Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China

foreign thank you professor cotkin and thank you all for coming to uh this uh special session of the Hoover institution uh project on China's Global sharp power we are just extremely honored to be able to host um this event which I guess is uh nearing the end of a long series of events uh introducing uh discussing and wrestling with this extremely timely and important book that Hal Brands and Michael Beckley have written danger zone the coming conflict with China which we hope uh will not become a war with China but uh as the book makes clear if we want to avoid war there are things we need to do to understand the trajectory we're on and prepare for for it um I would like to begin I'm Larry Diamond senior fellow at the Hoover institution I uh co-chair the project on China's Global sharp power with my colleague Glenn tifford who will be moderating uh the uh discussion that will follow the presentation of the book I'll also introduce our new program manager Francis hiskin uh who is with us today and uh Scott Sagan your uh entry is perfectly timed because I also wanted to thank the center for International Security and cooperation for co-sponsoring this session with us and for making available this beautiful multi-purpose uh hybrid session room um uh the world the William Perry room uh at and Senior Hall it's now my pleasure to introduce the two authors of this book who will present it and then be besieged by questions from us uh how Brands the most important thing to say about how Brands is that he's an alumnus of Stanford University so welcome back how he is now the Henry a Kissinger distinguished professor of global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins school of advanced international studies and a senior fellow also at the American Enterprise Institute he writes a weekly column for Bloomberg opinion on foreign policy and is the author or editor of several books including uh not only danger zone the coming conflict with China but also one that is again being much talked about the Twilight Struggle what the Cold War teaches us about great power rivalry today he he's a member of the state Department's Foreign Affairs policy board he's previously worked as a special assistant to the Secretary of Defense his co-author in this book is Michael Beckley who's an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and a non-resident senior fellow at the same American Enterprise Institute Michael is a leading expert on the balance of power between the United States and China and the author of two books and multiple award-winning articles he was an International Security fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of government and he has also worked with government agencies like the U.S Department of Defense as well as the Rand Corporation the cardigan Endowment for International Peace and he continues to advise different parts of the U.S government and the intelligence community and the U.S Department of Defense and I can only say in conclusion before I turn it over to you Hal and Michael I really hope the people you are still engaging in the United States government and hopefully in the Congress are listening to the very wise advice and warning that you offer in this book so over to you thank you thanks very much for that introduction Larry Larry and Glenn thanks so much for having us out here and everyone for uh showing up for what I'm told is basically the Kevin Rudd after party to talk about China we'll do our best uh to make you even more scared than maybe he made you scared about the situation um sign is rise at least from an economic perspective is basically coming to an end and then second that this fundamentally changes the calculus in Beijing it changes both their domestic policy as well as their International policy and we think that this explains some of China's assertiveness over the last 10 years and that those actions could actually be an ominous preview of what is likely to come over the next 10 years which is what we end up calling the danger zone so I realize like those two things may not be completely obvious so like on the China's Rises starting to slow down and economically come to an end I mean we just we argue that you could have a theory essentially of why China Rose so quickly over the last 40 years that this is actually not the norm in modern Chinese history of the most of modern Chinese history you know as a tale of war and and poverty and strife and so the last 40 years were really an ex exceptional set of circumstances propelling an exceptional outcome and now that same Theory would predict the end of the rise so you have the the Confluence of basically four happy trends that set this up one is just basic security um and largely underpinned by a friendly relationship with the United States you know obviously starting um in the 1970s the U.S starts fast tracking China's access to Western markets and capital um tells the Soviets not to to attack China and then even after the end of the Cold War continues to engage China so China enjoyed could become the workshop of the world and can really ride the wave of hyper globalization and relatively few children not alone essentially spends 25 of Chinese the third Factor was lots of resources so like one silver lining to late development is usually the the environment is relatively pristine and so China even going into the 90s was still almost self-sufficient in basic resources water uh energy all types of raw materials and that's not just good from a security standpoint it's great because it just lowers the price of inputs and so you know if you're a factory you can set up that factory plow through all the raw materials um it just makes growth very cheap to produce and then lastly you had a Chinese government that was at least willing to consider some reform and opening mean I think you know it's possible to take that argument too far but it's just very different than what we're seeing today and so we we go through and basically try to show that all four of those factors have been thrown into reverse over the last 10 years I mean obviously um at least big parts of the democratic World especially led by the United States are cutting China's access to the global economy uh the demographic dividend is turning into probably the worst Aging in population shrinkage crisis we've seen in a great power as far as I know in history I mean that 10 to 15 to 1 ratio I mentioned earlier that's going to collapse to two to one by the late 2030s so this is this is a problem that's going to hit China within the next decade it's not a lot just a long-term problem obviously China has plowed