President Joe Biden turned heads on Monday when he pledged that the U.S. would militarily intervene against China if it invaded Taiwan, and signaled that his commitment to the island was stronger than to Ukraine. The confrontational statement marked a sharp departure from the U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan that has prevailed for decades.
But shortly after his remarks, Biden’s administration downplayed the statement, saying that the president had in fact not meant to signal a policy change, and that the usual U.S. posture on Taiwan remained intact.
Biden is marring the credibility of his own speech.
It’s becoming a familiar pattern: Biden makes a bold statement expressing a new degree of readiness for war with a rival or adversary like China or Russia, and then his own staff walks it back. It’s also becoming a troubling pattern — while domestic audiences can laugh off Biden’s gaffes and missteps, there is no guarantee foreign powers will give him the benefit of the doubt. Biden is marring the credibility of his own speech, and potentially unwittingly causing the U.S.’s opponents to come to the conclusion that the U.S. is more inclined toward war than it is.
Biden’s newsmaking moment happened during a press conference in Tokyo alongside Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Here’s the exchange, per NBC News:
“You didn’t want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons,” a reporter asked. “Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?” “Yes,” Biden responded. “That’s the commitment we made,” he added.
That is in fact not the commitment the U.S. has made. The traditional posture of the U.S. is to deliberately not specify what the U.S. would do in response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a self-governing island populated by 23 million people which China has considered a breakaway province that belongs to it since 1949. Under the One China policy that’s been in place since 1979, the U.S. officially recognizes China’s position on Taiwan, but also maintains significant informal diplomatic ties with the island nation — and supplies it with arms.
It’s a delicate, paradox-laden policy space that requires careful maneuvering and nuance — and one Biden should know well. He’s traveled to Taiwan, passed legislation that set in motion decades-long policy on the U.S. relationship with Taiwan, and he even once chided George W. Bush for doing … exactly what he just did himself. After Bush said in 2001 that he would do “whatever it took” to defend Taiwan from China, then-senator Biden penned a critical op-ed in The Washington Post. “As a matter of diplomacy, there is a huge difference between reserving the right to use force and obligating ourselves, a priori, to come to the defense of Taiwan,” he wrote. In the piece, Biden emphasized that “words matter, in diplomacy.”
But it’s unclear exactly how much Biden’s words matter. Shortly after his remarks, a White House official told NBC News “our policy has not changed,” which is tantamount to a walkback. That’s because Biden responded affirmatively to a question about whether the U.S. would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan in contrast to the U.S. declining to do so in Ukraine. He also did not qualify his statement, or hedge in any way.
And at another point, Biden emphasized how he perceived defending Taiwan as more high-stakes than Ukraine. “The idea that that can be taken by force, just taken by force, it’s just not appropriate,” he said of Taiwan. “It would dislocate the entire region and be another action similar to what happened in Ukraine. And so it’s a burden that is even stronger.” Yet while Biden certainly sounded like he was signaling a policy shift to the world, his administration claimed he didn’t.
The Biden administration has actually done this whole dance at least twice before on Taiwan, each time the president seeming to stake out a new, more bellicose position, and his staff doing clean-up after. And Biden has also had similar things happen with Russia policy, when, for example, his staff had to clarify that the U.S. was not seeking regime change in Moscow after Biden said “Putin cannot remain in power.” Call it unstrategic ambiguity — a lack of clarity born of incompetence or indiscipline rather than a deliberate decision to keep the opponent guessing. Strategic ambiguity can be a source of strength, by acting as a deterrent without requiring the U.S. to commit resources or obligating it to one course of action, such as a major war. But unstrategic ambiguity signals a bumbling foreign policy apparatus. Biden weakens the gravity of his words if his remarks are constantly being mopped up and it’s evident that he isn’t able to stay on message. He could accidentally impose pressure on himself to have his policy conform to his toughest off-the-cuff rhetoric in order to save face. And worst of all, countries like Russia and China may perceive Biden as more of a saber-rattler than he intends to be, and in turn consider or pivot toward more confrontational policy regimes against the U.S. than they would have otherwise. Much of Biden’s proposition when campaigning for president was to restore American credibility to the U.S. after Donald Trump’s tenure. Being careful and consistent with language is an important part of achieving that goal.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy. 
