As Joe Biden’s inauguration approaches, debate about the US’s China policy is intensifying. At issue are the traditional pillars of strategy ambiguity and dual deterrence. Strategic ambiguity means that the US reserves the right to assist Taiwan militarily in the event of a conflict with China but does not commit itself to doing so. Dual deterrence means that the US doesn’t only seek to deter China from an unprovoked attack on Taiwan; it also seeks to deter Taiwan from provoking an avoidable conflict by declaring independence.

Biden has endorsed both pillars in the past. In a 2001 Washington Post op-ed, he wrote that while he remained a strong supporter of Taiwan, ‘The United States has not been obligated to defend Taiwan since we abrogated the 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty’. He also stressed that ‘there is a huge difference between reserving the right to use force and obligating ourselves, a priori, to come to the defense of Taiwan’.

Yet a growing number of commentators and policymakers argue that China’s power is now so great, and its ambitions so extensive, that the US should move away from strategic ambiguity and towards what Richard Haass and David Sacks described in Foreign Affairs as ‘strategic clarity’. In short, they suggest that to better deter China the US should make an unequivocal public commitment to aid Taiwan in any conflict.

At the heart of this debate, though, lies a mistake that threatens to blind the US to its options and, in doing so, could lead to a stance that increases the risk of conflict.

Both critics and defenders of strategic ambiguity tend to assume that it is required for dual deterrence, and thus that, regrettable as it may be, moving away from strategic ambiguity will mean giving up on dual deterrence. It is only the prospect that the US might assist Taiwan, in other words, that can deter China while simultaneously deterring Taiwan. This is why critics of strategic ambiguity like Haass and Sacks feel the need to stress that ‘deterring Taiwan from declaring independence is no longer a primary concern’, while defenders like Walter Lohman and Frank Jannuzi stress the opposite.

In reality, however, this assumption is false. It would be possible for the US to move away from strategic ambiguity without giving up on dual deterrence.

Suppose that, instead of maintaining an ambiguous stance, the US were to make two unequivocal, but conditional, public guarantees: first, to aid Taiwan in the event it were subject to an unprovoked attack, and second, to not aid Taiwan in the event it were to provoke a conflict by declaring independence. In this case, the US would shift away from strategic ambiguity without sacrificing dual deterrence. And it would better deter China from naked aggression without reducing the incentive Taiwan has not to spark an avoidable conflict. Indeed, it may increase this incentive.

It’s not surprising that people conflate strategic ambiguity with dual deterrence, because a certain kind of ambiguity can magnify deterrence. In the right circumstances, adopting a retaliatory stance without saying what would actually trigger retaliation can get your adversary to second-guess their every move. Drawing a clear line in the sand, in contrast, gives them the green light to do everything they can short of crossing that line. To give a well-known illustration, it’s sometimes thought that US Secretary of State Dean Acheson effectively gave a green light to North Korean leader Kim Il-sung to start the Korean War by making a speech in January 1950 that delineated a US ‘defensive perimeter’ that excluded South Korea.

These are not the circumstances in the Taiwan Strait, however. As such, a shift away from strategic ambiguity without a movement away from dual deterrence is not just possible, but advisable.

For one thing, it would be grossly disproportionate—not to mention illegal—for the US to use military force in response to merely diplomatic or economic pressure on Taiwan. As a consequence, a threat to use such force would lack credibility at the best of times—indeed, even if it were plainly stated. It’s no surprise, then, that China is already doing everything it can short of using military force to bring Taiwan back within the fold. There’s thus little that could be gained from strategic ambiguity on this front.

Further, the balance of effective military power in the Taiwan Strait may have shifted so far away from the US that, rather than inducing policy paralysis, strategic ambiguity merely gives China the impression that the US wants to be in a position to save face were it not to aid Taiwan. As the doyen of strategic studies, Thomas Schelling, put it in his 1966 book Arms and influence, when our stance is ‘ill-defined and ambiguous—if we leave ourselves loopholes through which to exit—our opponent will expect us to be under strong temptation to make a graceful exit (or even a somewhat graceless one)’. At this point, in other words, strategic ambiguity threatens to undercut rather than magnify deterrence.

