Book Event: Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

well good afternoon everyone my name is jude blanchett and i'm the freeman chair in china studies here at csis i'm really delighted to be hosting this book talk about a very important and a very timely book written by my two guests today hal brands and mike beckley the name of the book is danger zone the coming conflict with china um i think folks here will know very well the work of mike and howe who have been prolific over the past few years and annoyingly prolific over the past few weeks and months with a number of pieces really challenging the conventional wisdom on china and i think really pushing the strategic discussion on how u.s strategy needs to adopt and pivot to a china which is undergoing some pretty significant and important changes i'm also looking forward to today's discussion because um this will be an important time to interrogate a lot of the assumptions that i think a lot of us are bringing to the table in thinking about the duration of what we're calling great power competition is this a a long decades-long struggle for international order or is this a shorter term sharper competition that could well see the united states and china enter into some sort of hot conflict events of the past few weeks in the taiwan straits as well as looking at china's current economic headwinds seem to lend favor to the argument uh of my two guests today but i hope to have uh over the next uh 57 and a half minutes uh a really good conversation to explore how they came to these conclusions and and what the implications are everyone knows how mike but but to get the the formalities out of the way hal brands is the henry a kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the johns hopkins school of advanced international studies or seis and a senior fellow at the american enterprise institute mike beckley is an associate professor in the department of political science at tufts university and a non-resident senior fellow at the american enterprise institute mike cal thanks for joining us today maybe just as a introductory question i'm curious how the two of you got on the same page about this mike you know you've written a really good book thinking about u.s power in relation to china's i might be one of the only people to have listened to that on audible uh which i have to say with the number of statistics made it somewhat of a slog but really a book that really shaped my thinking about um uh the nature of the the competition between the two and you know really time was on whose side based on aggregate capabilities you know how did this come about this partnership well i think coming from my book i started looking what is the implication if china is not going to narrow the gap to the same extent that most people think and i was kind of plunking around and doing studies on what happens when you have a rising power that starts to slow down and in the course of that research i mean hal had already written a fantastic article in the american interest looking at the possibility of russia and china as declining powers and as violent declining powers then we just got connected through the american enterprise institute sort of randomly and i was giving a talk one day showing some of my research and hal was there and we started talking more and more and we realized that we were on the same page on a lot of these different issues and that we also had different areas of expertise that could maybe be combined because hal obviously is a noted historian of the cold war and has just written a great book on the lessons we can learn from that for great power competition i'm i'm not a sinologist but i've lived in china for a couple of years i've been doing most of my international relations research on the rise of china so we thought we could merge these two things together and and we started with a few small articles and just kind of built our way up from there how what was the that piece that mike had mentioned that you'd written what were the sort of proximate events you were seeing that that put you on this idea of russia and china as a different trajectory than i think the the general consensus that that was more of kind of just a thought experiment that i put down on paper but it was driven by the fact that we often talked about russia and china as rising or resurgent powers in that time period kind of the 2015 to 2018 uh time period but what was clear when you look closely was that both of them had deep deep internal problems i mean this was this was even more clear in russia's case than it was in china's case and in some ways i got started thinking about it from the russia perspective but when you started looking at some of the issues that china would confront and a lot of the things that we talk about in this book it did raise the question of whether i guess what china's trajectory was going to look like in the coming decades and whether the narrative that china was going to overtake the united states as the world's leading economic and military power was in fact correct and what it would mean if china fell short of that and so kind of the intuition i think that i had which drew as as much from history as anything else and thinking about some of the historical examples that we develop a little bit more and the book is that that's not always good news for the power that's being challenged it may put you in better stead over the long term but revisionist powers that start to worry that they are peaking and that they have annoyed a lot of countries that are now out to get them sometimes do some fairly rash things and so that was kind of the conceptual underpinning that i came in with and then mike had been working on the empirical underpinnings of a lot in his own work before we get into the the sort of guts of the discussion maybe it can ask you know mike can you lay out in broad brushstrokes the the main argument of of the book there's two sort of the if we take the title as the main title and the the subtitle there's actually some number of theses that you're making this one which is in the main title that we're entering into a period of a danger zone that although the competition or rivalry with china could could be long term there are going to be sort of pockets of that where we're going to see frictions reach sort of unprecedented or new levels and then the other is this there's not a question mark after the coming conflict with china it's just a it's more of a declarative statement so we are on a trajectory right now where conflict is the likely outcome can you just walk us through what are the pieces that you guys put together to come to that that conclusion of danger zones but also a a trajectory right now for conflict yeah so i think um we're so used to a rising china since it's been growing like gangbusters since the late 1970s and i think our fundamental argument is just that we're entering a new era where china is more of a risen power than a rising one it still has formidable capabilities it could still increase especially its military power uh in the coming years but from a growth perspective it's encountering increasing headwinds and we we argue that actually china's exceptional rise over the last 40 years was propelled by a number of exceptional circumstances that are all disappearing it doesn't mean china is going to collapse it doesn't mean that china can't continue to grow as a great power but it's going to be much more difficult and china is going to have to be much more proactive i mean one of those factors is just u.s engagement and this epic period of hyper globalization that we had that china was able to ride that huge surge of international trade and investment to become the workshop of the world now we're entering a much more divided period china alone faces thousands of new trade and investment barriers that it didn't face even as recently as 10 years ago the second is the changes in china's government i mean for a while china's always been a pretty brutal autocracy but for a while it seemed to be slowly evolving to a more technocratic uh autocracy you at least had some rewarding of good economic performance less about just blind political loyalty but under xi jinping it seems to be going in very much the opposite direction and then demographically i mean that's the big structural factor i mean china had the greatest demographic dividend in history 10 to 15 workers per retiree in the population during the 90s and 2000s that's going to collapse to