The former prime minister advises abandoning strategic ambiguity.
If there is a “gathering storm” in the Indo-Pacific, Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may be the Asian Winston Churchill. In an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times on April 12, Abe called for the U.S. and Japan to end strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan. “The policy of ambiguity,” Abe wrote, “worked extremely well as long as the U.S. was strong enough to maintain it, and as long as China was far inferior to the U.S. in military power. But those days are over.” Abe wrote that the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity “is now fostering instability in the Indo-Pacific region, by encouraging China to underestimate American resolve, while making the government in Taipei unnecessarily anxious.”