Of course, it might be thought that for the US to positively commit to not assist Taiwan were it to declare independence takes things one step too far. Mightn’t China interpret this as indicating that the US doesn’t recognise the many advantages to retaining Taiwan that are impervious to any such provocation, thereby leading China to downrate US resolve still further? At the very least, wouldn’t such a stance incentivise China to interfere in Taiwanese politics in an attempt to engineer such a declaration?

Yet the US could still better deter China without making such a commitment, namely by moving away from strategic ambiguity vis-à-vis China while retaining it vis-à-vis Taiwan. In other words, the US could make an unequivocal public guarantee to aid Taiwan in the event of an unprovoked attack while reserving the right to aid Taiwan in the event of a conflict sparked by a declaration of independence.

At this stage, the smart money is on the Biden administration retaining strategic ambiguity. But it would a great pity, to put it mildly, if this were done under the false impression that anything else would mean ‘ced[ing] to Taiwan … the ability automatically to draw us into a war across the Taiwan Strait’, as Biden himself put it in 2001. Two decades later, the challenge of the Taiwan issue calls for a far more careful analysis than that.

This week is the second meeting of the World Health Assembly (WHA) for 2020 and the second time this year that Taiwan has been excluded. High-level public diplomatic support for Taiwan to attend was provided by the US, Europe, the UK, Australia and many others, including a direct request from Washington and a statement by more than 600 of the 705 members of the European parliament. However, the World Health Organization did not accede.

Taiwan isn’t recognised as a state by the United Nations and is therefore not eligible to be a WHO member. However, the organisation’s representative forum, the WHA, has invited a number of non-UN states and organisations—including the Vatican, the Palestinian Authority and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies—to attend its meetings as observers.

Achieving observer status at the WHA has been a clear policy goal for Taiwan since the late 1990s. It’s part of a broad push by Taipei to gain access to international forums in order to counter Beijing’s efforts to isolate it diplomatically.

Under its ‘One China’ principle, Beijing considers Taiwan to be part of China, and on that basis argues that it should be excluded. However, Beijing has also shown a degree of flexibility in the past. Taiwan did have WHA observer status from 2009 to 2015, when the Kuomintang government of President Ma Ying-jeou was in power. But that ended abruptly in 2016 when the Democratic Progressive Party led by President Tsai Ing-wen was elected.

This points to the complex vectors of China’s politics and history that are interposed between the specific issue of the WHA and the tactics that Taipei and Beijing use to pursue their interests, and, especially for Beijing, their ideological commitments.

Since the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT have had an intertwined history, which Taipei and Beijing mobilised in cross-strait relations in the Ma period from 2008 to 2016, culminating in the meeting in Singapore between Ma and Xi Jinping in November 2015. Its shared history with the KMT serves to validate the CCP’s worldview as being the architect of modern China. The DPP, however, has a different historical and political genealogy reaching back to Taiwan’s Japanese colonial history (1895–1945) and emphasising Taiwanese national self-determination. In the hard politics of the Xi era, the DPP’s platform is wholly unacceptable to Beijing.

While these themes are longstanding, the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted and complicated the entire issue of Taiwan’s WHA representation. Taiwan’s response to the pandemic has been the best in the world, an exemplary demonstration of public health policy, the deployment of new technology, and the calibrated use of the power of the state in a democracy. Taipei has also sought to use this to raise its international standing and expand its international presence. It has been very effective, with many countries around the world acknowledging Taiwan’s successful handling of the crisis.

This has, however, brought it into conflict with the WHO and illuminated the effects China has had on the international system. Especially earlier in the year, there were discomfiting statements from senior WHO officials on Taiwan’s role in the global response to Covid-19. That Taiwan continues to be excluded from the WHA despite its leading example highlights how international organisations and some members states have taken on Beijing’s preoccupations as their own.

