Charles Glaser | The Washington Quarterly
ABSTRACT
There is wide agreement that Taiwan is the most dangerous issue dividing the United States and China. China believes Taiwan is part of its homeland, views unification with Taiwan as a core interest, and is determined to gain full control of the island. China continues to prefer peaceful unification, but explicitly retains the option of using military forces to achieve unification and seeks to use the threat of military force to strengthen its negotiating hand. Current US policy includes an ambiguous commitment to defend Taiwan if attacked or severely coerced by China—it leaves open whether and how the United States would respond. In addition, the United States provides Taiwan with weapons to improve its ability to defend itself. The United States is pressing Taiwan to deploy smaller mobile weapons that would increase the survivability and lethality of its forces; these forces would support a “porcupine strategy” that makes Taiwan harder to invade and conquer and would, at a minimum, provide time for US forces to arrive to aid Taiwan’s defense.1
Decades of Chinese military modernization and buildup have greatly changed the balance across the Taiwan Strait. China can reasonably imagine, if not now then in coming decades, that it might win a war against Taiwan, even if the United States comes to the island’s defense. China might start the war with a blockade or an invasion. If the former, China would hope to compel Taiwan to accept unification. If the blockade failed to achieve its goals, China might then choose to invade.
If China invades Taiwan and the United States intervenes militarily to protect it, the conventional war would be large, intense, and costly. Although unlikely, the war could escalate to nuclear war along several plausible paths.2 US-based China experts disagree about the likelihood and timing of a war, but few are confident that one will not occur in the next two or three decades.3 A 2022 survey by the Center for Strategic and International Studies of sixty-four leading experts on China found that 44 percent “think Beijing has a hard internal deadline to unify Taiwan by 2049.”4
Due to the enormous risks of US involvement in a war over Taiwan, policy analysts and foreign policy experts are searching for alternative US strategies. At one end of the spectrum of options is ending the US commitment to defend Taiwan.5 There is currently very little support for this option among foreign policy experts in Washington. Toward the other end of the spectrum, the United States has a number of options which would deepen its commitment. For example, some foreign policy experts and members of Congress have argued that the United States should make its commitment to come to Taiwan’s defense unambiguous, declaring that it would certainly intervene if China attacked Taiwan.6 The United States could also broaden its political engagement with Taiwan—for example, by increasing visits by US officials or by Taiwanese officials to the United States—thereby adding to the credibility of its commitment to come to Taiwan’s aid. The United States has been heading in this direction, starting with the first Trump administration and then under the Biden administration.7 The United States could, in addition, increase its military engagement, for example by doing more to train Taiwan’s military. A still further step would be to regularly deploy US troops to Taiwan to serve as a tripwire or instead to improve the joint US-Taiwanese ability to defend the island. The logic of these deployments would parallel NATO deployments in the Baltics and raise similar questions about a tripwire versus forward defense.8
This article proposes a very different option: maintaining a US commitment to Taiwan’s security but trimming it significantly. The United States would end its commitment to use force to come to Taiwan’s defense if China launched an invasion or blockade, replacing it with a clear public statement that the United States would not use its military forces for this purpose, but that the United States would continue to help Taiwan defend itself by providing arms and training.9 The United States would continue to call for Taiwan to shift fully to a porcupine strategy and would support the shift with weapons and financing.
[To Read Full Essay, PDF version]
From the The Washington Quarterly