two to one two workers per retiree just by the late 2030s so it's just going to be very hard for china to sustain economic growth rates and then lastly just resources you know china was self-sufficient in most resources going into even as late as the 90s in some cases in the 2000s but now china has plowed through its energy reserves it's plowed through um through water uh through uh various other resources and so that just makes growth more expensive and you see that reflected in say the capital output ratios where china has to spend more and more to produce every unit of gdp growth so these things are all coming together at the same time that china seems to be facing more international pushback obviously the united states is getting much tougher and other american allies to various extents or also uh whether it's japan you know planning to double its defense spending taiwan planning to revamp its military the formation of some of these alliances akis the quad being resurrected and so it just looks like a darker strategic horizon for china going forward these things aren't necessarily existential for the regime but it just means that it's easy rise it's easy access to the rest of the world is coming under threat and then we started looking at history and we looked at every case over the last 200 years where you had this kind of scenario and none of these countries kind of mellowed out and dialed back their ambitions they got very proactive and tried to expand into new markets they tried to beat back rivals they tried to basically grab what they could while they can or to try to rekindle their rise and we give a number of historical examples in the book yeah i mean just one thing to add to that which is that decline or even peaking power is particularly troubling for countries that have been having a rapid ascent because they have done and said a lot of things on the way up that then start coming back to haunt them and and so maybe the government has made big promises to the population about all the glories that will be achieved when this country achieves uh its rise maybe people have gotten used to a certain standard of of living maybe a country has started behaving more assertively and has thus begun alienating its neighbors and other great powers and thus has to worry that if it starts slowing it's going to be in a weakened position i think all of these dynamics are at play with china right now which is one reason why we we worry about its trajectory and just the second point to make is that it's really important to note that a country's trajectory typically doesn't it's not uniform across all factors at the same time right and so you can have a country that is rising rapidly economically but has not yet begun to develop military power to match and it can go the other way as well right you can have a country that has plateaued or begun to decline economically whose military power is still growing that was the case with the soviet union during the 1970s and so the the problem with china isn't that all of its capabilities are going to collapse in the second half of this decade or anything like that it's going to be more of a gradual decline and not even a decline in some sectors what you're going to have is an economically stagnating china whose coercive capabilities have become more impressive than ever before and that's the formula that leads to real trouble so kind of big piece moving piece number one is a secular slowdown driven by the fact that as you mentioned two of the two of the big environmental factors which three of the environmental factors which facilitated china's growth were low-hanging fruit so simply moving people out of very unproductive sectors and into more productive a marginal mile of high-speed rail but once you start to consume all those growth gets harder number two was a benign external environment which of course since 2016 maybe at the latest if not earlier we begin to see that shift and as you say sort of a balanced or more technocratic approach to policymaking so everyone's nodding their their head at this point in the argument you go further than just a story about a slowdown in in china's growth you then push the argument by saying we should expect a certain type of behavior or we're likely to see a certain type of behavior from china because of that can we move on to that piece then which is okay so china's been talking about this new normal of growth slowing down for a decade there have been warnings you know policymakers have been seeing the demographics you know the debt um and indeed a lot of china's xi jinping's policies you know over the past several years have been about trying to thread the needle of lowering the rates of leverage increase in debt but without sort of shaking the foundation where do we go from there though why is this not just the slowdown story why does it now go to this the danger zone in the coming conflict well i think for china some of the troubling signs are just that the reforms that the regime has tried seemed to be not as effective as the regime was hoping so in demographics for example just in the last few years they said okay we need to go to a two-child policy and then they had the lowest birth rates on record since the famine of the great league before they said okay we'll go to a three-child policy birth rates continue to decline then they said okay we're gonna make it much harder for women to get divorced from even from abusive husbands right so i mean you just just the nature of the policies that they're rolling out the quickness with what they're doing it suggests that they're having trouble coming to grips with some of these uh with some of these problems same thing in with the debt and with the the crisis we're seeing in the housing sector i mean they just keep going back to the stimulus tap over and over again they just eased and unloaded a whole bunch more credit as we as we're speaking right now so it just seems like they're out of easy options there could be more structural reforms that you know the world bank has been touting for china for years and they even considered some of those in 2013 they made a list of you know 60 plus um reforms and then implemented maybe 10 percent of them and a lot of it just has to do with the short-term objectives that are good for the regime aren't necessarily conducive to long-term reforms that could stabilize the economy kind of get them on a more sustainable growth path why more belligerence from that though i guess is the sort of thrust of the question well this is where the strategic encirclement argument starts to come into play and so so yes chinese officials have understood for years that the economy was encountering structural problems that would be difficult to overcome and of course those have gotten worse we would argue in recent years but even as recently as 2016 it was hard to make the argument that the world was pushing back against chinese power in a meaningful way or in a concerted way i mean it wasn't that long ago that you had an american president who argued that we faced more danger from a weak china that wasn't helping us run the world than from a strong china it wasn't that long ago that you had the white house you know outlawing the use of the term great power competition by dod even as late as 2018 2019 i think there were a number of observers in china who thought that the change in u.s policy was basically temporary that it was a trump phenomenon rather than an america phenomenon i think it's become harder and harder to sustain that view today right and so you it's not just that you've had the united states committing to competition with china whatever that means under two separate presidents of different parties it's that you're seeing more and more of the most important countries in the world the advanced democracies following suit in one way or another and the reason this matters is that it's going to make it harder and harder for china to achieve the objectives it has set out for itself through peaceful means i think there's relatively little debate among china watchers now that china wants to reincorporate taiwan in some way or another it wants to turn the east china sea and the south china sea into chinese lakes it wants to become the dominant power in asia and then people dispute people debate whether it wants to go farther than that but as more and more countries start pushing back against chinese power and as chinese economic power as chinese economic growth stagnates beijing is going