For the Well-Being of All by Bonnie J Taylor

The assurance requires conveying to the target, in a way that it can trust, that it will not be taken advantage of if it refrains from taking the proscribed action.Īvoiding war in the Taiwan Strait requires all sides to be deterred.

The threat requires signaling both the costs of a proscribed action and sufficient political will to impose those costs. Deterrence requires credibility in both of its elements: threat and assurance. policy toward support for Taiwan’s permanent separation from the mainland is more likely to provoke than to deter an attack on Taiwan. Senate last year, Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, implied that the United States could never allow Beijing to control Taiwan because such an outcome would make it impossible to defend other U.S. threat of a military response to a mainland attack. forces to Taiwan to lend credibility to the U.S. Still others have called for a permanent (and significant) deployment of U.S. These calls have intensified since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with some commentators even advocating for formal recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign country.

analysts and officials have called for the United States to treat Taiwan as if it were an independent state and to abandon the long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” in favor of “strategic clarity,” defined as an unconditional commitment to use military force to defend the island in the event of a mainland Chinese attack. Instead of heeding that lesson, a growing number of U.S. As tension rises between Beijing and Washington over Taiwan, strategists on all sides seem to have forgotten what the American game theorist Thomas Schelling taught years ago: deterring an adversary from taking a proscribed action requires a combination of credible threats and credible assurances.

For the Well-Being of All by Bonnie J Taylor