through a lot of its resources you know half of its water is just gone arable land gone the exploitable energy reserves largely gone and so that not only makes China more vulnerable to cutoffs and more dependence on Rivals for those goods but also has really driven up the price of growth because now inputs are incredibly expensive to source so if you just look at something like a capital output ratio I mean China's having to spend three times as much to produce every unit of GDP as it did just in the in the 2000s and you know dealing with these problems might be manageable if you had a government that was full of Savvy economic reformers but I think we've clearly seen that Xi Jinping if he has to choose between political control or economic efficiency he's going to choose political control and we just go through I mean this group is well aware of all the different policies the tech Crackdown zero covid heavily subsidizing state-connected firms while private firms have to kind of Scramble for Capital just a whole range of examples of him really turning the screw um and and taking China in a fundamentally different direction and so these these headwinds have already obviously dragged down the growth rate even as of 2019 the growth had already fallen by more than half from 2010 then kovid dragged it down by another two-thirds now zero covid I mean we were just talking last night that the estimates could range to you know zero percent growth to two percent you know so um it's not looking great from that perspective and and this economic slowdown is coming at the same time that China's starting to get more strategic pushback from other countries you've seen the bubbling up of explicitly anti-china alliances in something like August um or the quad you have Japan planning to double defense spending the Taiwanese you know don't even consider going back with the mainland there's just all kinds of pressure forming around China and so that leads to the second point we make in the book which is that you know we look we try to look at every case where something like this has happened we had a rising power that starts to encounter growing economic and strategic headwinds um starts to Peak and none of these cases they didn't mellow out you know they actually uh geared up to try to batter their way through the headwinds and part of it is sort of like a a classic um sort of economic imperialism argument that when you go you're surrounded by excess capacity you have to kind of expand into new markets abroad and then you need to build the military assets to protect your far-flung economic Empire and then that usually causes you to step on the toes of some other great power and so it causes it fuels geopolitical conflict even if the regime itself doesn't want it but there's also in in China's case it's it's um it meets it checks a lot of worrying boxes because it's not just any great power it's a religious great power like there are lost Chinese territories that the regime has said one way or another are going to be brought back in it's a brutal authoritarian regime that might be uh you know casualty uh insensitive um in um in any kind of conflict that does occur and obviously it's main competitor um has a fundamentally different ideology and so that it heightens uh this this process that we've seen play out through history so I I don't want to talk too much the alternative to how and then maybe we can open up to the discussion sure and maybe just to add a couple of things I mean obviously uh one of the pieces of concern we had in writing the book is is where this all made may lead China over the second part of this decade in particular and we walked through a variety of areas where you could see a more prickly and insecure China lash out or otherwise run greater risk I think the one that everybody's focused on now is is Taiwan for for obvious reasons and one of the things I think that that really worries us is that it's it's useful to keep in mind that when you talk about a peaking power or Rising power or declining power you got you got to problematize that a little bit because countries don't rise equally or fall equally in all Dimensions at once right it typically takes time to convert economic power into military power and then you can continue you know blowing out the doors on your military budget even after your economic performance has started to fade this is what happens with the Soviet Union uh in the 1970s for instance and so when we talk about sort of a peaking China it's a China That's encountering growing economic stagnation growing strategic resistance but is continuing to add coercive capabilities at a very uh High rate and so if you start thinking about um the balance of power in the Western Pacific let's say in the second part of this decade it starts to look kind of attractive from a Chinese perspective and kind of scary from an American perspective and so you have this this long-running Chinese military uh build up that's been happening in various stages and one of the stages is meant to culminate in in or around 2027 when U.S officials are now saying that the Xi Jinping has told the pla to be ready to carry out a Taiwan operation if they are uh indeed ordered to do so that's also the time when U.S military power in the Western Pacific is temporarily going to kind of go like this right because you've got a U.S defense modernization program that's that's really geared primarily towards the early 2030s in fact that's the case really up and down the Western Pacific if you think about Japanese uh defense modernization or Taiwanese taiwan's implementation of the overall defense concept but in the interim the United States is going to retire a bunch of ships and planes and submarines that were built 40 years ago and have reached the end of of their service lives and you know occasionally catch on fire and things like that so they need to be retired but that just means you have fewer basically you Munitions and particularly missile tubes you know floating and flying around the Western Pacific just as China's military power is is peaking and it's also a time when you're going to have some some pretty fraught political Dynamics in the Taiwan Strait and so one of the arguments you make is that China has a combination of opening and closing windows so it's got an opening military window in the Taiwan Strait but it may actually have a closing political window in the sense that the Taiwanese population becomes more and more averse to unification with every passing year it develops more and more of a distinctive Taiwanese national identity and of course you've got a major presidential election in Taiwan in 2024 and you don't have to have