There has been much talk about the comments of a Chinese military official issuing a dire warning against the US resisting Chinese aggression in the region.
Chinese Rear Admiral Luo Yuan (羅援) in December said that if the Chinese military sank a US aircraft carrier or two, with the loss of up to 10,000 lives, “we’ll see how frightened America is.”
He was referring specifically to the South China Sea, but Chinese generals have made similar murderous threats about US intervention in a conflict with Taiwan.
On Jan. 19, the Guardian carried an article entitled Chinese President “Xi Jinping (習近平) challenges [US President] Donald Trump over Taiwan,” quoting Chinese officials who saw the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis as the time Beijing decided that the ability to destroy US Navy ships was the key to seizing Taiwan:
“The aim was to ensure that the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] air, land, space, cyber and sea forces acting in unison had the capability to sink two carrier fleets... Once such a capacity got acquired, the generals in Beijing believed that Washington would not dare to intervene on the side of Taipei,” the report said.
US officials also saw the 1995-1996 events as significant — and worrisome. One Asian affairs veteran of then-US president Bill Clinton’s administration called it “our own Cuban missile crisis — we had peered into the abyss.”
It is worth recounting how the situation unfolded.
Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), Taiwan’s appointed president at the time, was the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate for the nation’s first direct presidential election in March 1996.
An alumnus of Cornell University, Lee was invited to attend his alma mater’s reunion in June 1995. China strongly objected to the US visit of such a high-level Taiwanese official and then-US secretary of state Warren Cristopher, sensitive to Chinese concerns, assured Beijing that Lee would not be granted a visa.
However, the uproar from American friends of Taiwan, particularly in the US Congress, caused the Clinton administration to reverse itself, Lee’s visa was granted, he gave his speech in Ithaca and Beijing went ballistic, literally. China fired missiles across the Taiwan Strait and conducted live-fire exercises, closing shipping lanes, disrupting air and maritime commerce, and sending insurance rates soaring.
Unsure how far China would go, Clinton deployed the USS Nimitz aircraft battle group into the Taiwan Strait to deter any Chinese escalation. This was the first time the US Navy had entered the Strait since then-US president Richard Nixon in 1972 pulled the Seventh Fleet out as a goodwill gesture prior to his historic visit to China.
Beijing saw the move as adding insult to injury and protested vehemently to Washington at this violation of what it considered Chinese waters. The Clinton administration quickly offered the Chinese an “explanation” of the transit: Bad weather had caused a diversion of the ships into the Strait.
China took this as an implied admission by the US government that Strait transits could only be made with Beijing’s permission. That gave it reason to question how seriously Washington was committed to defending Taiwan. Was this a one-off, purely symbolic US gesture, unlikely to lead to follow-up action?
So, Chinese officials decided to confront the issue directly with their US counterparts. In a December 1995 meeting with then-US assistant secretary of defense Joseph Nye, they asked him point blank what Washington would do if China outright attacked Taiwan.
“We don’t know and you don’t know,” Nye answered. “It would depend on the circumstances.”
(When asked later why he had given such an equivocal response, Nye said that he wanted to avoid a replay of the situation that led to the Korean War after US officials indicated that the US would not defend South Korea.)
Beijing decided it needed to test Nye’s strategic ambiguity doctrine and as Taiwan’s election approached, it again began firing missiles across the Strait, this time straddling both sides of the island.
A PLA general also issued a blunt warning against US reaction: “You care more about Los Angeles than Taiwan.”
The Clinton administration also upped the ante, sending two carriers and accompanying ships toward Taiwan.
However, this time, Beijing threatened a fierce response: If the US Navy entered the Strait, it would face a “sea of fire.” Washington turned the ships around.
Both sides took lessons from the episode. The US kept its navy out of the Strait for the next decade — until then-US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2005 directed the navy to resume normal operations.
However, US capabilities were not matched by a clear US will, so China kept building its naval, air and cyber forces — the new “circumstances” Washington must now confront in deciding whether to defend Taiwan.
The 1995-1996 events pose at least three important questions:
One, what if after Beijing protested the Nimitz passage through the Strait, Washington had responded the way then-US Pacific commander Timothy Keating did when China angrily objected to the Kitty Hawk’s transit in 2007: “We don’t need China’s permission to go through the Taiwan Strait. It’s international waters. We will exercise our free right of passage whenever and wherever we choose, as we have done repeatedly in the past and we’ll do in the future.”
Two, what if, when the Chinese military officers confronted Nye, he had, invoking the Taiwan Relations Act, said that Taiwan’s security is in the US national interest and the US will defend it under all circumstances?
And three, what if when Beijing threatened a “sea of fire,” Clinton had called its bluff and sent the two carriers into the Strait?
Those questions about China’s state of mind then, and how its strategic thinking might have changed by a clear and firm US posture, may never be fully answered.
However, the question the Chinese asked about US intentions must be answered, definitively and soon, before Beijing makes a fatal strategic miscalculation and we end up blundering into the very war Nye’s strategic ambiguity intended to avoid.
Yet, since the 1995-1996 crisis, no subsequent US administration has corrected the fatally flawed Nye formulation of US intentions.
In 2001, then-US president George W. Bush briefly attempted clarification when a journalist asked him the same question shortly after he took office: “What would the US do to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack?”
“Whatever it took,” he said.
Shocked US officials, supported by academic and think tank experts quickly got the administration to “clarify” that nothing had changed.
A similar reaction occurred when Trump took a congratulatory call from President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and said he did not feel bound by the “one China” policy.
It is time for a new presidential clarification to remove any doubt from the minds of Xi and his colleagues: Washington will intervene on Taiwan’s side against any form of Chinese communist aggression. Otherwise, US strategic ambiguity seems certain to lead to Chinese strategic miscalculation.
Joseph Bosco is a former China country desk officer in the office of the US secretary of defense, fellow at the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies and member of the advisory board at Global Taiwan Institute.
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