"Strategic ambiguity" caused us to miss a practical opportunity to have reasonably settled the matter decades ago.
Incredibly, this hasn't dawned on R. Nicholas Burns, our ambassador to China. According to The Diplomat, Burns observed during his confirmation hearings that strategic ambiguity is "time tested" and "the smartest and most effective way" to prevent a war across the Taiwan Strait.
Strategic buffoonery? That's now an understatement.
When asked if U.S. forces would defend Taiwan if it's invaded, President Biden answered "yes," according to Reuters.
So how is our Congress handling this matter? A sane approach would be to support closed-door negotiations with the PRC to settle it. This will require give and take on both sides. Our negotiators would need to have something to give to the PRC in return for PRC's compromise. And there would have to be a way to allow the PRC to save face. The U.S. would have to compromise and save face, too.
These would not be easy negotiations. But the alternative of war with China would seem to demand no less than a negotiated, peaceful solution.
So how is Congress presently dealing with this challenge? It is choosing to tempt war with China. This sounds like more buffoonery to me.
HR.554 is a bill under consideration in the House of Representatives. It is called the "Taiwan Conflict Deterrence Act of 2023." It is described as, "A bill to deter Chinese aggression towards Taiwan by requiring the Secretary of the Treasury to publish a report on financial institutions and accounts connected to senior officials of the People's Republic of China, to restrict financial services for certain immediate family of such officials, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Financial Services."
To me this seems something like our approach to Russia since conflict first broke out in Ukraine in 2014. Sanctions, sanctions, sanctions. Now we see a bloody, horrific war going on non-stop over there. Certainly Russia is to blame for its decision to invade. But our policy of sanctions against Russia did nothing to avert that catastrophe or to curtail it. At worst it could have been an accelerant.
Why try this same fool's game with China over Taiwan?
There also is S.1074 going on in the Senate. It is a bill "To require a strategy for countering the People's Republic of China." Among other things it seeks a plan "that describes a comprehensive sanctions strategy to advise policymakers on policies the United States and allies and partners of the United States could adopt with respect to the People's Republic of China in response to any coercive action, including an invasion, by the People's Republic of China that infringes upon the territorial sovereignty of Taiwan by preventing access to international waterways, airspace, or telecommunications networks."
What's more it wants to restrict China's military of access to "oil, natural gas, munitions, and other supplies needed to conduct military operations against Taiwan," and to "diminish the capacity of the industrial base of the People's Republic of China to manufacture and deliver defense articles to replace those lost in operations of the People's Liberation Army against Taiwan."
The bill also wants to "identify industries, sectors, or goods and services with respect to which the United States, working with allies and partners of the United States, can take coordinated action through sanctions or other economic tools that will have a significant negative impact on the economy of the People's Republic of China."
If we're planning all that, and planning it in public, isn't China going to see it as a threat? How will she interpret it? What steps toward war will she initiate in response? And in turn, how will we interpret those steps taken by China.
Either we're initiating a spiral of provocation or China initiated it with her own rhetoric. Frankly it doesn't matter now who was the initiator. It still carries a great risk of spinning out of control as tensions rise.
And to make matters worse, aren't we repeating a strategy that didn't produce a desirable result with Ukraine? This all sounds absolutely crazy to me.
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