that much imagination to sketch out a scenario where you get a third consecutive DPP presidency that that makes sighing wins two terms look relatively moderate by comparison on Independence related issues and so it's it's not beyond the realm of possibility that if this happens Xi Jinping might conclude that the road to Peaceful unification with Taiwan is is closed and then you start considering other options and a military option looks more attractive so we can we can talk all about that the only other point I'll make before just kind of wrapping up here um I think one of the interesting things that we try to do in the book was was introduce like a little bit of theory and a little bit of of history and and so I think part of what we're kind of doing is pushing them back against what I would consider the the some the simplified or simplistic version of kind of power transition Theory thucydides trap type stuff pointing out that it's you know if you look at a lot of the major hegemonic Wars that have broken out it's not always when the rising power surpasses the established power sometimes it's when the rising power realizes that it's not going to pass the established power and starts behaving more aggressively as as a result of that and you can actually get a sense of this if you look at the history of the the 20th century I I have a whole soapbox I'm happy to get on about the our understanding of World War One and why it's it's largely flawed but but do we think that this sort of the peaking power syndrome actually explains the outbreak of World War One fairly well right you had a Germany that had been growing rapidly that had been behaving more assertively making lots of enemies found Itself encircled by those enemies and increasingly feared as you get to the summer of 1914 that its military window of opportunity was closing right that if you got to 1917 the Russian Railway modernization would be complete the French were increasing the size of the army the British made clear they weren't going to be outbuilt in terms of battleships and so on and so forth and so if you ask why does Germany run these risks in the summer of 1914 giving the blank check to Austria Hungary and batting away attempts at mediation when it still might have made a difference well part of it is because there's a very strong sense in Berlin that it's kind of now now or never that if that if a great war is going to come even if that is not your preference let it come now rather than in two to three years when Germany uh might well lose and so that's really the scenario that we're working on and so we we do a little bit of work on the the history of the 20th century in the Cold War and I'm happy to get into that but I think that gives sort of a basic sense of some of the arguments that we're trying to make and so maybe it would just be appropriate to get into discussion at this point thank you very much Hal um I'd like you all um here in the room we have a lot of very distinguished people in the room to indicate maybe with your hands if you have questions and I'll take down a list and if we do get to you please announce who you are just for the benefit of the larger audience but I'll take the co-chairs prerogative and ask the first question just to get things going and much of the book focuses on the Western Pacific particularly a Taiwan contingency but I want to widen the frame because you know up until the uh the mid teens you might say that the um it was possible to talk about the China Challenge in largely economic terms and not quite security terms I think you know Australia's conundrum right Australia was economically dependent on China but dependent on the United States for security was a with a phenomenon that was found throughout the region as well but now that China has achieved military modernization that makes it almost appear competitor with the United States that the economy has broken down now China's challenge is truly comprehensive in the region and it seems like the United States response to that has been fighting really with one hand tied behind our back it's mostly described in terms of rising to the military challenge but we've been relatively light on the diplomacy and economic side of the of the equation and of course economics is what put China on the map in the first place and where China's influence has been strongest globally so we have lots of stick but very little carrots that we're offering people in the region and elsewhere in the world and I think if you think about a Taiwan contingency in China growing more assertive in the world I think it's useful to reflect on recent votes in international organizations for example you know the votes on the National Security Law in Hong Kong where much of the world broke down into the rest against the West likewise in the invasion of Ukraine likewise in the recent Human Rights Commission xinjiang report in the debate the vote about whether to have a debate about the report and you can even broaden the frame and say that the decision by OPEC plus to cut their oil production at a time where it's against U.S and European interests reflects the fact that the West is no longer able to Prevail among the rest and so China's been very active among the rest in a Taiwan contingency in in a challenge that is globalizing between the US and China can we rely on the world lining up behind the United States on the blocks actually favoring us numerically and even in terms of Natural Resources the way we once might have and then throw into that um last April she didn't ping announced a Global Security initiative which promises truly to globalize superpower competition that's now been mostly confined to East Asia so I'm wondering is that Bluster can we afford to treat it as such until the evidence is in how should we rise to this new globalized challenge how can the United States step up diplomatically and economically at a time where it's impossible now to have multilateral trade agreements like PPP or CPT um what is the what is the path and strategy for the United States outside of the military domain uh on the on the first question um it there's no doubt that you know through the global South that China is right now quite quite popular and it makes sense because China is the top Sovereign lender uh you know has doled out more more uh loans than uh the 22 Paris Club Rich democratic nations combined um and more than the World Bank more than the IMF everyone loves you when you're handing out money and goodies um it's the top trade partner for more countries than for the United States and so that's just very hard to push back on I think the United States I'm a little bit more heartened in terms