to find it harder and harder to achieve those goals without the use of coercion without potentially the use of of force and so what you have is a country that has staked out immensely ambitious goals for itself and is increasingly going to struggle to achieve them peacefully and so the question then becomes does china change its goals or does it pursue different means of achieving them trying to understand the cause causation here imagine we go back to 2013 2014 um we were already seeing a much more aggressive china i mean a lot of the the feta companies that china presented us in the south china sea were were happening in a period where we were seeing this sort of supremely new confident and aggressive leader who was trying to see strategic initiative we saw you know on the cross straits we saw the real inflection point when dpp president signing wins in 2016 and the kmt looks like it's on its way out and china responds uh in in quite i think a short-sighted strategic way um so it seems like we were already beginning to see this more aggressive behavior and from just my own vantage point it looked like this was the offshoot of confidence not the lack thereof or anxiety about a slowing economy and therefore running out of time um where am i wrong on that why isn't this i as you were just speaking i was imagining could we almost remove the slow growth story and still get much the same thesis which is it's really the idea of strategic encirclement that is leading china to see and as i think you know i and some others have written it seems like xi jinping already had this view that there are uh limited windows of opportunity to grab some objectives that aren't a matter of slowing economy but because transient shifts in the international order new emerging technologies where you really want to be first in and a perception that the us is a declining power so now is the time to rush forward and take advantage of that where is that story not complete without the slow growth one i think slowing growth just makes it harder to achieve all of those other aims so something like taiwan you know china for a long time was basically tried to buy reunification by forging deep economic links with taiwan that would get harder in a world where china's economy starts to stagnate because they have less goodies that they can throw across the strait i think more broadly though you know because we we trace back changes in china's behavior i would say even to the 2008 financial crisis because on the one hand that maybe inflates chinese egos because the united states looks like it's down on the map but it also does cause a lot of um not not fear but concern within china because they're seeing the rise in international protectionism all those markets that they've been selling into for years and years are starting to close as countries scramble to dig themselves out from the crisis and other countries are specifically starting to target china there and so they realize they need to start expanding into new markets and i think that creates the impetus for something like belt and road which then causes china to not only have to expand economically but then start thinking about protecting overseas interests and so then in 2015 you get this new declaration that they're going to start looking to build the military power projection capability to to secure their far-flung economic assets so i think the slowing economic growth can have multiple effects one is just it makes it reduces the number of tools you have for peaceful options needs to be something like taiwan and the second is that it requires you to get more active out on the international stage because you have to open up new markets when you're faced with closing ones in your traditional export areas yeah just maybe a conceptual point to add here um it's wrong to think of this as a dichotomy where rising confident powers act calmly and uh sort of um powers that have peaked start to act aggressively right you can have rising confident powers that act very assertively as as well right and so if we think back to the 1890s this was a time when germany was very much a country on the make and it starts acting more assertively because of that and this is an old story in international politics the more power you have the more opportunities you have to act assertively and countries are going to take some number of those opportunities what changes though is your risk acceptance and and so if you have been on a long upward trajectory you may have started acting more assertively but if you think that time is on your side in dealing with the united states now or the united kingdom back in the 1890s early 1900s presumably you will draw in your horns when a crisis emerge you won't you won't push things too far because tomorrow will be better for you so why risk confrontation today and in fact that's mostly what china does up until sort of the mid 2010s and and so there's a lot of expansion in the south china sea the east china sea for instance but when the united states makes clear that the senkakus are covered by article 5 or when the united states makes clear that we're not going to allow the chinese to starve out those two unfortunate filipino marines on second thomas shoal or whatever the chinese back down in both cases the point that we're raising is that if if china becomes increasingly concerned that the long-term picture doesn't look so good then it becomes more willing to run risks and behave more aggressively in a more erratic way in the short term and so it's not so much a difference between assertive behavior and not assertive behavior it's how much risk are you willing to run to achieve your objectives in the here and now can you talk through what are some of the ways in which we would see beijing become more aggressive or risk tolerant in a means ends way so you laid out in the book um i think a convincing picture of the sort of broader grand strategy that china has which as you say it quite clearly is as much a matter of interpretation because there is no gospel but actually even the bible is mostly about biblical interpretation so even even bibles are are up for debate um what are some of the actions that you expect china to see it sees its resource its pile of resources not immediately end but it sees the sort of the heady days are over so the sense of time may be accelerating where do you expect to see beijing adopt more risk tolerance and plea and can you connect those actions to how that might likely help their broader grand strategy so taiwan for example seems like one where that seems to be a fairly good shortcut to to quash any of your broader grand strategic objectives by sort of making a mad dash for the island i could be wrong on that but that's my own assessment where do you connect these ends and means so i think the the question isn't so much what objectively would happen the day after china attacks taiwan right because there are a lot lots of different things could happen the day after china attacks taiwan the the question is what is the story that xi jinping can tell himself about how taking taiwan or making some other short-term move improves china's long-term trajectory and and you can make a compelling case that if china is able to force unification with taiwan whether through the use of force or just heavy coercion short of the use of force it actually makes a really big difference in terms of busting up some of the strategic encirclement that we have talked about right and so taiwan is generally considered rightly i think to be the keystone of the first island chain it it really sits in the middle of this run of features that obstructs china's access to the open pacific and that has real military implications right and so just to give you one example of this if you are the chinese submarine force it's much easier to make your way out beyond the first island chain if you have access to the deep water on the east side of taiwan than if you are hemmed in in the relatively shallow water within the first island chain i think there would emerge pretty profound questions among remaining u.s allies and partners in the region about the american commitment to upholding the balanced power in the western pacific if china intervened in taiwan and the united states was unable or unwilling to do much about it you'd have further uh projection of chinese power using taiwan as a base and and so on and so forth and so it is not guaranteed that if china takes taiwan then it's able to bust up this ring of