After the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1954-55, the US brought into force the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) with Taipei. The treaty was never intended to be a war-fighting pact. It was designed to boost Taiwan’s morale and to tie the hands of Chiang Kai-shek, who was always scheming to involve the US in his attempts to return to China.
Both president Dwight Eisenhower and secretary of state John Foster Dulles did not trust Chiang or Beijing. Thus they built strategic ambiguity into the treaty to keep both Taipei and Beijing guessing about the circumstances under which the US might intercede in a cross-strait military conflict. Since the 1950s, each successive US administration has adopted a version of strategic ambiguity.
Just as the US understood that Chiang wanted US support to return to China, another aspect emerged when the US was concerned that Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian sought to involve the US military to gain Taiwan independence. Never being sure of the US response, strategic ambiguity help prevent adventurism by Chiang and Chen.
It also signaled to China that the US would not support either pursuit while at the same time keeping Beijing guessing just what assistance the US might render Taiwan in a Chinese attempt to take the island. All of this added up to a key feature of American strategic ambiguity: dual deterrence.
Shortly after Tokyo established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1972, Japan’s policy of strategic ambiguity evolved. Japan’s position on Taiwan’s defense was an equivocal one, enabling Tokyo to walk a tightrope between its alliance with Washington and its nascent friendship with Beijing.
In short, Japan’s ambiguous stance on the Taiwan issue appears to have been created as a result of compromises to keep a balance between the US and China as well as to overcome a political divide within Japan at the time, rather than something maintained as part of a deterrence strategy.
To be sure, ambiguity was a reasonable position to take at a time when the probability of a contingency in Taiwan was low. As long as the United States’ overwhelming military superiority had been sustained and military confrontations in the Taiwan Strait had not been anticipated, Japan could keep on being ambiguous and deterrence against China would still be maintained.
Such an ambiguity simultaneously allowed the Japanese government to reassure its public, which still held pacifist and anti-military views. And it protected Japanese business investments in China, a major Japanese market.
‘Strategic clarity’
Since 2020, debate over whether to revise the strategic-ambiguity policy has been reinvigorated again. It was sparked by an article by Richard Haass and David Sacks of the Council on Foreign Relations, who argued that the time had come for the United States to introduce a policy of “strategic clarity.”
Why? Haass and Sacks argued that the People’s Liberation Army was catching up to the US military. Furthermore, overwhelming US power was the foundation on which America’s strategic ambiguity rested.
Kurt Campbell, a key figure in US Asian and Pacific strategy, argued against the change. Campbell contended that the best way to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is to send a consolidated message to China combining diplomacy and US defense innovation.
Bonnie Glaser of the German Marshall Fund believes that changing to strategic clarity could see China use force, making it imperative for the US to signal its resolve.
Most regional countries do not support a change for fear that they would have to choose sides.
While the late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe called for a change from the United States’ strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity, such a change in Japanese policy would have had little domestic support and would have endangered Japanese investments in China. It would have hurt Japan’s sense of balance.
Moreover, the largest Japanese companies in China are included in the Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), a very powerful and politically connected organization.
Rather than jettisoning US and Japanese policies of strategic ambiguity and replacing them with strategic clarity, both countries should build up deterrence and institute creative diplomacy with China.