of the cooperation among democracies but we've seen with sort of you know the build back better world uh initiative that it's in dollar terms it's small potatoes compared to what China is able to Dole out and you may not even be able to see it through to fruition the one it's not something that makes me optimistic because it's a result of bad things happening but I actually think China will end up doing some of America's work for it just because um for example a lot of these loans that it stoled out even according to China's own statistics roughly half of them probably aren't going to get paid back uh we've seen you know recently in Sri Lanka how these these debt situations can really spiral into a lot of anti-china sentiment and then China obviously is doing lots of other things partially to kind of protect this this emerging Econo economic Empire it's it's put out you know expanding its military Footprints getting more coercive with with Partners saying look if you don't take our technology we'll cancel the four other projects that you have here we'll cut you off from the finance tap or we'll deny you access to China's market so you better let us build that Port you know and make it Naval compatible that's not really winning China a lot of hearts in mind so I could see a situation maybe 10 years from now when a lot of those loans mature and China has to go into the debt collection business that it's going to be harder for it to sustain that support but if the war over Taiwan you know happens right now I mean I don't I don't think it's certainly not in the run-ups of the war and not in the early stages where you get much if any support I mean we just saw the Saudis you know line up with the Russians I think you can see something similar to that across the global South now if the United States and Taiwan can turn the tide militarily and seem to be like they're they're going to win the conflict then I I think there's a Tipping Point where people say okay we need to bandwagon for profit here but that's that's not really a great way to uh win hearts and Minds abroad or build a stable Coalition so I guess I I share your pessimism in the short term I'm somewhat optimistic in the long term but maybe not for the right reasons and then I'll let Hal say a lot more on the um Global Security you know initiative but I think this is a serious thing you know we're going to spend a lot of time talking about Taiwan but certainly Xi Jinping has elevated regime security to be the priority and is crafting not just a domestic strategy but a global strategy to make the world safe for his Reign and for his power and that means propping up autocratic governments it means destabilizing democracies so they look more shambolic so that the Chinese people won't want to emulate those systems and it means carving out a privileged economic zone where Chinese companies will have easy access to the markets and and credit and don't have to rely so much on the United States and other democracies and I think this dovetails very much with the Dual circulation policy where China is really on an Epic Quest for economic self-reliance and this is where I think it differs from the Soviet problem I mean the Cold War was bad it might have been even worse if the Soviets didn't depend on uh had didn't have lots of natural resources and a communist predilection to wall themselves off from the world of China is critically and chronically dependent on many of its Rivals and kind of a similar way to like you know Germany Italy Japan were and that actually made them more insecure and more aggressive because uh you know they were worried that their Empires were going to get choked out by the United States and its allies and I think China clearly is showing that it has those same concerns with this expansive uh security project in the Dual circulation policy let me just make a couple of points and two that are a little bit optimistic and one that is is less optimistic I think if you're trying to put a good spin on this from the perspective of the United States the way you can frame it is that the the nature of the Coalition or the block that you need is not so much determined by the number of countries that you can get to vote for your resolution and the the Human Rights Commission or wherever it's it's can you assemble a critical mass of Economic and and military power to push back against Chinese assertives and if you look at it from that perspective then the trends look look a lot better right and just in the way that you've seen kind of I'd say pretty impressive Unity among the advanced democracies on Ukraine you're seeing increasing Unity among the advanced democracies uh with respect to China although it's it's uneven to to be sure um the second point I would make that that's a little bit more optimistic is this is a problem but I'm not actually sure that it's a new problem and so the United States actually faced similar challenges in dealing with the non-aligned movement the third world throughout much of the the Cold War and so particularly by the time you get into say like the late 1960s and 1970s the United States is just getting its clock cleaned an international organization after International Organization by margins that actually make the the ones we see today look encouraging by by comparison and so this is this has always been a challenge but I think again the theory of the case that American policymakers had during the Cold War was more similar to the theory of the case that I just articulated uh the last one I'll make though which is kind of I guess less um less optimistic is that if you were to grade U.S policy let's say over the past four or five years in terms of rallying multilateral support or international support in dealing with the the China problem set writ large I think you'd give the United United States pretty high marks for getting countries that were already likely to be on site more on side right and so the advanced democracies Japan you're seeing movement in Europe as well have sort of come into greater alignment with U.S policy over the past three or four years even though as I mentioned it's been uneven and the progress has been a little bit slow you'd give the U.S policy far lower grades in terms of getting on side folks who were not already inclined to be on side right and so you see a much more uncertain diplomatic situation in Southeast Asia for instance which matters quite a bit even in just sort of the the narrow Regional sense and you can see this in some of the reactions to the Pelosi triggered crisis and in August right and so the Japanese and Australians were were sort of convinced more than ever that this showed that China was