powers that are trying to hem it in but it's plausible and xi jinping can tell himself a story where that will help and so that's i think probably the biggest example of a case where we say here is a relatively short-term move china could make to take advantage of a favorable window of opportunity with the hope that this would improve its long-term strategic position i'm trying to imagine myself in the zhongdang high leadership compound and we're sitting around the table with xi jinping and we're looking at this sort of strategic map of objectives that we want to accomplish we're looking at we've got our economic policy advisors in and they're saying you know jinping things are not going well you know they lay out the picture of of some of the demographic structural trends we're looking at um you know the shifting international environment and the the economic squeeze that is putting on we're looking at you know uh prospect of recession in europe um so now we're laying out our options um i've got you know comrade hal brands who is saying maybe this is the time to make a dash for taiwan this is going to you know potentially bust through this strategic encirclement or at least give us a pretty wide lane i feel like if i'm in that environment i'm saying why don't we just think about raising the retirement age why don't we think about some tax reform why don't we think about the 10 or 15 things on the world bank list if this is primarily a story about you know our economic engine is slowing down why don't we get rid of our covet zero policies like we've got a lot of cards we can play here and we've got far more control over those domestic levers then we do have this massive gamble you know dice roll that you're right if it works out we get this corridor but by the way we're going to screw our economy and that's a pyrrhic victory we'll win a strategic corridor but we will take all the trends of decoupling zapping business you know confidence and we're going to send those i don't know which way my metaphor is going but sort of through the roof where does that debate around the table go and what would your sort of what would your response be when you know the you know piece nick dove jude blanchett makes the tax reform argument well i mean this isn't purely about economics and especially on the taiwan issue uh you know changing the retirement age is obviously not going to change the fact that more and more taiwanese see themselves as solely taiwanese and not as chinese the lack of the fact that there seems to be a slippery slope not for taiwan's international status as well as the relationship between the united states and taiwan with the legislation you know pending on capitol hill biden saying three times that the us will defend taiwan and saying it's a commitment that the united states made pelosi's trip so the you know and i think one key difference with the way you're portraying uh the argument is it's not always necessarily about grabbing glory and getting good things for your country sometimes it's about preventing worse things from happening in the future i mean you know i'm sure the people that are sitting around talking to mao as the united states was uh conquering its way up the korean peninsula during the korean war weren't exactly saying oh we can have great things happen if we intervene in this they were just thinking it could be a lot worse if we don't take on the americans now because they'll set up a permanent military presence there that'll eventually crush us so sometimes it's about just preventing a worse outcome from happening and i think that's the kind of the dynamic going on with taiwan it's not that they are relishing the idea of military action it's just that they look at the lack of peaceful options and this is a core interest for them on the economic side you know a lot of those reforms you mentioned you know like when i when i've given presentations in beijing i usually end with something like along those lines and they usually look at me like yeah you would like that wouldn't you you american guy who hangs out in dc because you know and and i think we have to look at it from xi jinping's perspective if you're a dictator you have to you have to balance things that are good for your people versus things that are good for the cronies that help keep you in power and a lot of the things like huco reform great for rural residents who are poor who can come into cities not so great for the rich elites in the cities who want to keep all the rural folk out tax reform same same kind of problem cutting back subsidies for state-owned enterprises so it's not so easy the political economy is not the same as the straight-up economic story and i think this is exactly why you haven't seen all of those long-term structural reforms that you just mentioned that the world bank has been you know trying to get the chinese to do for a long time and countries don't always take the choice that seems the most rational or that optimizes value or output and so if you were thinking purely in sort of how does how do how will countries behave in a way that would optimize their future prospects you would not have predicted the decisions that led to world war one or world war ii or putin's invasion of ukraine and and so on and so forth that's not to say that sort of we're resorting to uh chinese leaders are irrational type of analysis here it's just to say that that what leaders dictators particularly value can be somewhat different than what we think they ought to value and what we expect they they would value and so they can make decisions from a different set of perspectives than we might find comfortable or familiar and i think that that's worth keeping in mind now especially when you think about what's just happened in ukraine and so it's it's very hard to come up with a story in which russia comes out of this war better off than it it went in just as i think it it might be it's entirely possible that china would come out of a taiwan war in in much worse shape you know in in terms of the military devastation it would suffer in terms of the economic problems in terms of the fact that it might wake up and find that japan has 60 nuclear weapons the next day and so on and so forth that doesn't mean however that xi jinping wouldn't make the decision to do it how should we think about time as a component of all this it's one of the you know interesting things baked into all the the conversations we have here in the united states you know in national security strategies and blinking speech and even in chinese sort of parallel documents no one quite articulates the precise demarcations of of the great power rivalry a great power competition but time is infused through through all of this and and you know one of the arguments your book is and and i remember seeing this in a report you did for aei gosh i think a year ago think of this as a sprint you know not a marathon um tell me you know walk me through how you think about how we should be thinking about time um it seems to be a feature of this that both beijing to me at least both beijing and washington feel like in the long run uh time is on their side because i think we may disagree on this but in the chinese context i feel like their time horizon for the level of confidence they have it's not the past ten years of performance it's the fact that the party is 100 years old it is weathered you know storms hurricanes typhoons and and that's really what imbues their sense that we'll we'll get through this i think for the united states there's a parallel of we look at the legitimacy of our institutions we look at the you know resiliency of the democracy recent shortcomings uh notwithstanding but both seem to feel like it's actually you know uh um in the near term we're you know we're gonna face some significant challenges but i haven't seen time baked into strategic documents so i want to get your thoughts on the handicap of not articulating you know time horizons and and how you think we should be better incorporating conceptions of time and as they relate to objectives i think it's hard to know what china's time horizon is because you can find evidence on all different sides you can find internal xi jinping speeches worrying about the possibility of a soviet-style collapse you can also find speeches where he's talking about you know china's inevitable rise to greatness and great rejuvenation i think our the way we look at it though is that these structural headwinds that china is facing means that