Current and former US military leaders are increasingly urging Washington to abandon its long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” to counter Beijing’s attempts to change the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait, Nikkei Asia reported on Friday.
“Strategic ambiguity has had its day and it’s time to move to strategic clarity,” retired admiral Harry Harris, former commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, told the magazine on the sidelines of the Global Energy Security Talks in Tokyo.
“The Taiwan Relations Act calls for a peaceful resolution and calls for the status quo,” Harris said. “China has changed the status quo and is acting belligerently with regard to Taiwan, so that obligates us to do certain things to help Taiwan.”
Photo: Mass Communication Specialist Third-class Ismael Martinez, US Navy via AP
The act stipulates that peace and stability in the region are in the “political, security and economic interests of the US,” and that the US president and the US Congress must take “appropriate action” should those interests be put at risk, he said.
US President Joe Biden has said four times that his administration would defend Taiwan, Harris said.
“We should take him at his word. He is our commander-in-chief,” he said.
Harris’ successors as commanders of the US Indo-Pacific Command, retired admirals Philip Davidson and John Aquilino, have both testified in Congress that strategic ambiguity had served the US well, Nikkei Asia reported.
However, Commander of the Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Samuel Paparo did not defend the policy of ambiguity or use the term to describe the US’ stance toward Taiwan during his confirmation hearing earlier this year, the magazine said.
“There is no ambiguity for the joint force,” he said. “There is just the mission clarity contained within the Taiwan Relations Act that the [US] Department [of Defense] will aid Taiwan’s ability to defend itself.”
Asked if he meant preparing US regional forces under his command for “every potential,” including combat, Paparo said: “Yes sir. Clarity and mission focus.”
Separately, he told Nikkei Asia during an interview last month that the US closely observed Beijing’s military drills conducted shortly after President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration.
“We watched it. We took note. We learned from it. And they helped us prepare for the future,” he said.
He said he was confident the US and its allies would defeat China in a conflict.
However, Jeremy Furchtgott, director of Washington-based consultancy Baron Public Affairs and leader of the firm’s China practice, said that embracing strategic clarity risks forcing China into a corner.
“If the goal is conflict, the US should signal clarity. If the goal is to freeze the current situation, there should be ambiguity and mixed messages,” he told Nikkei Asia.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
RSS