becoming aggressive and belligerent and they needed to align more closely with the United States I think the the message from Southeast Asia was mostly kind of like a pox on both of your your houses and you can make a similar point about kind of trade issues at large so we didn't spend a lot of time on this in the book because we didn't think that the U.S should rejoin cptpp was like a particularly original contribution um coming coming from us because it's it's conventional wisdom right but but also happens to be true and so one kind of interesting nugget that emerged about maybe maybe 10 or 11 months ago this is after China dropped its application to join cptpp and you know when the Australians and the Japanese come through DC they will say we understand that it is our job to keep China out of this thing for now but you have to understand that we can't do it for Apple right and so there's sort of a little bit of a ticking clock on some of these economic issues as well whereas if the United States doesn't come up with sort of a more positive economic vision for the region it's going to be playing at a disadvantage thank you so we have a long list when you ask your question please announce who you are I think we'll start with Steve cotton thank you Glenn for announcing and I'm Steve cotkin you make an analytic diagnosis of the economy in China hitting a wall and then from that you then move to observable Behavior and likely Behavior so what's the evidence that the leadership in China shares your view on the economic diagnosis maybe they have a different view of how they were successful maybe their view is not that they're hitting a wall maybe the observable and likely behavior that you describe is not motivated by the same perception of the situation that that we might have or that you have thank you so there actually are um I wish everyone would read the selected works of um Xi Jinping and umin and hujin Tao because there's there's a lot there and there's also leaked documents that have come out um and and you don't even have to read Chinese there are there are books that translate a lot of these things the elite debates going on within China and it's kind of a mixed bag and what we took from a lot of these documents was that the Chinese seem to be confident abroad but increasingly insecure at home and that this is the combustible combination and you can actually trace the causal Story I mean we we actually go back to the 2008 financial crisis where the Chinese look around they see the drop in demand for their export dependent economy and so they initially roll out these giant stimulus packages which artificially keep the growth rate high for a couple years but they realize that's not going to cut it over the long term and that they need a fundamentally new strategy and so you have documents that outline all of these economic concerns you know the the declining demand the rising debt um and as when Joe Bao said you know the unbalanced unsteady economic model that they had used previously and they were also worried that they expressed a lot of worry about becoming cogs in uh the supply chains of leading multinational companies and so when they start to come under more economic pressure they say well we we need a new strategy and we can recover from this because we have these formidable capabilities we've built up over the last 30 years of rapid growth but we need to do something we have to be proactive about this we cannot just sit back and wait for the Invisible Hand of the free market to save us we have to use the Iron Fist of state power and there are there are lots of statements um from Chinese leaders to this effect um and and of authoritative documents like government work reports that go through all of these economic insecurities and and Link them causally uh to this idea that we need more expansive and aggressive abroad in order to sort of reset our rise on on sure footing so we kind of go through that causal story and then there's just lots of a trickle of very you know the the Xi Jinping speeches where he's talked he's warning his the internal speeches where he's warning you know cadres about the prospect of a soviet-style collapse that is triggered by some system crippling economic crisis a a series of reports that are coming out that note not just the economic slowdown but the rising anti-china sentiment around the world and then there's just a lot of things that China's been doing that aren't exactly the Hallmarks of a confident superpower you know censoring negative economic news um you know uh this massive increase in internal repression and and censorship um so we we kind of compile all these things and try to read the tea leaves to the extent we can I I found the more that you get into these it's these Chinese it's amazing where if you just read read it like they say what they're what they're thinking here um so you know to the to the extent that you can study a black box looking authoritarian regime like China we do the best we can with those documents very briefly it has to be a circumstantial case right because even if Xi Jinping reads this and he's like yeah man Brands and Beckley nailed it like he can't he can't come out and say that publicly and we shouldn't expect him to and so what I think you have to look for our the expressions of concern that are mixed in with the expressions of of confidence that that may be somewhat genuine or maybe just what you would expect from a regime like this and and you can find it basically in all of the areas that we've talked about right whether it is the fact that um you know China is basically outlawed bad economic news right refuses to talk about the demographic uh problem uh if you look at the way that even pretty hawkish folks closely aligned with the party in the pla talk about the problem of encirclement there's enough there or to to make it seem like a plausible sense that this is not just sort of objectively what is happening but that uh that's the way it may be seen from Beijing just got Sagan professor of political science senior fellow here at FSI and co-director of csac um I think most of us in this room have had that experience uh where something happens in the real world and you say oh how does that influence what I've just argued in a book or in an article and that that's the nature of my question um if I were XI I would say oh this war in Ukraine makes me really want to doubt the militaries assessments when they come to me and say yes we've acquired the capability to do what you've asked me to do ask us to do and would also maybe say oh Taiwan will be United and fight harder than my intelligence estimates are telling me is that true is there any