regardless of what chinese leaders are thinking they are going to be really up against it by the 2030s i mean the demographic situation alone between now and then losing 70 plus million working age adults and gaining 120 million senior citizens just between now and the early 30s that's that's absolutely devastating to to a country's ability to rise and so when we're looking at from the perspective of u.s policy and u.s defense policy this just seems like a moment of maximum opportunity for china given that it's coming off this wave of a steady rise and going to hit more headwinds and therefore a period of maximum danger regardless of what how chinese leaders are necessarily interpreting it just means we have to be more vigilant in the short term i think there are multiple timelines worth keeping in mind here and so let's go back to taiwan which we were talking about a second ago one timeline is the timeline leading up to the point at which xi jinping feels that the pla is ready to conduct a taiwan operation for real right another timeline might be the time until the united states feels that it has strengthened its posture in the western pacific sufficiently to frustrate that operation against a modernized pla a third timeline might be the time until taiwan and u.s allies and partners are ready either to defend themselves or to contribute to a taiwan contingency operation in a meaningful way a fourth one might be the taiwanese political calendar and this deals with issues that mike mentioned about a growing sense of taiwanese nationalism and national identity less and less interest and unification with china and so on and so forth the decline of the kmt as a viable political organization that can contend for national leadership and and so on and so forth and so where we come out in the book is kind of trying to put all these things together and then thinking about where does that create moments of of real danger and that places us in the late 2020s now the kind of the meta point to make here though is that it's easy for us to try to make a relatively precise you know half decade prediction about when this relationship is in real danger of growing going critical because we're academics right and so if we're wrong it's embarrassing for us but uh the stakes are relatively low the stakes are quite high for u.s officials for instance who are thinking about this and so i think actually it's this is why it's less common to see u.s officials engage in the sort of um we think this is when the window of maximum vulnerability will open up because if you make that bet and that bet has implications for military procurement and modernization and so on and so forth and you get it wrong that there may be uh real implications right there may be real implications for coming too late there may also be implications for coming too early and so i think the urge and government often or the inclination government often is to try to fudge it and say we've just got to be effective across this long time horizon you know 2020 out to 2050. i think what we're trying to do is provide a little bit more specificity to that but we understand that there are constraints that policy makers face that push them in a different direction on these things i want to if i can um go to an audience question then i want to pivot to kind of current events and i want to talk about events of the past couple weeks and which seemed to i think for everyone looking at this constrict our timeline a little bit you know after speaker pelosi's visit it seems like time is speeding up question coming in is um uh is the coming conflict with china due to china's actions or due to the u.s not being able to contend with a challenge to its hegemony without engaging in a conflict we're sort of looking at two sides of agency one is trying to acting as a more aggressive actor if i can actually weave in events of a few weeks ago you can see where u.s agency and actions can also have their own effect in speeding up time estimations or or understanding of deterrent signaling um you know areas where where we do have agency in our misplaying of those i'll mix my metaphors but our misplaying of those cards moves us you know one minute closer to midnight or or away so can you we've talked a lot about the china side and there's probably a lot of head nodding can i go to a slightly more challenging discussion which is sort of our self-reflection on u.s strategy and where our own agency plays into the prospect of of conflict i think there's plenty of things the u.s can do to make it worse um and we try to also take you know historical lessons of what not to do where the u.s could go too far and actually catalyze the exact kind of reaction from china that we're worried about i mean i guess we're going to talk about pelosi's visit in a second but these kind of symbolic moves that don't actually enhance the deterrent barrier that the united states has there seems like exactly the type of situation that you want to avoid playing whack-a-mole with with chinese development projects all over the world and giving china the sense that the us is determined to just choke out its economy and we saw how that worked out with imperial japan going into world war ii so there are certainly things that the united states could do you know full-scale tech embargo trying to destabilize shi's regime directly by engaging in political warfare and doing some of the things the u.s tinkered with during the cold war to me those those could easily accelerate this exact process that we're looking at so there's there's certainly agency on the u.s side but on on the other hand i think china is going to be moving in this more aggressive direction regardless i think we're at the point now where can we really convince xi jinping to lay off taiwan and then that just doesn't seem that plausible to me and so on the u.s side you also have to find ways to raise a deterrent barrier because you can't coerce your adversary or cajole them to change their behavior you just have to raise the cost and hope that that will be enough to deter them in the long run there are multiple ways to avoid conflict with with china and one of them would simply be conceding that china is going to become the dominant power in the western pacific and that there's nothing the united states can or should do to stop it and and so the the chances of conflict no kidding military conflict with china would go down dramatically in the coming years if the united states decided it was going to cut taiwan loose right if it decided that it was no longer going to contest chinese advances in the east china sea or the south china sea if it decided that it no longer wanted to have alliances with frontline states in the region the number of hot spots uh goes down dramatically almost we might just cut the event there and have that be the full quote for how i'm surprised of the western pacific right and if you thought that it would be an acceptable type of international order once that happens then you might go in that direction and there are serious analysts who argue that we should go in that direction the united states typically has has thought that it cannot not that it can't live but that it can't tolerate a situation of that sort that we would not want to have a situation where a hostile power particularly a hostile authoritarian power dominates a region that is so vital to the international economy dominates a region that would allow it to project power on a global scale and perhaps coerce its enemies including the united states on a global scale and so the united states for for decades and and i think this consensus has been affirmed recently in the case of china has said that that's not a road we want to go down if we can avoid it right now there may come a point where chinese pow let's say we're wrong right and so two decades from now chinese power is just so great that there is no chance of the united taiwan being able to defend itself and no chance of the united states being able to intervene to stop a chinese assault then i think you have to ask yourself the serious question is this worth it for the united states or should we simply concede the issue fortunately we're not there yet and we would argue there are a number of steps that we and our friends in the region can take that will help avoid this outcome and so we should try to push off the outcome for as long as possible one of the if i can just pivot to um to the pelosi visit not not the event itself but just i think what