When Clinton Sent Two Carrier Groups to the Taiwan Strait in 1996

Some history lessons are delivered in speeches. The best ones are delivered by aircraft carriers. In March 1996, when the Chinese government fired ballistic missiles into waters a few dozen miles from Taiwan's two busiest ports, the American answer was not a communiqué. It was two carrier battle groups, arriving at the edge of the crisis with an unmistakable message in steel.

It is a rare thing for a conservative to give a Democratic president credit for a national-security decision, and I do it here with pleasure, because the record deserves it. Bill Clinton made a sound call in 1996. But the story is not complete without the other half: what the Chinese government learned from it, and what it built afterward. A show of force that works can also teach the other side to prepare for the next one.

How a visa became a crisis

The crisis began, as many do, with something that looked small. Taiwan's president, Lee Teng-hui, who had earned a doctorate at Cornell University in 1968, wanted to visit his alma mater to attend an alumni reunion and give a speech. The State Department's longstanding practice was to deny visas to Taiwan's top leaders.

Congress did not agree. In May 1995 the House passed a resolution urging the administration to allow the visit, by a vote of 396 to 0, and the Senate passed a similar measure by 97 to 1. Those are not the numbers of a divided country. They are the numbers of a legislature that thought the executive was being pushed around. On May 22, 1995, the administration reversed itself and granted the visa.

Lee spoke at Cornell on June 9, 1995. His address was careful in tone, with its emphasis on Taiwan's democratic transition, but to Beijing it was an alarming political event. The government of the People's Republic reacted angrily and began a campaign of military pressure.

I want to be fair to the Chinese view, because understanding it is part of understanding the crisis. To Beijing, Taiwan is part of China, and a visit by its president on American soil looked like a step toward recognition of a separate state. The Chinese leadership saw the visa as a break with past practice. From where they sat, the United States had broken faith. From where Congress sat, the United States had refused to treat a democratic friend as a pariah. Both perceptions were genuine, which is how crises begin. Diplomats call this a difference of perspective. Everyone else calls it two people reading the same contract and finding different sentences.

Beijing's pressure builds

In July 1995 the People's Liberation Army fired missiles into waters north of Taiwan, near the island's northern tip, and announced exercises. More exercises and missile tests followed in August and in the autumn, including live-fire drills and amphibious exercises on the coast opposite Taiwan. The message was directed at Taiwan's voters as much as at its government. Taiwan was preparing for its first direct presidential election, scheduled for March 23, 1996, the island's first presidential election. Beijing's objective, most analysts agree, was to intimidate the electorate and to discourage a result it did not want, and in particular to make Lee Teng-hui and the idea of a separate Taiwanese identity look costly.

The pressure escalated in early March 1996. China announced a series of missile tests and live-fire exercises, and on March 8 it fired ballistic missiles into zones off the coast, close to Taiwan's northern port of Keelung and its southern port of Kaohsiung. Those are the ports through which much of Taiwan's trade flows. A closing of the approaches to them, even for a few days, would have been a blockade in effect. The launches twice closed the approaches to sea and air commerce, and shipping and insurance rates for freight to Taiwan rose sharply. The missiles reportedly carried unarmed warheads, but the point was not damage. The point was fear.

The American response

The Clinton administration's reaction was initially measured. And then the Pentagon did something that was not imprecise. In March 1996 it ordered the carrier USS Independence, based in Japan, to sail toward the area, and it sent the carrier USS Nimitz and her escorts to follow.

That meant two carrier battle groups, each with an air wing, escorts and submarines. Accounts differ on exactly how close they came and whether any carrier entered the Taiwan Strait itself during the crisis; the Independence group operated to the east of Taiwan, and one account places a Nimitz transit of the strait in December 1995, before the March firings. That detail is not the main point. The main point is that the United States announced, by movement and not by words, that it could and would put a very large military force into the area in a matter of days.

It was the largest American naval deployment to the area since the Vietnam War, by some accounts. It had a purpose that was both military and political. It said to Beijing that missile fire and exercises meant to intimidate Taiwan would be answered by a visible American presence, and it said to Taiwan, and to the countries of the region, that American attention had not wavered.

The crisis subsided. Taiwan held its election on March 23, and Lee Teng-hui won it with a majority of the vote. Voters had been told to be afraid and they went to the polls anyway, which is the most conservative thing a democratic electorate can do: they declined to be intimidated.

Why it worked, in four premises

I do not want to romanticize this. A show of force is a tool, and its success depends on conditions. But the conditions were present, and they are worth listing.

1. The capability was close at hand and credible. The carriers were already in the region or could arrive in days. A force that takes months to assemble does not deter a crisis that takes weeks to unfold.
2. The signal was legible. Beijing could see the carriers move. A signal that the other side cannot read is no signal at all, which is a point I made at greater length in Deterrence Fails When an Enemy Thinks You Will Not Pay the Price.
3. The stakes were bounded. The United States was not threatening China. It was refusing to let a neighbor be intimidated. That meant Beijing could back off without losing its core interest, which is a condition of every successful deterrent move.
4. The authority was clear. The president acted in the area the Constitution assigns him, directing the forces Congress had created and funded, in a situation where a decision to open fire was not required. He did not need a declaration of war to move ships. He would have needed Congress to go further, a distinction I discuss in Commander in Chief Means Less Than Presidents Claim and More Than Critics Say.

