Eyck Freymann

And this has been reaffirmed by Congress, which in 1979 passed the Taiwan Relations Act that makes very clear that it's the sense of Congress that we should treat Taiwan as a state in basically every respect except for some of these formal, very high-end political and military interactions.

And then in the Reagan administration, we made some extra commitments to Taiwan called the Six Assurances.

And they basically reduced to, we will not force you to the negotiating table.

We will not trade you away.

In other words, you will never face pressure from us to take a bad deal.

And what this policy adds up to has been called by political scientists dual deterrence.

We want to deter Taiwan from declaring independence or doing something provocative that might trigger a crisis.

And we want to persuade Beijing that if it intervenes, it might face a devastating reaction, but that they don't have to worry because Taiwan is also deterred, so they can take their time.

And hopefully, if we deter both sides from doing something extreme, we can encourage them

to resolve their differences peacefully.

So that strategic ambiguity is the not saying exactly what we would do or under what circumstances.

The tricky thing is that was a great policy when we had overwhelming economic, technological, and military advantages.

That is no longer the case.

We probably could defeat China in a high-end conventional war, and we can go into why.

If we put sanctions on China, we could probably cause a greater GDP hit in China, and we can get into why.

But the cost to us and the risk to us as Americans is just going up, up, up as the relative balance shifts.

And so now it increasingly seems like it's a get-out-of-jail-free card, even if it isn't.

It's how nerdy do you want to get?

So here's the thing.

I mentioned that the dispute is largely about what China means.