evidence of that and is there anything in the past given your backgrounds where the Chinese government has been able to reassess military capabilities or political Unity of an adversary based on recent events let me let me take a crack at the first part of it and I think the on the honest answer is that no one can say with with certainty right and so there there are kind of like you know so the pla has um a pattern of studying other people's Wars and trying to make sense of it and some of that debate will play out in place that you know we can observe it's not actually clear how much that matters right now because what we're ultimately trying to figure out is you know what is Xi jinping's interpretation of the war in Ukraine and he's not telling us unfortunately I think there are kind of there have emerged two um competing although not entirely contradictory hypotheses about this and and the first one is is basically along the lines that you were alluding to and it it basically goes well of course Xi Jinping would have to be sobered by what's happened in Ukraine because he's seen how hard Conquest is against a committed Defender right he's seen how good the U.S intelligence capabilities are and so he must doubt how much surprise China would have on on his side he's seen how much economic and technological punishment the advanced democracies can inflict on a country when they when they decide to do it and and so on and so forth and and that that may be plausible the other hypothesis though runs in the other direction right which is just that one Xi Jinping probably doesn't believe that the United States would do some of the things to China that it has done to Russia would the United States sanction the Chinese central bank right that's a much bigger deal than going after the Russian Central Bank he may not believe that the Taiwanese have the same will to fight as the ukrainians right and and to be fair he wouldn't be the only person in the world to think that the Taiwanese don't have the same rule the fighters he may believe that what the war has shown is that nuclear coercion works right that the United States and NATO would be fighting alongside Ukraine right now if it wasn't for the Russian nuclear uh Arsenal and he may believe that Putin's big mistake wasn't launching The Invasion it was doing it haphazardly and incompetently and not winning decisively in the first few days and and so if you if you take that approach then the lesson he draws might be much different which is that if you're going to do this be decisive at the outset and and take advantage of everything that he has seen about Russia's vulnerabilities in this conflict to use that as a checklist to reduce China's vulnerability connection I I can't tell you which it is but just you know sort of inferring based on what we know about China's Ambitions and have observed in recent Behavior I I would have to say that I think the second hypothesis is at least as plausible as the first I think the other problem you know in terms of learning from other people's experience I mean the problem is even if Xi Jinping is a little bit more sobered about the Tactical demands that we placed on the pla I don't know if that's going to make him lay off Taiwan just because it's such an important issue and as Hal said in his initial presentation just the the peaceful reunification options are disappearing quite fast and it just I think the Chinese clearly see a slippery slope of Taiwan gaining International status upping its relationship with the U.S getting lots of arms and international backing and so if you look at China's history of its use of force it often has used force not when things are going to go great for it not because it expects wonderful things to happen or an easy cake walk but because things are getting so bad that they decide to fight now rather than Wait For Worse outcomes later I mean the Korean war is obviously the obvious example where you know Mao certainly didn't relish the idea of you know taking on a superpower that had just used nuclear weapons five years previously on a rival but you know it would be a worse outcome if you let the Americans go on top or the the invasion of Vietnam you know that comes uh not too long after America's horrible experience in Vietnam and yet Deng Xiaoping says well we can go into Vietnam and maybe have a different outcome or maybe we just need to um to accomplish our security aims and my domestic political aims so I just even if they're sobered about the Tactical stuff I just worry about the other peaceful options are dwindling so fast and that could compel them um in more preventive kind of thinking into a work hi I'm Jackie Schneider I'm a Hoover fellow here and I was previously at the naval war College um so I I didn't get to read the book but I loved your description of the theory it had um all these elements that a social scientist loves right it's simple and yet it has this extraordinary face validity the example you give about World War One in Germany it's extremely compelling so I have two questions the first is are there cases that are like Germany right that have this that really fit the theory well and yet don't lead to war and the second follow-on question is what do we take away from those types of cases what is the the so what and the recommendation for the U.S government if your theory is and I mean which sounds like intuitive and potentially accurate what do we do next you know I'm happy to take a crack at it um in some ways you could look at the Soviet Union during the late Cold War as as an example of this right and so Soviet economic power Peaks relative to the United States around 1970 although I think we we thought it came later than it than it actually did during the Cold War and of course Soviet military power continues to grow relative to the United States really probably until the early 1980s maybe even a little bit later than that but of course the Soviet Union doesn't sort of lash out and cause a global war it does engage and and some of the behavior you might expect to see right so there's the rash of sort of Soviet third world expansionism whether director and direct during the mid and late 1970s and the Soviets absolutely get more prickly and insecure during the early 1980s as they start to realize that time is not on their side and they're falling farther and farther behind the United States and so that that is one of the drivers of increased U.S Soviet tensions during the early 80s but you know when we tried to answer this question um you know why doesn't it Go worse we came up with kind of two two answers and the first was that the the United States and its allies did a really good job of