occurred and what lessons we should be we should be drawing from that one of the really fascinating things for me was the complete disconnect between how i think the chinese were assessing their actions and the signals that those were sending and the message received here in in washington dc and elsewhere so you know in conversations we were having with with interlocutors in beijing they were confused as to why we didn't see this as pure deterrence signaling um and really this was from their perspective the u.s had assumed basically gotten into a comfortable space where it was assessing a marginal price of zero for every salami slice and we've been warning you know we've been sort of uh raising our hands and shouting and screaming and stomping for the better part of a couple years certainly since the end last year of the trump administration saying you've got to start taking our interest seriously um and and you've got to cut this out and so it if it wasn't the pelosi visit it would be it would be the speaker mccarthy visit but we had to basically give you a bloody nose you know in conversations we would say to them that i can understand that logic but lobbying short-range ballistic missiles over over taiwan in this environment here in the united states on the back of all the other actions that you've done is clearly seen you know now there's a million ttx's which have moved from being full-on invasion to now the blockade scenario because of you know beijing's head fake can you you know both you i think you've got a really good chapter on lessons from the cold war and of course how you we we did a book event here not that long ago on your on your great book on lessons from the cold war it seems to me we've sort of lost or we've atrophied uh or we've forgotten the muscles of that real granular sort of sense of assessing deterrent signaling from escalation and both sides i think are pretty sloppy at this just want to get your thoughts on what lessons do you draw out of that um uh that series of events and what they tell us for the prospect of of competition between the two militaries moving forward yeah i think the the chinese actually have a bit of a point when they argue that the united states has been redefining its relationship with taiwan in a way that can plausibly be interpreted as a weakening of our one china policy in beijing the aperture has opened up considerably politically militarily economically in recent years and so i i think that i think it's probably fair to say that the chinese viewed pelosi's visit not as sort of an opportunity to be welcomed you know to make a point but but really as as a threat and as part of this ominous trend where taiwan gets farther and farther estranged from the mainland politically with the support of the united states i think though that what you know your chinese interlocutors or others in beijing may not realize or may not acknowledge is that it's it's china's own actions that have driven a lot of this over over recent years and so one of the reasons that both you know the trump administration and now the biden administration have been set on enhancing the u.s relationship with taiwan it's not simply because we're looking for opportunities to stick it to beijing it's because there's growing concern about what china might do and in fact is doing with military exercises and economic coercion and other things vis-a-vis taiwan and so one of the the calculations in dc is well if we're saying that we might plausibly defend taiwan from a chinese assault we we've got to help taiwan enhance its international legitimacy in the process we've got to build out the u.s taiwan diplomatic and military relationship so that that's all actually a plausible argument to to make and so this is this is kind of a classic case and i think it comes back to what mike was talking about before where china really does have a serious taiwan problem in the sense that china's preferred outcome on taiwan is actually getting farther and farther away and less china resorts to force and then china has gotten itself in a situation where it does assertive things and then countries react in ways that heighten chinese insecurities yeah mike i want to get your thoughts on that as well you were just laying out some of the less helpful steps that the united states could take that have lots of symbolic value rile up beijing but don't fundamentally contribute to you know to taiwan's prosperity security resiliency you know building on house point so we have i think a shifting u.s position which i completely agree and i feel like we've got to be better about articulating we do have an adaptive one china policy it has to be and it adapts to in a dynamic sense to actions that china takes to to destabilize an equilibrium across the strait on the other hand it also seems like we've built up this architecture of one china policy to manage tensions um and that worked for a long time because china didn't have the aggregate military power it does now so so fundamental dynamics in the straits have changed because of of china's growth how do you think about getting to some sort of strategic equilibrium here as you mentioned taiwan is on a healthy trajectory of becoming a a resilient democracy um china is not going to change its overall objective for historical political reasons of annexing taiwan or at least making progress towards an annexation and we for for deep-seated reasons are not going to um are not going to walk away from from taiwan although the extent of our commitment is up in the air that seems like a really bad recipe um thoughts about how this might play out uh over the next frankly days months years and any thoughts on in the sort of the danger zone period how do we get through how do we get through this period it's going to be very difficult because a lot of it is out of america's control i think fundamentally this is being driven number one by what hal just mentioned the fact that taiwan is becoming seen itself as more independent and is less willing to even consider any type of peaceful reunification and the other factor is the rise in chinese military power you can basically just imagine two lines converging there that alone i mean i don't know how you turn that ship around i think the best the united states can do is at least get the sequencing right pelosi's visit and those kind of symbolic measures wouldn't have been bad if you had the big stick to back that big talk up but right now the united states is talking loudly while not developing the big stick to actually back any of that talk up think inverse teddy roosevelt yeah i mean it's like so we're doing the worst possible thing rather than at least doing the kind of a mediocre thing that is the best we could do given the horrible circumstances that we have here um and i think you know americans tend to underestimate the how this current slippery slope activates a lot of historical baggage that beijing has i mean they basically see the the negotiations over taiwan as a series of broken american promises everything from nixon saying oh well we'll give up taiwan but in my second term and then watergate tubes that and then carter saying we're going to normalize relations with you and ditch taiwan the taiwan relations act uh you know reagan's saying we intend to gradually reduce arms sales but then doing all kinds of legal mumbo jumbo to actually say well these new f-16s are the same as those old ones that we know and raising the bar so from a chinese perspective this is it just fits the pattern and i think for on the american side you have the same problem where americans just look at the visit they don't think about any of that history they just think about the fact that we had one politician fly over civilian land in there and china reacts by surrounding an island with its military forces that just seems crazy to the americans and so both sides you know they're we're in the same bed but having different dreams kind of thing right like we're just not seeing eye to eye on this issue and it's just it's very hard for me to imagine a good outcome for this and this is why we kind of come back reluctantly to this idea that now the focus just has to be on actual military deterrence we're not gonna be able to finagle our way out of this with brilliant diplomacy or anything like that i mean at the end of the day you just have to say this is gonna be a hard slog for you so don't do it yeah just to add i think we we sometimes forget two things or we don't know two things one is that