Back in 1990, a US diplomat informed Saddam Hussein that his border dispute with Kuwait was of no concern to the US. We all know what happened next. Would Saddam have invaded Kuwait if he had known how the US would respond? I doubt it. In international affairs, misunderstandings can be very costly. Better to make your policy crystal clear to your adversaries, in order to avoid misunderstandings.
This FT article caught my eye:
It is easy to forget that early in Joe Biden’s presidency he made a bridge-building overture to Vladimir Putin. During the 2020 campaign, Biden barely mentioned Russia as a geopolitical rival to the US. China hogged all the attention. At the Geneva summit with his Russian counterpart in June 2021, the US president went to great lengths to massage Putin’s ego, even calling Russia a great power.
A few weeks later, Biden withdrew America’s remaining forces from Afghanistan in a debacle that threatened to define his presidency.
In retrospect, it is clear that the two seemingly unrelated events — Biden’s positive mood music towards Russia and his Afghanistan pullout — reinforced Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. The west, in Putin’s view, was unlikely to react any more decisively to his planned annexation of Ukraine than it had to Crimea in 2014.
Such misunderstandings have characterised geopolitics through the ages.
I’m not sure this is entirely correct (I suspect Putin expected a quick win.) But it is certainly true that Biden ought to have informed Putin that we’d supply weapons to Ukraine if Russia invaded.
Now you see discussion of “strategic ambiguity” in our policy regarding Taiwan. Here’s Raymond Kuo at Foreign Policy:
Strategic ambiguity typically is understood as deliberately creating uncertainty in Beijing and Taipei about whether the United States would intervene in a war. This supposedly creates dual deterrence: The threat of U.S. intervention prevents China from invading, and the fear of U.S. abandonment prevents Taiwan from sparking a war by declaring independence, which China considers a casus belli. This approach, supporters contend, has kept peace for decades and prevented entrapment, whereby the United States unwillingly gets pulled into war.…
Let’s hope it doesn’t end with a war between the US and China.
A better solution would be to tell Taiwan that we won’t support them if they declare independence, and make clear to China how we will support Taiwan if they are attacked. My own view is that it would be a very bad idea for the US to go to war with China.
A recent article by Tim Willasey-Wilsey makes some good arguments against strategic ambiguity on Taiwan:
There are four problems with strategic ambiguity. The first is that it often masks a genuine uncertainty in the policy-owning country (the US) whether it would go to the defence of the potential victim and whether that defence would include direct military intervention, the provision of arms and intelligence, or neither.
The second is that its very existence can serve as an impediment to genuine policy planning. An incoming secretary of state would be told ‘our policy towards Taiwan is one of strategic ambiguity’ and the briefing would then move on to the next topic. In other words, it looks like a policy but, unless underpinned by full assessment and planning, it is a vacuum.
The third is that potential aggressors are getting wise to the fact that strategic ambiguity often means ‘absence of policy’. In such circumstances the deterrent effect disappears.
And the fourth is that, at the moment of truth, the president will have to take a rushed decision which may embrace a host of other factors such as the state of the global economy and electoral prospects at home.
PS. To be clear, I supported the withdrawal from Afghanistan—and it was certainly not a “debacle”. Any withdrawal from a place like Afghanistan would be very messy, and no amount of “planning” (good luck with that!) would change that fact.
READER COMMENTS
Capt. J Parker
Jul 25 2023 at 8:41am
The thing is Putin has for years made it clear that continued NATO expansion would be met with serious resistance possibly including military action. In this context, a warning from Biden about US arming Ukraine would be about as close to a declaration of war as you could get. Drawing clear lines in the sand is fine as long as both sides end up respecting those lines. I the case of Ukraine there’s a case to be made that it is the US that failed to respect lines drawn years ago.
Scott Sumner
Jul 25 2023 at 3:01pm
Nato is not the reason Putin decided to invade Ukraine. He wants to recreate the Soviet Empire, or at least the European portion.
steve
Jul 25 2023 at 6:38pm
Scott is correct about why Russia invaded Ukraine. Also, people seem to forget that Russia failed in Afghanistan, 15,000 killed and 60,000 wounded. They had a faked withdrawal that looked good on TV but they left hundreds of soldiers behind. Doesnt seem likely they would view our withdrawal as a sign of weakness.
Steve
zshu223
Jul 25 2023 at 2:04pm
Scott,
Your current post has me thinking about a past one – specifically, your notes on being in the 2012 FP 100 and attending their events. There, you said
“During the day I attended a bunch of foreign policy panels. It was interesting to see what these are like, although I can’t really process foreign policy discussion very well. It seems like lots of words, without clear meaning. I couldn’t tell you why we intervened in Libya and not Syria, except I gather that it’s complicated. There doesn’t seem to be a model, but then maybe there can’t be a model–I certainly don’t have any suggestions.”
