Strategic Ambiguity, Strategic Clarity, and Dual Clarity

Abstract The United States has successfully prevented the military conflict between China and Taiwan since the 1980s through the Strategic Ambiguity (SA) strategy, which discourages both sides from deviating from the status quo by not committing to defend or not to defend Taiwan. The recent US–China tensions and the rising nationalism in China and Taiwan drew critics to SA and suggested it be replaced with the strategic clarity strategy. We argue that the choice of Dual Clarity (DC)—the United States promises to defend only if Taiwan does not unilaterally declare de jure independence—is widely ignored. We examine the psychological mechanisms behind the three strategies through a pre-registered, within-subject survey experiment in Taiwan (n = 910). The result shows that DC can keep the status quo similar to SA—respondents lowered their support of independence in both DC and SA conditions. The results hold through robustness checks and formalized by a game-theoretical model.