convincing the Soviet Union over of over a long period of time that there was no way that military aggression could actually make its life better right because you had these alliances that had been sealed together over a period of decades they were backed by uh you know very compelling uh deterrence and in the mid-1980s early mid-1980s the military balance actually begins to shift so rapidly in the favor of of the West that it's just not clear how using force or coercion will actually make you know breshnath for the the geriatrics who come after them their their lives better right but the second piece is that the United States worked you know pretty hard to avert this type of situation and so a lot of what happens really from 1983 onward but particularly in the Reagan second term is about giving the Soviets a sense that there's a place for a soft Landing if if they want it right and so convincing Gorbachev that if he is willing to basically do business on American terms on arms control in terms of Soviet retrenchment from the third world even on a variety of other things that you will the Soviet Union will then enjoy a better relationship with the world which by the way might help them address some of the economic problems that they are facing now that's obviously not how it turns out for the Soviet Union because a lot of Gorbachev's reforms backfire in a major way but you had this this common nation of deterrence and reassurance or conciliation or whatever you want to call it that ease is a little bit of the some of the Dynamics you might otherwise expect to see so just quickly have the the most peaceful case that we looked at was obviously Japan in the 1970s and 1980s where it's economic Miracle comes to an end but we we interpret it almost as the exception that kind of Curves the rule because Japan just has things that China today does not so it has an alliance with the United States and what you know Dale Copeland has called trade good trade prospects I mean this is right at the beginning of the period of hyper globalization so even as it's as economic opportunities at home start to wither away there's all these new opportunities abroad and so Japan could rely more on a sort of free market laissez-faire strategy um and also it was a democracy and we found that Democratic regimes aren't immune to these sort of peaking power dynamics but they're at least seems to be some shock absorbers because they represent a broader political Coalition some you know some of whom favor uh open markets and free trade and some of whom want to you know do more Imperial kind of stuff that's a a lockdown privileged economic zones and it kind of buffers um those Temptations so you know obviously China has neither of those things going forward Aaron Carter who her fellow uh thanks for interesting presentation and I also really love Twilight's struggle um last year so so my question is so I'm curious how you would react to um what I view as perhaps the most compelling counter argument to your book um which is that it's certainly the case that Xi Jinping would like for China to be the dominant power in the Asia Pacific uh would certainly like for Taiwan to be part of China however shooting things real core interest is staying in power right he's had a lot of challenges recently it faces a lot of domestic struggles um so my question is going out into the future more or less indefinitely China is going to face a lot of uncertainty about whether it could take Cola militarily not only because it hasn't fought a war in decades but most importantly because of the U.S policy of strategic ambiguity right it's just not going to know if the U.S military with all of its power is going to come to the defense of how long um and so that guarantee you know you know subject to the Biden Administration maybe is not really going to change going to the Future um so my question is why why would you expect that the from XI jinping's point of view that he would ever really engage in that Taiwan gamble just simply because the expected value of that gamble is so negative if he were to fail right um and um the just the political domestic power ramifications are so costly from his point of view why would it you know I acknowledge these shifting power dynamics are real but those sort of domestic political imperatives are so important and unlikely to change I'm just curious how you would respond to that I certainly hope you're you're right and can and see lots of ways that that would play out um the problem is I would have said the same thing about Putin you know and dating Ukraine um and risking uh so much on a on a big operation now maybe she will learn from uh the Ukraine example but um for one thing fair enough fair enough yep so I mean I think first of all I would say Taiwan you can't separate Taiwan from XI jinping's hold on power because he has attached a lot of his legitimacy to not passing this problem down generation to Generation Um as as he put it um and so you know if he just sits back and lets these current trends such as they are where Taiwan seems to be growing in status and gaining uh allies um continue I that that itself can become a risk there's also the Strategic risk uh to China which obviously implicates his his regime if Taiwan becomes this Bastion that is once again hostile but I think I also just worry that for a dictator like there are very great arguments as to why you should not try to invade Taiwan I think it would be a complete disaster for the PLA and for Xi Jinping but you know I also don't know if dictators are going to get the best information and you you know as you well know he has just purged so many people not just within the pla but you know a million seniors CCP officials and so I can imagine because he's killed the messenger so many times that he's not going to get the kind of sober assessments and could be told no I mean we've been training for this Mission we're ready to go hopefully you're right and I do think at the end of the day an invasion of Taiwan is probably you know less likely than not but it's just can we rule it out for the sober reasons that you've raised um I'm not comfortable enough uh wrestling I mean just two two things real quick one is you know historically the peaking power Gambit usually doesn't work out well right and so like it didn't work out for Germany in 1914 and it didn't work out for Japan in 1941 and in both cases there was reason to suspect beforehand that it might not work out and that it might actually jeopardize the the regime's hold on Power and so I think the Germans understood very clearly in 1914 that if they got into a long War a long Continental or global war it was likely to lead in the