Still your view, including in relation to US-China-Taiwan?
Scott Sumner
Jul 25 2023 at 3:02pm
Yes, still my view. The foreign policy establishment says we must not go to war with Russia over Ukraine, but must be prepared to go to war with China over Taiwan. If there’s a coherent model, I fail to see it.
Mark Z
Jul 25 2023 at 2:23pm
I think the FT is basically wrong about the Biden admin and Russia. Withdrawing from Afghanistan doesn’t signal anything about the US’s attitude toward Russia; if anything, if the US stayed in Afghanistan, it would’ve been in a weaker position to respond to Russian aggression since resources, manpower, and attention would’ve been bogged down in Afghanistan (and with the Taliban resurgence, that war would likely be heating up quite a bit in 2022). I think attempting to improve relations with Russia was also reasonable. Until the lead-up to the invasion, the best explanation for Russia’s behavior up to that point was that it was, though often nefarious, ultimately rooted in the understandable goal of preventing NATO expansion by creating territorial disputes in candidate countries that preclude accession to NATO, not that it was trying to aggressively take over more territory. Russia had, I think, even specifically declined to annex the separatist parts of Luhansk and Donetsk. Until a few months before it happened, an all-out invasion of Ukraine wasn’t considered a likely scenario, that’s why the administration didn’t feel the need to specifically say it would supply Ukraine with arms if that happened. The FT is reading history backwards here.
Taiwan is a much better example of the perils of ambiguity because it’s something everyone definitely sees coming. But being unambiguous is harder than it seems. A US government on its first day in office can’t unambiguously guarantee anything more than 4 years out (maybe two, if congressional approval is required). A president may figure it’s better to be ambiguous than to commit to supporting a country, and risk the US being discredited a couple years later when the next president withdraws support, e.g. when we joined the Paris climate accords then withdrew a couple years later under a new admin. And a government itself can be very fickle and undecided about what its own interests are. WW1 seems like a textbook example of ambiguity leading to misunderstanding and war, but the participating countries were also very mercurial about what their interests even were. E.g., Germany’s attitude toward Austria intervening in the Balkans did a 180 between Dec. 1912 (the first Balkan war) and July 1914. It’s hard to be unambiguous when your own interests are highly unstable (or in a democracy, when the voters’ perception of the national interest is highly unstable).
Mark Z
Jul 25 2023 at 2:24pm
I thought I put a paragraph break in there. Oh well.
Scott Sumner
Jul 25 2023 at 2:59pm
Fair points, but at least you can be unambiguous about your own policy over the next 4 years.
TMC
Jul 26 2023 at 3:58pm
“Strategic ambiguity” requires a strong president to work. Obama caved with his ‘red line’ and Putin invaded Crimea. Trump bombed and killed 60 Russians soldiers when they used chemical weapons in Syria, and Putin stood still. Another weak President was elected and Putin marched in without hesitation.
I also supported the withdrawal from Afghanistan— bit it was most certainly a debacle.
We should have removed our people, then equipment, then soldiers out. That’s $80 billion of equipment the Ukrainians could have used. I would have even just kept the airport as a base for a while to ensure our interests. Too bad for the girls who used to be able to go to school.
Alexander Turok
Jul 26 2023 at 8:10pm
My suggestion for peace in Ukraine is:
Russia gets all the Ukrainian territory it and its proxies occupied before 2022. This is recognized internationally as part of Russia. Russia withdraws from the remainder. All international sanctions are cancelled.
In return for recognizing Russia’s annexations, Ukraine gets immediately admitted to NATO(or an equivalent alliance without Turkey) along with nuclear weapons, a few American ballistic missile submarines and American nuclear and submarine technicians who will agree to a 10 year contract to serve with the Ukrainian armed forces, after which Ukrainian replacements will have been trained.
Both sides can feel like they won. Russia can say that it gained territory and international recognition of said territory, whose residents no longer have to feel like they’re living in limbo. Ukraine can say it gained a promise of protection by the West that the West stubbornly refused to give before 2022 along with a nuclear trump card in case the West tries to weasel out.
Scott Sumner
Jul 27 2023 at 2:31pm
Because appeasement has worked in the past?
Mark Z
Jul 30 2023 at 3:11am
It has worked in the past. The majority of successful peace treaties involved compromises, not one side totally defeating the other. And the latter option isn’t even on the table here. What happens if the Ukraine manages to somehow seize control of Crimea and Russian-controlled eastern Ukraine? Putin admits defeat, retires, and Russia becomes a nice liberal democracy? Even if such a defeat somehow leads to Putin’s government collapsing, which seems unlikely, it’s as likely as not to be replaced by something worse as by something better. In your reading of history, do countries tend to take humiliating defeats with equanimity and just let bygones be bygones?
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