US Response to Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Not 'Black and White,' Former Official Says

Although U.S. lawmakers have called on the Biden administration to develop a set of sanctions it could immediately impose against China if Beijing were to invade Taiwan, experts told a think tank this week that it remains unclear how exactly the U.S. would respond, including whether it would use military force.

About 96% of U.S. expert respondents in a new survey by the Center for Strategic and International Studies said they were “completely or moderately confident” the U.S. would respond militarily to defend Taiwan. But Taiwan experts surveyed were less confident in U.S. support and had "even lower confidence" U.S. allies would join in.

Ivan Kanapathy, the former director of China, Taiwan and Mongolia with the White House’s National Security Council, said the U.S. has a range of ways it can intervene that may not involve its military. He said there are "lessons that we can gather" from the U.S. response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has included a host of multilateral sanctions against Moscow and defense aid to Kyiv.

“I think it's important for us all here in Washington and in Taipei to keep in mind that the policy process in the United States isn't sort of a black and white,” he said during a Jan. 22 event hosted by CSIS. He said the U.S. government can choose from “different levels of intervention,” which could depend “very, very largely on Taiwan's own posture and Taiwan's own response to aggression.”

The U.S. Select Committee on China has called on the Biden administration and its allies to better coordinate on a potential sanctions response if China invades Taiwan (see 2305240048), and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June advanced a bill that would require the administration to form a sanctions strategy that would be triggered if China invades Taiwan (see 2306090012).

Kanapathy, a non-resident CSIS senior associate, said any U.S. reaction might be influenced by the election year pressure President Joe Biden faces. He said Republicans will paint Biden as being “weak” on China, and he specifically pointed to a November meeting between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in California, which resulted in the U.S. removing a Chinese scientific institute from the Entity List (see 2311160003). Administration officials said the move helped convince the Chinese government to work more closely on stopping the flow of illegal fentanyl to the U.S (see 2312120070), but it was criticized by Republicans, who called the removal premature (see 2312050057).

“President Biden's going to have to respond,” Kanapathy said. “He's not just the president, he's also a candidate on a campaign, and he's going to have to be able to respond to attacks from the other side and from his opponents that he's being weak, for example, on China.”

Kristen Gunness, a senior policy researcher with Rand Corp. and a former Pentagon official, said the U.S. presidential election will be “critical” to how China views its relationship with Washington and how it assesses a potential U.S. defense of Taiwan. “If you look at the U.S.-China competition in general, it's partly a competition for influence with allies and partners in building those relationships,” she said. “And so who becomes president will have implications for that.”

She added that China is “studying what's going on in Ukraine and they're coming up with some lessons learned from that situation,” such as the types of military equipment Ukraine is using against Russia and how the U.S. has been able to “rally or not rally and sustain resources for supporting” Ukraine.

“I think these are sort of trends that China's watching,” Gunness said, “and some of those might be applied to how they assess a Taiwan situation.”