Taipei has regretfully accepted its exclusion from the WHA meeting this month. The government has made a number of statements under the ‘Taiwan can help’ slogan, emphasising its Covid-19 experiences and potential to lead. However, the DPP under Tsai has learned since the previous DPP presidency of Chen Shui-bian from 2000 to 2008 that discretion and discipline serve Taiwan’s interests and it will be pleased at the high level of international support it received for WHA participation nevertheless.

For the international community, the challenge will continue to be understanding that Taiwan’s exclusion from the international system is destabilising. It makes unpredictable actions by Taipei or Beijing more likely. Continuing to press for Taipei’s inclusion in the WHA and other organisations isn’t a question of taking sides in the emerging era of US–China strategic competition but of maintaining the integrity of the global system and mobilising the best responses to global crises.

China’s longstanding campaign to isolate Taiwan has intensified since Xi Jinping took power in 2012. However, as Beijing has been upping the ante against Taipei, the United States has worked hard to create more space for Taiwan in world affairs. Washington has also been marshalling its democratic partners to support Taipei. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s success in managing the Covid-19 pandemic has improved its international reputation and slowed Beijing’s efforts to diminish Taipei’s status.

In March 2020, the US enacted the Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative Act of 2019. The law, known as the TAIPEI Act, makes clear Washington’s intention to advocate ‘for Taiwan’s membership in all international organizations in which statehood is not a requirement’ and ‘for Taiwan to be granted observer status in other appropriate international organizations’.

The US’s declaration of support for Taiwan to formally play an international role couldn’t be more timely. Taipei’s successful early measures to contain the spread of Covid-19 provided a textbook example of how a government should respond to a pandemic. As soon as the first cases emerged out of Wuhan, Taiwan implemented a coordinated response that involved effective contact tracing, a strong testing regime and accurate daily press briefings. Confirmed Covid-19 cases reached 440 on 7 May and no new cases have been recorded since then. If one government were to be held up as a model by international organisations, the strongest contender would be Taiwan.

Despite Taipei’s success in managing the pandemic, some international organisations show discomfort at any mention of Taiwan. In late January, the International Civil Aviation Organization began blocking Twitter accounts when analysts, journalists and US congressional staffers suggested that Taiwan become a member. The move drew public outrage, but ICAO remained defiant, saying that the blocked accounts were ‘deemed to be purposefully and publicly misrepresenting our organization’. The US State Department later issued a stern rebuke, calling ICAO’s actions ‘outrageous, unacceptable, and not befitting of a UN organization’. It’s hard to argue with that criticism when you consider that Taiwan is excluded from ICAO despite its capital city being a major civil aviation hub.

The World Health Organization has been subject to more pointed criticism. While Taipei isn’t formally a member, the Taiwanese government still has been a source of insight into the virus and into best practices for managing and controlling the pandemic. Yet WHO officials find it difficult to acknowledge this, and some struggle to even mention the word Taiwan.

When pressed about the WHO’s engagement with Taiwan by a Hong Kong journalist, a senior WHO official pretended not to hear the question and hung up the phone. When the journalist called again to ask about Taiwan, the WHO official ignored the question and talked about how well China had done to contain Covid-19. The sorry display showed the world exactly why the WHO needs to start listening to Taiwanese voices.

The TAIPEI Act was enacted to assist Taiwan to more readily contribute to the international community. A greater Taiwanese presence in international organisations is one part of that story. Strengthening Taiwan’s partnerships with the 15 countries that currently recognise its sovereign status is another part.

The TAIPEI Act attempts to strengthen Taiwan’s diplomatic relationships with its 15 partners by doing what Washington does best: deter and coerce. If any one of the 15 stops recognising Taipei’s sovereignty, Washington will reduce its diplomatic engagement with that country as a consequence.

