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For generations, significant elements of international policy have turned on a concerted global effort to ignore an obvious truth: that Taiwan’s legal status is ambiguous. Beijing is adamant that it is sovereign over the island. Taipei is adamant that it is not. Domestic political pressures prevent either from allowing any appearance of giving any ground. Neither is able to unilaterally impose its view on the other; even a “successful” invasion of Taiwan would devastate China’s economy and quite possibly break its military, while a Taiwanese declaration of independence would almost certainly prompt Beijing to demolish the entire island despite the costs and risks.

Most of the rest of the world has sought to accommodate both maximalist positions at the same time, largely by formally accepting Beijing’s view while de facto adopting Taipei’s. By focusing on public rhetoric rather than underlying interests and actions, unfortunately, these efforts ultimately produced decades of miscommunication, uncertainty, and dangerous crises.

For generations, significant elements of international policy have turned on a concerted global effort to ignore an obvious truth: that Taiwan’s legal status is ambiguous. Beijing is adamant that it is sovereign over the island. Taipei is adamant that it is not. Domestic political pressures prevent either from allowing any appearance of giving any ground. Neither is able to unilaterally impose its view on the other; even a “successful” invasion of Taiwan would devastate China’s economy and quite possibly break its military, while a Taiwanese declaration of independence would almost certainly prompt Beijing to demolish the entire island despite the costs and risks.

Most of the rest of the world has sought to accommodate both maximalist positions at the same time, largely by formally accepting Beijing’s view while de facto adopting Taipei’s. By focusing on public rhetoric rather than underlying interests and actions, unfortunately, these efforts ultimately produced decades of miscommunication, uncertainty, and dangerous crises.

The public U.S. position on this point is particularly tangled, opaque, and in many specifics self-contradictory. Administration after administration has twisted itself into pretzels attempting to maintain “strategic ambiguity,” grounded in former President Richard Nixon’s 1972 statement that the U.S. “acknowledges” and “does not challenge” Beijing’s position on Taiwan without endorsing or adopting it. Congress has since repeatedly attempted to distance this U.S. “One China policy” from........

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