A Taiwanese defense expert said he believes the best approach to counter China’s “gray zone” warfare tactics is for the US to ditch its long-held policy of “strategic ambiguity” in favor of “strategic clarity.”
In an article published online on Wednesday, Huang Chung-ting (黃宗鼎), an associate research fellow at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said that Washington has publicly blamed Beijing for two dangerous encounters between the two countries’ militaries over the past few weeks.
One was an incident between the US Navy and a Chinese warship in the Taiwan Strait last week. A video clip released on Sunday by the US appears to show a Chinese vessel crossing in front of a US destroyer, forcing it to slow down to avoid a collision.
Photo: Reuters / US Navy / Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Andre Richard
Another incident at the end of last month involved a Chinese jet which the US accused of carrying out an “unnecessarily aggressive” maneuver near a US military plane in international airspace over the South China Sea.
Calling the two incidents “unacceptable,” US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Monday said that such “unsafe and unprofessional intercepts” could lead to “misunderstandings” and “miscalculations.”
In response, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) said that “the measures taken by the Chinese military are completely reasonable, legitimate, and professional and safe,” and accused the US of being the aggressor.
Huang said the two Sino-US skirmishes took place near Taiwan’s southeast air defense identification zone and in the Taiwan Strait, seriously jeopardizing Taiwan’s national security and US freedom of navigation.
Such incidents, together with a recent clash in the disputed South China Sea in which Manila accused Beijing of shining a “military grade” laser light at a Philippine coast guard boat, are part of Beijing’s “gray zone” warfare tactics deployed to test US responses to such aggressive behavior, Huang said.
Washington and Manila have a long-standing US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty, which dictates that both nations would support each other if either were to be attacked by a third party, Huang said.
However, the treaty does not give a clear definition of what constitutes an attack or whether shining a laser at the Philippine vessel is regarded as a form of attack, he said.
The lack of a clear definition of attack in the mutual defense treaty is one example of US adoption of “strategic ambiguity” to avoid angering China, he said.
To counter China’s “gray zone” warfare, Huang said the US should ditch such ambiguity and make clear what kind of military response it would take should China continue to use similar tactics against the US and other countries.
“Gray zone” tactics are generally defined as coercive actions that do not meet the threshold of conventional warfare.
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