Helping Taiwan strengthen relationships with its diplomatic partners couldn’t be more urgent. Since 2016, eight countries across Africa, Latin America and the Pacific islands—including Panama, El Salvador, Solomon Islands and Kiribati—have transferred diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. Economic inducements have been a primary element in Beijing’s campaign. Some are now worried that the Vatican or Tuvalu could be next to recognise Beijing.

Arresting Taiwan’s diplomatic misfortune is a tough ask. For the TAIPEI Act to work, Washington will need to do more than foreshadowing reduced support if nations flip to recognise Beijing or pressuring international organisations into accepting Taipei’s membership. The US will need to rekindle its powers of persuasion.

Therein lies the trouble. The US is mishandling its own outbreak of Covid-19. The Trump administration began by downplaying the severity of the pandemic and decided to focus on criticising China—for political and sensible reasons alike. Washington has also failed to play its leadership role of coordinating a global response to Covid-19, leaving the WHO subject to Chinese Communist Party influence during the early stages of the crisis.

Given the unique challenge that Covid-19 poses to American leadership, the TAIPEI Act shows foresight in acknowledging that Washington alone can’t keep Taiwan afloat in the world. The act recognises that ‘Australia, India, Japan, and other countries are of significant benefit in strengthening Taiwan’s economy and preserving its international space.’ Clearly, Washington is relying on its allies and partners to do some heavy lifting.

Australia is stepping up to the mark. Facing threats of economic coercion from China, Australia played an important role in persuading 116 countries to co-sponsor a motion in support of an international inquiry into Covid-19 that will be put before the World Health Assembly during its meeting in Geneva on 18–19 May. If the motion is upheld, Australia will be in a great position to build another coalition that backs Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the WHO.

Like its support for a credible international inquiry into Covid-19, Australia should advocate for Taiwan’s meaningful participation in the WHO because Taipei can offer valuable experience and expertise that will advance the international public interest. Australia won’t be the only nation supporting Taiwan for this reason.

Australia can also do more to support the objectives of the TAIPEI Act. Australia could work collaboratively with Taiwan on Covid-19 aid projects as part of the government’s ‘Pacific step-up’. Exchanges between Australian Defence Department officials and their counterparts in Taiwan could also be promoted through Track 2 or Track 1.5 dialogues, which is all well within the joint communiqué between Australia and the People’s Republic of China.

Australia has an interest in ensuring that the TAIPEI Act meets its objectives. The Covid-19 crisis has shown that a world without Taiwan’s contributions is poorer and less secure. As a good international citizen, Australia needs to help Taiwan realise its potential as a productive member of the international community.

In January 2020, Taiwanese voters will go to the polls to elect their president and legislature. President Tsai Ing-wen from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is running for re-election against the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT’s) populist candidate Han Kuo-yu, and the DPP is hoping to hold its legislative majority.

A year ago, in municipal elections, the DPP suffered heavy defeats, most notably in the southern city of Kaohsiung where it had held the mayorship for 20 years. Han won the city for the KMT and has been launched into presidential politics on the strength of it. The losses were, however, the start of a turnaround in the DPP’s fortunes. Tsai appointed DPP veteran Su Tseng-chang as premier. He re-energised the DPP’s legislative agenda, including the legalisation of same-sex marriage.

Then, in January, CCP chairman Xi Jinping gave a speech on Taiwan for the 40th anniversary of the National People’s Congress’s letter to ‘Taiwan Compatriots’ that was unbending on the policy lines from Beijing of the last 40 years. Tsai’s measured but forceful response played well with an electorate increasingly frustrated with her technocratic and risk-averse style and her poll numbers began to climb.

The crisis in Hong Kong has given potency to DPP messaging, while the KMT has made some serious election missteps. Now Tsai is looking like being returned for another four-year term, and the DPP may also retain its majority in the legislature.

Regardless of the outcome, Taiwan’s democratic elections have long presented a dilemma for the norms of Australia’s foreign policy analysis. Canberra’s approach remains dominated, although not totally, by neorealist assumptions about the rational pursuit of interests governing the behaviour of state actors in the international system.

