The Anti-escalation Logic of Strategic Ambiguity

• In Event: Security Dilemma and War

Abstract

"Strategic ambiguity” is a concept that is ubiquitous in policy debates over the U.S.’s posture over Taiwan for several decades. Yet the term remains undertheorized in both international relations and the broader policy world, leading both proponents and opponents to mischaracterize how strategic ambiguity is supposed to work. In this paper, we suggest that strategic ambiguity cannot be assessed on whether it enhances deterrence. Strategic ambiguity is a policy to encourage de-escalation, or even prevent two states from entering into a bargaining crisis in the first place. Whereas strategic clarity involves issuing credible signals that goad the other party to issue credible signals of their own, strategic ambiguity works by taking away the necessity of the other state to respond. States do this when they ensure that certain sensitive information does not become acknowledged as fact. Sensitive information refers to information that – if it were acknowledged as fact – could cause domestic constituencies or foreign stakeholders to put pressure on state leaders to escalate a crisis. Drawing from scholarship on strategic ambiguity in organizational studies, we show that a policy of strategic ambiguity does not necessitate that such information is kept strictly secret. Rather, it merely requires that sensitive information is plausibly deniable so that it is not intersubjectively shared knowledge. We illustrate these mechanisms in three cases: the Cuban Missile Crisis; NATO expansion; and the Third Taiwan Straits Crisis.

Authors

• Jittip Mongkolnchaiarunya, George Washington University

• Amoz Jin Yi Hor, Centre College