symbolism matters in this relationship and i think you made this point when we were talking about this a couple weeks ago that the last taiwan straight crisis in 95 96 was provoked by something that was essentially symbolic right it was a speech at cornell this taiwan straight crisis was provoked by something that was basically symbolic right the house speaker's visit to taiwan these things do matter in the relationship they're taken as indications of the broader direction of of travel it's when it's when it's when beijing is publicly seen to be losing taiwan that i think they get their most right anxious right and so that's that's one thing that that i think we sometimes struggle to understand and so the the corollary to that is that we need to be really careful about things that seem like symbolic changes in the status quo to us but might actually have a very different connotation and mike mentioned the taiwan policy act which is kind of working its way maybe through congress at the moment and there's a lot of good stuff in that bill and there's also some stuff like you know renaming the techno that i think would actually be pretty offensive and fairly dangerous right the second thing is that i think until recently and probably even now most americans and i'm not talking about you know normal guy on the street i'm talking about political elites in washington actually didn't have a particularly good understanding of what the military balance in the western pacific looks like and how challenging it has become from an american perspective and so i think there's sometimes a tendency to think that we can you know get away with doing things that may not be wise to do anymore because people assume that we still have the same military edge that we had 25 years ago in the last taiwan straight crisis and that that's just not the case anymore and so mike's exactly right that we need to be doing more and saying a whole lot less i wanted to stick on this issue of deterrence for a minute um and and what deters and i think especially in light of the war in ukraine you know how we just published today a short commentary by you and a few others looking at this um i think really interesting lengthy chinese article by a guy named sushing at remin university assessing uh's deterrence um you know after ukraine and he came to i think an interesting argument of on the one hand you know u.s deterrence largely clearly failed in many ways and the u.s then moved to a strategy of punishment but he seemed to let dangle at the end of the piece some tantalizing hints that um nonetheless beijing was watching and that beijing was um we were still sort of successfully deterring so i wanted to get your thoughts you know if we move into this phase where we're now taking or we're prioritizing military deterrence what's your sense on how accurately we've got a read on what is deterrent and what is actually just instilling resolve in the tr in in beijing and again i don't want to make everything about the pelosi visit but it's a nice moment to sort of get out and scrimmage and begin to see how china plays and admittedly that was a very symbolic event and as you rightfully say we can do a lot that's a much more quiet low-key consistent i mean if we keep it below the threshold of in your face you know beijing may kick and scream but it doesn't uh lob missiles nonetheless coming out of the pelosi visit what struck me is i'm not sure we've got a real good dial in on what are steps we can take that will deter um is almost a sense that beijing when some argue for this that sort of beijing will sit there and watch us you know bulk up taiwan and then it will get to the point where beijing will go well shucks it's it's too late so it seems like we've got some work to do to dial in more and just wanted to get you know maybe mike start with you and then how thoughts on what deters in the sense that we don't simply exacerbate the situation or or send a signal to the pla where they go all right more budget coming our way yeah i think there's this sort of valley of death where the things that could deter china in the long run will provoke it in the short run i mean something like mines you know which we look at as a defensive weapon beijing looks like at that as an offensive weapon because you're blocking our access to our own territory and so how do you get those deployed in time and not trigger a crisis um i think you just have to hope that on on their side they would have to mobilize for a while in order to carry out a massive military operation over taiwan so i think it could be done but i think there is going to be this very dicey period where the u.s is trying to basically flood the areas around the taiwan straight with sensors and shooters and beijing is are they just going to sit there and watch that i i don't know and the other i think the fundamental other problem is that we don't even know if those would deter because we don't have a good sense of the decision-making calculus at the very top level with xi jinping i mean there are plenty of chinese military writings as you well know that describe all the factors that we think would make these powerful deterrent weapons you know these they the chinese know better than anyone else they did it to us right with their anti-axis area denial capabilities that these things can fend off stronger opponents and massed forces but the problem is is there going to be information translated from you know low-level pla analysts up to the highest levels of xi jinping what we typically see with dictatorships you know is that they they kill the messenger they purge the highest ranks they surround themselves with yes men and yes women and you know nobody has killed the messenger more than xi jinping in recent years so i just don't even know what kind of information gets up to the to the top level so even if we have an effective deterrent it may not be interpreted as such by beijing this is an old problem uh in the early 1950s during the korean war when we started talking seriously about rearming west germany there were serious analysts who said this will provoke a war with the soviet union the soviet union will go to war rather than see the country that just ravaged them rearmed and the answer was well maybe they will but we can't accomplish our objectives without doing this and so we've got to take a risk while doing this in a way that that at least assuages some of the more reasonable soviet objections and what that meant was basically rearming germany in a way that it couldn't use force independently it could only use force in concert uh with with nato and and so there's i think a useful parallel there in the way that mike talked about none of the things that we're advocating are without risk the question you just have to ask is you know where is there more risk is there more risk of finding ourselves in a weakened position five years from now where it starts looking very attractive to china to use force or is there more risk in you know provoking some tensions hopefully in a measured way in order to strengthen our our position but we you know i acknowledge that's a matter of of judgment the question that you started with you know sort of which way does ukraine push china i think is the 64 000 question and i don't think we know the answer yet although i was really interested to read that article because it gives us a little bit into insight a little bit of insight into at least how some folks are thinking about it i think you can sketch two plausible narratives of how ukraine affects china's calculus and they cut in opposite directions and so the first narrative and this is the one i think that's being pushed by the biden administration to a certain extent is surely the chinese are going to be more cautious as a result of this they've seen how good our intelligence capabilities are they've seen how we can engage in serious cost and position even without using military force they've seen how the world has rallied around ukraine and so they've seen that if they invade taiwan it's just going to turn out very badly for them and i think maybe that's a plausible narrative there's another narrative though which goes like this xi jinping doesn't believe for a second that the united states would do to china economically financially technologically what it has done to russia because the chinese economy is so much more robust resilient and interconnected than the russian one is he may have learned from the current crisis that nuclear coercion works