Both US interests and the interests of a rising China are served by their relative regional hegemony. Taiwan, in this view, stands either as a complex proxy for a US presence in the region or, if unified with the People’s Republic of China, as a material and symbolic expression of China’s emerging power. Taiwan’s future in these analyses will ultimately be decided by the US and China, and is a metric of their capacity to manage their changing balance of power peacefully or otherwise.

This analytic approach achieves its clarity and force by its determinism and ahistoricism, and its application has allowed the view to prevail in the Australian system that our foreign policy settings are basically and self-evidentially right. Australia’s foreign and security policy goals for Taiwan are a cool-headed calculus for bilateral relations that prioritises both our place in the US alliance and access to the PRC’s market as the great powers find their new balance point.

There are long-recognised limits to this approach to foreign policymaking, not least decades of argument about the value of democracy. More recently, new vectors of non-state global communication, climate and environmental crises, and reckonings for imperial and colonial injustice have challenged its assuredness.

Put simply, even with the coolest of foreign policy, people’s politics and history matter. States act in ways that are often irreducible to a calculation of interests but are instead entangled with historically situated political aspirations.

For Taiwan, its elections are a clear expression of its politics, but also its history. This includes 50 years as a Japanese colonial territory, 40 years of authoritarian rule, and 30 years as a democracy. The pursuit of self-determination and political liberalism by the Taiwanese reaches back to the early Japanese colonial at period beginning of the 20th century. Taiwanese formally petitioned the Imperial Diet in Tokyo for self-government on no less than 14 occasions between 1921 and 1934.

For Beijing, its contemporary party-state politics are steeped in the history of revolutionary struggle for China’s post-imperial future and the intertwined histories of the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT. As with many former empires, the crisis of imperial collapse, when the hard boundaries of nationhood were drawn across the more porous boundaries of empire, is continually replayed as the defining national metaphor.

Taken together, this means that while the Taiwan issue can be about a shifting balance between state actors pursuing regional security and power projection, it’s also about the political aspirations of peoples that trace back decades and will continue to be a force across the Taiwan Strait and in communities around the world.

For the Taiwanese, their aspirations for self-determination will endure whatever future plays out with Beijing. For the PRC, its Taiwan strategy validates the totalising ideology of a relatively closed party-state system that prioritises the rectitude of the party and its vision for ‘New China’.

Australia must contend with these politics and history in its own policymaking. A rising China as a regional power is inevitable and this has generated a debate in Australia that, in the hardening politics of the Xi era, has threatened to split into pro- and anti-China positions. It is a false choice that says more about Australia’s own political history. Instead, we should be able to subject politics and policymaking in Beijing, Taipei, and Washington, too, to new forms of cool-headed critique and assessment.

It is only with a proper understanding of our region and its histories and political aspirations that Australia will find the necessary policy nuance to sustain our security and prosperity in a changing world.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s comments in early January on reunification with Taiwan, which he categorised as unavoidable, certainly prompted vigorous discussion. Much of it has focused on the value of the strategic ambiguity surrounding the US’s likely response to Chinese military action against Taiwan. There has also been scrutiny of the specific military calculations that would inform a response by the US and its allies in the event of Chinese military action against Taiwan.

To date, the analysis has largely skirted over several critical elements that sit at the heart of the Taiwan conundrum. It hasn’t duly consider the Taiwanese public’s views on unification with China and the related question of Taiwanese identity. It has also ignored the prospect that Taiwan’s evolving democratic system may have already taken Taipei across a threshold that makes Chinese military action inevitable.

A December 2018 survey of Taiwanese views on the long-debated 1992 Consensus on ‘one China’ indicated that more than 80% of Taiwanese don’t accept the ‘one country, two systems’ formula for unification espoused by Beijing. This survey followed a separate poll conducted in October 2018 which also indicated that a significant majority of the Taiwanese public—70% –oppose the idea that both sides of the strait belong to ‘one China’.

