Europe’s “one China” policy contains a dangerous structural defect because it has allowed deliberate ambiguity to degrade into strategic inertia, leaving European governments far less prepared to counter Chinese coercion than they were to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the Ukraine experience raises an even more fundamental question: At what point does diplomatic caution cease preventing war and start inviting it?
Consider the counterfactual. Had Vladimir Putin anticipated the true scale of Western resolve before February 2022 — the sweeping sanctions, massive intelligence and arms transfers to Kyiv, and Europe’s willingness to absorb considerable economic pain — would he still have invaded? Perhaps.
But deterrence operates on an aggressor’s pre-invasion calculations, not post-invasion regrets. Putin made a catastrophic gamble in part because whatever warnings the West issued beforehand, they did not convince him that the consequences would be as severe as those that actually followed.
That miscalculation offers a critical lesson for Western policy toward Taiwan. The purpose of deterrence should not merely be to punish aggression after it happens, but to remove beforehand any reasonable expectation that aggression might succeed at an acceptable cost.
Europe’s approach to the region currently rests on twin pillars: adherence to its "one China" policy while opposing any unilateral attempt to change the status quo across the Taiwan Strait by force or coercion.
But these two principles are not carrying equal weight. Beijing tirelessly invokes the first while behaving as though the second barely exists. Meanwhile, Europe turns a blind eye.
Crossing the line
More critically, the two principles function differently in practice. The first pillar carries concrete, self-enforced diplomatic consequences that European governments strictly observe. The second pillar, however, too often reads like a polite statement of preference rather than a stern warning of consequences.
What actually happens if Beijing crosses the line? Would Europe impose comprehensive sanctions, choke off access to advanced technology, freeze assets, arm Taiwan, or downgrade relations with Beijing?
Would those measures come immediately, or only after weeks of negotiation while a new reality is imposed across the Taiwan Strait? Or not at all?
To make this second pillar operational rather than rhetorical, Europe must define its leverage points beforehand. Beijing currently operates under the comfortable assumption that European bureaucracy is too fractured to act swiftly.
Removing that illusion requires pre-drafting specific mechanisms that include clear triggers for EU-wide asset freezes targeting major Chinese financial institutions, immediate export bans on critical dual-use technology, and pre-negotiated trade suspensions. Beijing should not have to guess what cost it will pay and it certainly should not be allowed to guess optimistically.
Wishful calculation
Europe must transform the second half of its posture from a polite diplomatic preference into an explicit deterrent condition. An attempt to alter the status quo through military force, blockade, or severe coercion will trigger immediate, predefined consequences. The objective is not to threaten China gratuitously, but to reduce the room for precisely the kind of wishful calculation that proved so disastrous in Eastern Europe.
While those consequences should include swift economic and technological sanctions, one measure deserves fundamental consideration, namely that Europe’s “one China” policy itself must no longer be treated as unconditional.
If Beijing unilaterally destroys the status quo, it cannot expect Europe to remain bound by a diplomatic framework designed to preserve it. Beijing cannot demand permanent European adherence to one half of the arrangement while reserving for itself the right to obliterate the other.
Europe can articulate this framework without prematurely breaking the status quo by introducing a diplomatic "snapback mechanism." Under this posture, European adherence to its current framework is explicitly bound to the preservation of peace.
Should Beijing deploy military force or impose a sea and air blockade to terminate that peaceful equilibrium, Europe's "one China" commitments automatically terminate alongside it. This reframes Europe's position from a passive, permanent concession into an active, conditional contract.
This is not a call for the immediate, proactive recognition of Taiwan. It is a structural boundary.
Europe’s adherence to its existing framework cannot be separated from Beijing’s adherence to the peaceful status quo that makes that framework possible. While European institutions have gradually begun advocating scenario-based planning, those consequences must be made far more explicit directly to Beijing.
Manageable aggression
Skeptics within European capitals will inevitably object, arguing that such explicit clarity risks provoking Beijing, or that economic entanglement makes severe action impossible. But this fundamentally misunderstands both deterrence and risk management.
While punitive decoupling from the world's second-largest economy would indeed inflict pain on European industry, a full-scale cross-strait conflict and the resulting shock to global supply chains would precipitate an exponentially greater economic collapse. Pre-committing to hard deterrent conditions is not an act of economic carelessness, it is the ultimate insurance policy against an unmitigated global catastrophe.
Communicating costs does not provoke aggression, it strips away the dangerous illusion that aggression will be manageable. Ambiguity can deter when it creates uncertainty about whether aggression will succeed. It becomes dangerous when it creates uncertainty about whether aggression will be punished.
If ambiguity contributed to Putin’s catastrophic miscalculation in Ukraine, why assume that the same ambiguity will deter Xi Jinping over Taiwan?
Europe does not need to abandon its “one China” policy today, rather it needs to make clear to Beijing precisely what will cause Europe to abandon it tomorrow.
John Cheng is a retired businessman from Hong Kong who lives in Taiwan and is the author of “Taiwan Is Taiwan.”
