Verbs that hold the structure up
Published 8 October 2026
The structure that governs American policy toward Taiwan was assembled in under a decade, from three kinds of material: a vote, a communique and a statute. The first is the one most often misread.
On October 25, 1971 the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758. Its operative text says the Assembly "decides to restore all its rights to the People's Republic of China and to recognize the representatives of its Government as the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations, and to expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the place which they unlawfully occupy at the United Nations and in all the organizations related to it." The text is about who represents China at the United Nations. It does not mention Taiwan by name. Whether it also settles Taiwan's status is a matter of continuing argument, and this piece takes no side in it.
The State Department Historian records that the United States urged the UN to seat both Beijing and Taipei in 1971, and that the proposal failed. Henry Kissinger's second trip to Beijing, in October 1971, fell during the vote.
Richard Nixon was in China from February 21 to 28, 1972, the first sitting American president to visit the mainland. The communique issued at the end of the trip, negotiated by the American and Chinese delegations and preserved in the State Department's documentary record, contains the sentence on which a great deal rests. The Chinese side affirmed that Taiwan is part of China and opposed "two Chinas, one China and one Taiwan, or an independent Taiwan," and called Taiwan "a province of China which has long been returned to the motherland." The American side declared: "The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position." It added an interest in "a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves," and an "ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan."
The word in the American text is "acknowledges," not "recognizes" or "agrees." The Historian lists the reasons for the opening: the Vietnam war, a wish to isolate North Vietnam, leverage against the Soviet Union, and Sino-Soviet tension on Beijing's side. Whether a diplomatic verb can bear the weight placed on it is the question Taiwan has been asking ever since.
The second piece is a law. On January 1, 1979, Washington moved diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing. Congress did not like the State Department's plan for what came next. It rejected the draft the administration sent over, wrote its own, and passed it. The Taiwan Relations Act became law on Tuesday, April 10, 1979. The House voted 345 to 55 on March 13 and the Senate 90 to 6 on March 14, and after a conference the Senate agreed to the final text 85 to 4 on March 29. The act replaced the phrase "Republic of China" with "governing authorities on Taiwan" and committed the United States to provide Taiwan with defensive arms. Notice terminating the 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty took effect on January 1, 1979, with the treaty itself ending one year later, on January 1, 1980. Diplomatic normalization, the new statute and the treaty's final termination were related changes, not events on the same day.
The operative language is plain enough to quote. Section 3(a): "the United States will make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability." Section 3(b): the president and Congress determine the nature and quantity "based solely upon their judgment of the needs of Taiwan," with review by American military authorities. Section 3(c): the president must inform Congress promptly of any threat to the security or the social or economic system of the people on Taiwan, and the president and Congress then decide the response "in accordance with constitutional processes."
The findings in section 2 add that the American decision to establish relations with Beijing "rests upon the expectation that the future of Taiwan will be determined by peaceful means," and that any effort to settle the matter by other means, "including by boycotts or embargoes," is "a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States." That is the only place the statute speaks of embargoes. Congress wrote "grave concern," not "we will fight." Read plainly, section 3(c) sets a process, not a promise.
Put the two documents next to each other and you have American policy in miniature: recognition of Beijing by diplomacy, a promise to Taipei by statute, and no sentence anywhere that says what the United States would do if the two sides went to war. Washington's envoy in Beijing recited the formula on September 26, 2026: the United States remains committed to the Taiwan Relations Act, the three joint communiques and the Six Assurances, and "we don't support independence." The recitation has the cadence of a liturgy. People who study the Taiwan question call it strategic ambiguity. The ambiguity is the product.
The year of normalization was also a hard one on the island. On December 10, 1979 dissidents around Formosa Magazine led tens of thousands of people in a Human Rights Day rally in Kaohsiung. Police used tear gas, and about 50 opposition leaders were detained without trial. The trials had a consequence nobody in the government planned: they sent defense lawyers into politics. Chen Shui-bian, later president, was among them, and Shih Ming-teh, who spent ten years in prison, later chaired the Democratic Progressive Party.
For about two decades after 1979 the arrangement held because everyone had other things to do. Taiwan democratized. China rose, and its military began to matter. Between those two trends sat the question nobody wanted to answer first. When a government on an island of 23 million people becomes a real democracy, who gets to say what its future is? In 1995 China decided to answer it with missiles.