“Strategic ambiguity” over Taiwan has long been the fanciful way for the United States and its allies to avoid saying the quiet part out loud: in the event of a second Chinese civil war across the Taiwan Strait, everyone may end up getting involved.
US allies in the Asia-Pacific have long understood this. But the trick is not to spell it out. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, unfortunately, committed the diplomatic sin of more or less stating it openly. Then, all hell broke loose.
Predictably, Beijing responded with fury and demanded a retraction. Takaichi continued to equivocate, but last week, she qualified her offending remarks by declaring her country’s position on Taiwan had not changed from its basis in the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique. Has she backed down from her previous statement? Not really, as we shall see. Will China take the bait? That depends.
It all started on November 7 when former foreign minister Katsuya Okada pressed Takaichi in the Japanese parliament about Taiwan and how a crisis might trigger a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan under its security laws.
In her reply, the hawkish prime minister boldly said that if Beijing uses “warships and that is accompanied with the use of force then, however you think about it, that could be a ‘survival-threatening situation’. The government would judge how to respond based on all the information on the actual situation in specific individual cases”.
This is actually a double offence for Beijing. First, under Japan’s security laws passed in 2015, a new condition was added to the pacifist restraints of its post-war constitution under which it could deploy its military only in self-defence: it could engage militarily to preserve Japan’s independence and the welfare of its people by assisting a foreign nation with “a close relationship to Japan”. That unnamed foreign nation is widely considered to be the US.
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