Mon, Jul 28, 2025 page8

• John J. Tkacik, Jr. On Taiwan: A Strategy of Denial

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  Elbridge Colby, America’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, is the most influential voice on defense strategy in the Second Trump Administration. For insight into his thinking, one could do no better than read his thoughts on the defense of Taiwan which he gathered in a book he wrote in 2021. The Strategy of Denial, is his contemplation of China’s rising hegemony in Asia and on how to deter China from invading Taiwan. Allowing China to absorb Taiwan, he wrote, would open the entire Indo-Pacific region to Chinese preeminence and result in a power transition that would place America’s prosperity and security in peril.

  Mr. Colby’s global anxieties about great-power hegemony and its threats to the global status quo have an honorable pedigree. Alarmed by Hitler’s rise in Germany, Winston Churchill warned Parliament in March 1936: “For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating power on the Continent, and particularly to prevent the Low Countries [Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland] falling into the hands of such a power.”

  America’s foremost post-war diplomatic thinker, George Kennan, expanded Sir Winston’s perspective to all Eurasia. Mr. Kennan wrote in 1950 that, just as Britain’s position depended on the maintenance of a balance of power on the European Continent, “thus it was essential to us, as it was to Britain, that no single Continental land power should come to dominate the entire Eurasian land mass” nor “conquer the seafaring fringes of the land mass, become a great sea power as well as a land power” and thereby “enter on an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and supported by the immense resources of the interior of Europe and Asia.”

  

  In the 20th Century, Sir Winston’s concern was Hitler; Mr. Kennan’s rising hegemon was Soviet Russia. In the 21st Century, similarly, Mr. Colby asserts America’s strategic imperative “is to be the external cornerstone balancer for a coalition designed to frustrate Chinese pretensions to hegemony in Asia.” Quite reasonably, he believes it absolutely essential for the United States to assemble an “anti-hegemonic coalition” in a strategy to deny Taiwan to China. The greater part of his “Strategy of Denial” centers on the military and diplomatic measures the United States must take to alter Beijing’s cost-benefit analysis of an armed attack on Taiwan.

  The only quibble I have with Mr. Colby’s denial strategy is that he limits his deterrence strategy to military and alliance operations but seems to neglect the importance of other moves which might more effectively deter Beijing.

  In 1979, Congress statutorily broadened the US defense commitment to Taiwan far beyond clear instances of “armed attack” to include any “non-peaceful” aggression or “other forms of coercion” against Taiwan. “Any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes,” were considered “a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” To meet these threats, the TRA asserted a United States policy “to maintain the capacity [-] to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.”

  While Mr. Colby devotes much attention to the realms of alliance diplomacy and military planning, there are other dimensions of a “denial” strategy that inform China’s plans to annex Taiwan: legitimacy, forestalling Taiwan’s formal independence, eradicating “the Governing Authorities on Taiwan” after a successful invasion, and seizing Taiwan’s assets overseas. (There are others, but listing them would confuse the issue.) So, I suggest that, for any “Strategy of Denial” to be successful, there must be credible American and “Third-Country” (that is, countries other than “China” and “Taiwan”) cooperation in these lawfare realms.

  First, Washington and Tokyo, at the very least, should explicate their denial of international legitimacy to any Chinese aggression against Taiwan. Many countries which signed the 1951 San Francisco Treaty still acknowledge (privately more than publicly) that Taiwan’s status was left unsettled and that sovereignty over Taiwan was never ceded to China. Indeed, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Japan and Australia still hold this truth “in pectore” as it were — agreeing to China’s demands not to talk about Taiwan’s status in return for China’s acquiescence to their formal protestations that Taiwan’s future must be “resolved peacefully”. As Beijing often declares that Taiwan’s “independence means war”, so too should Washington, Tokyo and like-minded “third-country” capitals explicitly caution Beijing that “war means Taiwan independence.”

  Second, to buttress the credibility of Taiwan’s independence in the event of Chinese aggression, member states of Mr. Colby’s “anti-hegemonic coalition” may want to study the Taiwan Relations Act’s (TRA) creative statutory language which accommodates formal recognition of a governing entity called the “governing authorities on Taiwan”. The American TRA explicitly includes “Taiwan” under the rubric of “foreign countries, nations, states, governments, or similar entities”; “approves the continuation in force of all treaties and other international agreements”; mandates US defense articles and services for Taiwan; authorizes diplomatic-immunity treatment for Taiwan’s representatives; preserves Taiwan government properties in the US.

  Crucially, the US law also mandates the full spectrum of government-to-government relations between the United States and an entity specifically defined as: “the governing authorities on Taiwan recognized by the United States as the Republic of China prior to January 1, 1979.” It is that entity, only, which the Taiwan Relations Act covers. The Act anticipates that there may, in the future, arise some “successor governing authorities” to the authorities once recognized by the US as the “ROC”, but it does not contemplate any successor revolutionary regime, military government of occupation or communist-installed regime. The plain wording of the Taiwan Relations Act encompasses a possible future “Republic of Taiwan” as a recognized entity, so long as its name did not include the word “China” — there is, after all, only one China, and Taiwan isn’t it.

  Third, and most importantly, the credibility of any “Independent Taiwan” in a post-invasion context diminishes once a Chinese army occupies the island. To preserve credibility, Mr. Colby’s “anti-hegemonic coalition” must have a legitimate “Taiwan Government” to deal with. The preservation and continuity of the TRA-defined “Governing Authorities on Taiwan, recognized …etc., etc.” either on Taiwanese territory — or in exile. Under section 3314(2) of the TRA, the pre-1979 “ROC” is the only entity recognized in US law as legitimately possessing Taiwan’s national assets and properties.

  Fourth, there is the matter of US$600 billion in ROC foreign exchange reserves and vaguely some US$1.5 trillion in private Taiwan assets abroad — that is, not in Taiwan. The TRA-defined “pre-1979 ROC” holds sovereign possession of “… rights or interests in properties, tangible and intangible, and other things of value, owned or held on or prior to December 31, 1978, or thereafter acquired or earned by the governing authorities on Taiwan.” This last matter, of course, is self-enforcing, but ensuring its smooth execution requires the attention of the Congress, the State, Justice and Treasury Departments, the Federal Reserve and the US Judiciary.

  Given the staggering magnitude of assets at stake, the United States ought to take this latter issue far more seriously than it has thus far. A “Strategy of Denial” designed to make Beijing think twice about forcing the Taiwan issue by “other than peaceful means” let alone “armed attack,” is less than credible absent the specter of “Taiwan Independence.” That specter is enhanced if “the governing authorities on Taiwan recognized by the United States as the Republic of China prior to January 1, 1979,” and the United States Government can explore arrangements for a government-in-exile should the need arise. It would take as little an executive order or as much as an amendment to the TRA.

  John J. Tkacik, Jr. is a retired US foreign service officer who has served in Taipei and Beijing and is now director of the Future Asia Project at the International Assessment and Strategy Center. He is also on the Advisory Board of the Global Taiwan Institute.
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