that if you have a big nuclear arsenal the u.s won't intervene conventionally on your doorstep and he may have learned that putin's mistake wasn't invading ukraine it was not invading ukraine decisively in the opening days i i can't tell you which of those things is right but i think the second one is at least as plausible as the first i think there's dangers all around of of forming a strategy based on what we think the other guy is learning because as you know mike you were just saying that the ecosystem of decision making in senior level you know in beijing is unknown right so how much of the reality is puncturing through so that comradeshi is getting an accurate read on where the relative costs are um and and just the the role of perception is so critical here because i agree i think there's you know um that's the story we may tell about these are the lessons they're learning about how you know how good our intelligence was and cost imposition but i agree it's it's it's a coin toss about are they learning another set and i think you know the objective of you know of chinese grand strategy which i think is you know extends far beyond taiwan although the conversation in dc has now sort of shrunk everything down to it's all about the 100 miles across straight but nonetheless i think um you know the the best thing we can do is first of all recognize that this crisis is not over i think the other thing is and this gets back to mike what you were just saying the a better understanding of of fundamental credibility because you know codels are no substitute for perceptions in china in the region of u.s risk appetite right but critically not stated risk appetite but a real credible sense that the united states has has skin in the game and i feel we've talked about this pick your metaphor bark bigger than bite over our skis and that's the that's the dangerous point when you know i think china looks at us in many ways is uncredible over committed uh and probably you know uh shouting loud loudly with a with a small stick and and how that exacerbates tensions i don't think it's sufficiently understood here yeah i think that's right and i mean one of the things that you and i have have talked about before is that the us is good at sending cheap signals and less good at sending costly signals and so you know increasingly there has evolved this narrative in the united states where it's almost assumed that the united states would fight on behalf of taiwan if it were attacked by china that would be a very costly endeavor and yet we are not willing to pay the much much lower costs of entering into an ambitious trade agreement in the indo-pacific right and and so there there is this question of sort of how credible is it when we say that this is the most important thing in the world for us it's not a great analogy but i imagine sort of you know walking into a restaurant where the you know doors falling out off its hinge you know there's there's dirt on the glasses you know the waiter takes 20 minutes to show up to get your drink order but when they do they promise that they've got a michelin chef in the back like unless you're getting the small stuff right you know and showing consistency in these other areas i think we don't realize how much credibility is fungible and it'll be credible credibility on you know putting political capital on the line for a trade strategy in asia that actually we're down to credibility in in other areas and i think we've got too much of a sort of siloed uh view um we're already two minutes over but i want to give sort of final comments you know to both you and i think one of them is um implications for our strategy and you know message in a bottle sent over to you know president biden on what is the sort of one or two priority areas we need to focus on you know in light of your thesis mike maybe i'll go to you first i think at that the more broad level you know our our solutions flow from our diagnosis so you know time is short and so you have to move fast and you have to use the capabilities and the partners you have on hand not those that you might like to have 10 years from now with a lot of r d spending or have time to rally big international coalitions and we make an analogy to the early cold war where you know then policymakers were fairly confident that communism ultimately would become bankrupt but it looked like it was on the march in the short term with the soviet army sprawled across a shattered eurasia and communism becoming more popular even in western europe so there's a danger zone then and there's this danger zone now and so we you know we've talked a lot about getting more assets defensive weapons around taiwan but i think we haven't talked so much about the economic things that the united states needs to be doing if you can't get a big trade deal like that what you at least need to do is cobble together some kind of economic block probably anchored by the g7 that works with a rotating cast of other partners to slow china's technological development down in key areas because china's trying to dominate these choke points of the global economy and then use that leverage to turn the screw on other countries as well as to obviously speed up to do joint r d and to also make sure that we partners don't necessarily fall to chinese economic coercion like what china tried to do with australia after it called for an investigation to covet and basically launched a full-blown trade war we need some kind of block that can help countries that become the target of chinese economic coercion have other options you know create a multilateral spectrum of options not just for core democratic allies but obviously going into developing countries which right now are very much enticed by the lower prices the big loans that china can offer up front authoritarian surveillance systems that they offer so the united states just needs to work with this block to try to have alternatives to chinese products and services i just say i think the direction of travel and u.s policy is about right on a lot of issues and the speed of travel is what's lacking and and so there have been good constructive initiatives in a lot of the areas that we've talked about here that we talk about in the book whether it's you know trying to prevent china from establishing this uh technological sphere of influence that encompasses much of the developing world or getting serious about the defense of the western pacific rallying overlapping coalitions of countries to contest chinese power and assertiveness there's progress on all of these things the progress has been a lot slower than i think anyone would like though and i think this was one of the things that the pelosi visit and the crisis it provoked underscored which is that we're simply not ready for a major crisis in the taiwan strait because even though people have known what would be necessary to have a better u.s defense posture in the western pacific for maybe a decade plus we've just moved very very slowly for a variety of reasons and implementing that and we're basically just out of time at this point and so we've got to find a degree of urgency a gear that we have lacked and the only other thing i would say is let's make sure we are starting crises over the right things or that we're picking the right fights i think a lot of u.s friends and asian beyond understand that there are going to be high tensions in the taiwan strait or elsewhere in the western pacific in the coming years they were a little bit puzzled that you know we seem to walk into a crisis over this right over this symbolic thing that didn't actually help taiwan and so we need to be a little bit choosier about these issues so that crises help us rally countries to our side as opposed to making them doubt our judgment how let me introduce you to the realities of our political system but mike cal thank you so much for uh for this conversation uh the book is danger zone the coming conflict china um which is uh just published by norton um highly recommend everyone read it um and continue to read the work of mike and hal as they continue to push our our thinking on the nature of competition with china and what the united states needs to do with it so thank you both [Music]

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

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Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics

Id: OTE9VyxnAPM

Length: 65min 4sec (3904 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022