Polling of public opinion on unification by the Election Studies Centre of the National Chengchi University since 1994 reveals some interesting trends. Overall, there has been a general trend towards greater support for either maintaining the status quo indefinitely (24% in 2018, up from 10% in 1992) or moving towards independence at some point in the future (15%, up from 8%). Fewer respondents (16%, down from 20%) are supportive of unification now or in the future.

Importantly, it appears that public sentiment on unification is increasingly influencing policy positions across the political spectrum in Taipei. A day after Xi’s statement, the Kuomintang Party, historically supportive of unification, said in a statement that the ‘one country, two systems’ framework was unacceptable for democratically run Taiwan because it lacked public support.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen also noted that Taiwan had never accepted Beijing’s definition of the 1992 Consensus that includes Taiwan as part of China. Following her statement, Tsai’s previously dire approval rating surged, suggesting that her stance on the issue resonated strongly with the Taiwanese public at a time when Beijing’s position on unification is hardening.

Of perhaps greater long-term consequence is the changing nature of how Taiwanese see themselves. Since 1992, the Election Studies Centre has also mapped identity in Taiwan by asking respondents to comment on their ethnicity. Over the period, the proportion of respondents who saw themselves as exclusively Taiwanese increased from 17% to 54%. The proportion of respondents who saw themselves in terms of a dual identity, as both Taiwanese and Chinese, decreased from 46% to 38%. Crucially, over the same period, the proportion of respondents who saw themselves as Chinese (with no reference to a Taiwanese identity) decreased from 26% to 4%.

It’s not clear how this strengthening of a specific Taiwanese identity will impact on Taipei’s broader posture towards Beijing. Of potential relevance is the increase in Taiwan’s defence budget in recent years. Taipei increased its defence budget by just under 2% in 2018, and Tsai has sought a further increase of 5.6% for the 2019 defence budget. This boost in defence spending is occurring in the context of increased pressure from Beijing, but Taipei’s sharper focus on homegrown defence systems suggests that it’s trying to be less reliant on Washington for its military capability.

Nevertheless, the warfighting capability of the Taiwanese defence forces, which has been clearly overtaken by Chinese military advances in recent years, remains unclear. The Taiwanese military itself assesses that it could only hold off an invading Chinese force for two weeks. The Taiwanese public is also pessimistic about Taipei’s ability to counter a Chinese invasion. An early 2018 survey indicated that over 65% of respondents have no confidence that Taiwanese forces could repel an attack by Beijing. Interestingly, 41% of respondents also doubted that the US would intervene in the event of a Chinese attack.

These figures tell only part of the complex story that is Taiwanese identity and Taiwanese perceptions of the relationship with China. What they do illustrate is the emergence of a distinct Taiwanese identity detached from a broader pan-Chinese identity over a period which has also seen democracy take root and flourish in Taipei’s political culture. Nevertheless, on the question of independence versus unification, most Taiwanese appear to favour the status quo.

As noted by Rod Lyon and Michael Shoebridge, any discussion that seeks to shed light on the strategic ambiguity of the US position and the question of whether the US would respond to Chinese military action makes it difficult for Taiwan to maintain the status quo.

But Beijing may ultimately prove unwilling to countenance a continuation of the status quo. Taiwan’s evolving democratic political culture and independent national identity represent direct threats to Beijing not because they potentially presage a future declaration of independence, but because they challenge Beijing’s authoritarian model of governance.

By demonstrating that a state with ‘Chinese origins’ can successfully evolve from an authoritarian system into something more representative and based on the principle of political succession, Taipei is showing the people of China that there may be alternatives to Beijing’s increasingly pervasive authoritarian surveillance state.

Unfortunately, there’s also another issue at play on the Taiwan question—Taiwan is a de facto sovereign state that deserves to be treated as such, yet its future is being determined largely by third parties. Given the current challenges facing the rules-based global order of sovereign states—particularly the problems created by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its undeclared war in eastern Ukraine—it’s unlikely that the global order will survive a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, regardless of whether the US or others act to support Taipei.