Biden Administration Wrestles With the Urgency of China’s Threat to Taiwan

Tensions across the Taiwan Strait are at their highest in years, perhaps since the crises in 1995 and 1996, Those crises triggered the United States’ most overt display of military support for the island and some believe helped motivate China’s subsequent campaign of military modernization. The question of what the new Biden administration must do to ensure the question over Taiwan’s governance is not resolved by violence, and what it should be prepared to risk to that end, appears to have a new urgency.

Over the past year, increasing incursions by Chinese aircraft into Taiwanese airspace have forced the island’s air force to sortie interceptors at unprecedented rates. Some worry that China’s strategy is degrading the combat effectiveness of Taiwan’s air force by increasing stress on its airframes, reducing readiness, and exhausting its pilots. Last year Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry issued a report warning of China’s increased military preparations for a cross-strait invasion.

The outgoing head of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Phil Davidson, recently told Congress that he believed China may act to take control over Taiwan before the next decade is out: “I worry that they’re accelerating their ambitions to supplant the United States and our leadership role in the rules-based international order, which they’ve long said that they want to do that by 2050. I’m worried about them moving that target closer. Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions before then. And I think the threat is manifest during this decade, in fact in the next six years.”

The United States does not guarantee Taiwan’s security against a mainland invasion. Though it is broadly assumed that Washington would intervene on the island’s behalf, the U.S. has only committed to helping to ensure that Taiwan can defend itself against China.

After Joe Biden was elected last November, many Taiwanese worried that he would not be as supportive as Trump, despite the latter’s off-and-on courting of China’s Xi Jinping. A new book even alleges that the former president told a U.S. senator that “Taiwan is like two feet from China. We are 8,000 miles away. If they invade, there isn't a fucking thing we can do about it."

But Biden began his administration signaling strong support for the autonomous island by inviting its de facto ambassador to his inauguration as an official guest for the first time. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has reiterated the United States’ One China policy – which does not recognize Beijing’s claim over the island – and its commitment to cross-strait peace to his counterparts in Beijing. In a March congressional hearing, Blinken even referred to Taiwan as a “country,” a characterization that U.S. officials have generally avoided. 

Since the Biden administration was inaugurated in January, the U.S. Navy has sent three warships through the Taiwan Strait, increasing the already high tempo of naval passages through the sensitive waters at the end of the Trump administration.

The United States also appears to be doing more to enlist the support of partners against a potential Chinese invasion.

Any U.S. intervention on behalf of Taiwan would almost necessarily involve forces based in or staging out of Japan. This is politically sensitive given Japan’s defensive constitutional barriers. It is also strategically fraught since U.S. bases in Japan could potentially make tempting targets for a pre-emptive attack by the PLA ahead of a potential strike against Taiwan. At the same time, mainland control over the island is seen as strategically perilous for Japan. Together with Taiwan, Japan’s extended island chain effectively encircles China’ access to the western Pacific Ocean.

For this reason, reports that a recent meeting between U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Japanese Defense Minister Kishi Nobuo included an agreement to cooperate in the event of a crisis over Taiwan are a significant indicator of its willingness to participate in military operations in some capacity, though Japan’s policy remains to support peaceful resolution of the cross-strait dispute.

Later in his testimony, Davidson implied support for reconsideration of the United States’ decades-long policy of “strategic ambiguity” with respect to how far it would go to prevent China from taking control of Taiwan. The move is controversial but gaining more support from mainstream foreign policy voices who believe that the United States needs to make explicit security guarantees for Taiwan in the face of China’s growing power.

The current policy is a diplomatic hedge born out of the early years of normalizing relations between the United States and China. It was intended to provide just enough uncertainty to deter China from making a move against the island but without impeding improving relations with a policy position that the Communist Party could not accept. Now that the two countries are economically enmeshed, even despite moves to “decouple” some sensitive or strategic dependencies, some believe that security guarantees can be made without unacceptable damage to the economic relationship, but others worry that consideration of such an announcement might incentivize China to attack when it may otherwise not have.

Balancing debates over how much the United States ought to risk on behalf of Taiwan are debates over just how urgently China actually wants to resolve the cross-strait dispute.

Some strategic analysts note that the official language on Taiwan’s status coming out of the most recent National People’s Congress in March was relatively stock and non-specific, a departure from language in a speech by Xi in 2019 and last year’s Congress that implied timelines for resolving the dispute may move up and that non-peaceful means could be necessary.

Earlier this year a scholar at a research institute affiliated with China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published an essay outlining the military and political hurdles to mounting an invasion of Taiwan, running risks to more pressing domestic priorities that China’s leaders were unlikely to accept anytime soon, if ever. While the essay was not reflective of official policy, and not necessarily representative of a majority view of China’s political elite, it shows that these internal doubts and concerns circulate within its policy community.

Back in the United States, important voices signal that whatever the United States does to balance China’s threats to its neighbors, it won’t be through overwhelming military force.

Congressman Adam Smith, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Pentagon’s authorities and helps determine its budget, is skeptical of a military buildup to face China. “I am worried that we are running towards the idea that the only way to deal with China is to build a military that is large enough to dominate them. I think that’s a mistake,” he has said. “I think it’s unbelievably expensive, unnecessarily provocative, and also in the modern era of warfare, pretty much impossible. We are not going to get to the point of having a military that dominates China… It’s just not going to happen.”