The statutory backdrop mattered, too. The Taiwan Relations Act, explained in The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 Is Not a Treaty, So What Does It Promise, had declared that any effort to determine Taiwan's future by other than peaceful means would be a matter of grave concern to the United States and that the nation would maintain the capacity to resist coercion. In 1996 that language was put to the test, and the capacity to resist turned out to be two carrier groups.

The objections, stated fairly

The first objection is that the crisis never needed to happen. The Cornell visit was a political gesture driven by Congress, it embarrassed the executive and it provoked Beijing for little gain. A more disciplined foreign policy would have avoided it. I have some sympathy with the point that a visa decision should not be made by headlines. But the answer is that a democratic government cannot refuse to receive the elected leader of a democratic friend because a rival threatens to be angry. The principle at stake was whether Beijing would have a veto over whom Americans may welcome. If the answer is yes, it will use the veto again.

The second objection is that the deployment was a bluff. A realist would say the United States did not intend to fight, the Chinese knew it and the exercise was theater. Perhaps, but theater has consequences. Whether the United States would have fought was not the issue. The issue was that China could not be sure, and a rational leader does not gamble the future of his regime on the hope that the other side is bluffing. The uncertainty is the deterrent.

The third objection comes from the opposite side: the crisis proved only that China was weak in 1996, and that the lesson is irrelevant today. That is correct in the narrowest sense. In 1996, the People's Liberation Army had no answer to a carrier group. And that is exactly why the sequel matters.

What China learned

The conventional account, which I find persuasive, is that Beijing drew two conclusions from 1996. The first was political: that Taiwan's democratic identity was strengthening, and that coercion in the form of missile tests could backfire by pushing Taiwanese voters toward the very outcome Beijing feared. The second was military: that China could not allow a situation in which an American carrier group could operate freely near its coast and the PLA had no means to stop it.

The humiliation, as Chinese officials and analysts have described it in later years, produced a sustained investment in what the Pentagon came to call anti-access and area-denial capabilities. That means missiles capable of reaching ships at sea, including anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles, a modernized submarine force, more capable air defenses, long-range aircraft and a growing navy. The most famous product of this effort is the family of anti-ship ballistic missiles, designed to threaten a carrier at a distance. I would not claim to know every detail of those programs, and I would encourage you to treat any specific claim about their performance with caution. The overall direction is on the public record: the Chinese military of today is different in kind from that of 1996.

So here is the paradox. The American deployment worked in 1996. It bought time and preserved the democratic election. But it also taught a serious rival exactly what it needed to build in order to make the next deployment harder. A military lesson is a lesson to both sides.

What the lesson means for deterrence

It does not mean the show of force was a mistake. It means a show of force is not a permanent solution. The advantage that a carrier gave the United States in 1996 depended on the other side's inability to threaten the carrier. When that condition changes, the tool changes too, and a nation that relies on the old tool without developing new ones is one step behind.

There are four lessons, and I will put them as plainly as I can.

1. Presence matters, and it has to be real. The ability to move forces to the right place at the right time is a product of readiness, bases, allies and logistics. See The Shipbuilding Gap with China Is an Industrial Story Before a Navy Story for the base on which that presence stands.
2. Credibility is perishable. The 1996 deployment strengthened it, but credibility must be renewed by continued capability and clear policy, not by one good week.
3. The adversary adapts. A policy that depends on an advantage the other side can erase needs a plan for the day it is erased. That calls for new systems, new basing, distributed forces and allied cooperation, and a defense budget that is honest about those needs.
4. Democracy is itself a deterrent. The Taiwanese electorate's defiance in March 1996 did more to stiffen the island's position than any missile. A free people that knows what it wants is harder to coerce than a government that is merely armed.

The Founding anchor

There is an old American principle at work here, one that Washington stated in his Farewell Address when he wrote that it is our policy to steer clear of permanent alliances while keeping the nation in a respectable defensive posture so that it might trust temporary alliances in extraordinary emergencies. The readers of that passage often forget its second half. A nation can avoid entangling commitments and still insist that it will not be pushed around, and that those who try will find out what a navy is for. The Constitution put the power to provide and maintain a Navy in Congress's hands in Article I, Section 8. The Navy that sailed in 1996 was the product of that power, exercised across decades by Congresses of both parties and held in readiness for exactly such a day.

It is worth remembering, too, that the crisis came near the end of a decade often called a peace dividend. As I describe in Peace Dividends Always Come Due, the 1990s Drawdown Reconsidered, the force of the 1990s was being cut, and yet it was able to send two carriers to a distant crisis in days. The dividend, in other words, was being drawn on a reserve that earlier presidents had built.

The case in brief

1. The 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis began with Lee Teng-hui's June 1995 Cornell visit, which Congress had pressed for by votes of 396 to 0 in the House and 97 to 1 in the Senate, and ended after Beijing's March 1996 missile firings near Keelung and Kaohsiung.
2. The United States answered by moving two carrier groups, Independence and Nimitz, toward the area, and Taiwan went on to hold its first presidential election on March 23, 1996.
3. The deployment worked because the capability was near, the signal was clear, the stakes were bounded and the president acted within his constitutional role.
4. Beijing's lesson was to build the missiles, submarines and air defenses that would make a later carrier deployment harder, so a show of force bought time and not a permanent answer.
5. Deterrence is perishable: it requires renewed capability, an industrial base and a politics that shows the world it means what it says.

What you can do: read the Taiwan Relations Act on Congress.gov, and then ask your representative, through the my-representatives page, what is being done to keep the Navy able to respond in the Western Pacific if another crisis comes.