Noah Feldman, Columnist

Uncertainty Fills the Taiwan Strait

China is posturing, and what the Trump administration will do about it is unclear.

January 12, 2017 at 7:05 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Taiwan's navy, at the ready.
Source: AFP/Getty Images

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The world's most dangerous flashpoint got much more dangerous Thursday when China sent its lone aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Strait and Taiwan scrambled fighter jets in response. This is how accidental wars start: provocation and counterprovocation in an environment with too much uncertainty. The uncertainty arises from not knowing the Donald Trump administration’s answer to a pressing foreign policy question: Would the U.S. defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack?

The answer as a matter of U.S. policy has long been complicated. Legally, the U.S. has no treaty obligation to defend Taiwan, and the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 says only that the U.S. would view an attack with “grave concern.” Analysts refer to this as a policy of “strategic ambiguity.”