machination required to rise to the top of a mafia-like communist dictatorship, what are the motivations, what are they likely to respond to? My guess is clarity of words and following clear words with action – an invasion of Crimea meant a military response from the West, for example.
So, the main question for President Biden and leaders of the free world, based on lessons learned from our failures in Ukraine, is how to best convince the dictator of China that a war they initiate would guarantee the end of their dictatorship? Not chest-thumping, not military adventurism, in many cases, the options are not military – but creative ways for the US and the free world to recognize Taiwan’s democratic sovereignty while stating clearly that any attempt by China to start a war would end the Chinese communist dictatorship. Without that clarity, the lesson from Putin is that a dictator will always be tempted by war. 11.6.2024
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