overthrow likely leaded overthrow regime as in fact that it did and yet in both of those cases for some of the reasons that the Mike talked about and in part because you know they just didn't feel like there was much of an alternative they went ahead and rolled the dice that's the pessimistic part but the optimistic part is I think I agree with a lot of the premise of your question and that actually makes me a little bit more hopeful that you can put together a strategy that makes an invasion of Taiwan look unappetizing even to an increasingly risk acceptance Xi Jinping right and so if you can make it look dead certain that this is going to be a long war that involves lots of countries coming in against China that is unlikely to end quickly that it's going to have horrific economic consequences for the state and that all of that may jeopardize XI jinping's hold on power then maybe he does think twice or three times about doing it even as these other factors would make him more risk accepted in the future I want to applaud the depth and comprehensiveness sophistication of your answers but we have a long list I knew the butt was coming unfortunately everyone in the room is on the list no no please talk faster I don't know oh we have Matt next um this is a great discussion uh two two points one another you know other possible historical antecedents if you want one right in the neighborhood I think Japan in the 19 uh 1930s 1920s and 30s is an excellent um you know example of this and and you have very similar political political economy Dynamics where you have a capital glut um uh and a need to find the foreign markets and given the the protectionism of the 20s and 30s that kind of had to come from imperialism some sort of chilling analogies to today um uh one one question I have and this is an empirical question because I know absolutely nothing about military hardware so when we talked about one of the reasons this window of opportunity is closing is because uh in West Pacific uh democracies are upgrading their uh military hardware their military capabilities um how how mechanical how easy a process is this is just is this just you know unboxing a bunch of new hardware and then it works or how much uncertainty and risk is involved in in this whole um you know uh procedure real quick uh totally agree on on Japan we talk a little bit about Japan and the book and uh you will often you will increasingly see Japanese observers saying that China reminds them of themselves right in in the 1930s it's not good these days on well said on on the SEC on the second one it it depends on what what military gear you're trying to get right and and so if if your bias is towards future capabilities where you still got to do research and development and so on and so forth there's a higher obviously a higher degree of uncertainty about whether any program will be successful if what you're trying to do is just kind of like load up on long-range strike capabilities and things that already exist right then the question is really it's really just an industrial base and a money issue as opposed to a like will it work type issue that's kind of the question like for is the view from nanhai like okay we know what their military is going to look like in 19 you know in 2035 or is it like wow this is kind of a wild card I I'm not entirely clear on what our military is going to look like in in 2035 and so I I don't think they would have a lot of certain I think they can they can you can predict pretty well what the US military is going to look like in 2026 or 2027 right because most of the capabilities that will be in existence then are in existence today there's some areas where there's uncertainty about how good the capability are how effective they would be particularly there may be some uncertainty about which capabilities are being concealed so that you know the Chinese can't prepare to deal with them beforehand but the the farther out you get into the future the more uncertainty there's going to be next we have Mike McFall so Michael Stanford Hoover FSI political science I rarely get to say this so I want to say it I have read your book I own a ton of books uh and I always say oh I have your book uh I just said that to our visitor yesterday but I had a long plane ride a couple weeks ago I read it it's fantastic it's made me think about a lot of things so congratulations um I have 17 questions I'm not only going to ask one and but but that's because it's such a great book it makes you think um two questions one what's the best right no no it's the same question it's the same question A and B one a one B it's the same thing it's it's building on actually what Stephen Aaron said um which is this so what is the article out there right now that is categorically different from your argument that makes you worry that you're wrong and related to that see 1B it's the same thing what in the future what evidence in the future would make you think okay we got this wrong this was this prediction you guys have this very precise prediction and if you're right everybody's going to remember your book and if you're wrong they'll nobody will remember your book that's a great that's a gamble you've made but I'm interested analytically like so so a couple of examples would be what if we got another secret document released right you know we've had we've had very one very important one that gets a lot of attention and in the Chinese studies what if we got another one that said actually XI xingping doesn't care about Taiwan as much as we as you just said Michael right oh and and actually and the data that they've done in China suggests that actually Chinese uh it's not important to them in terms of the legitimacy of the regime if they take Taiwan or not so that would be really concrete things okay so we got this wrong second on Steve's Point like like the and it's a great you know economic collapse you know we got it we got to do this thing now but that's assuming that economic growth is what Xi Jinping is maximizing for alternative data might suggest he's maximizing for State control of the economy and that's going to take him decades to get right right so the the thing that you see is a danger zone because you're looking at it like like they don't have much time for what he's trying to do could push out and there might be four or five others but what would what would be the data that would really cause you to rethink the the very clear hypothesis in the book yeah I mean we don't have to go far because um we can just walk down the hall at Ai and orianna will tell us why we're wrong about this and that house or even my PhD advisor uh Andy Nathan also wrote a piece in foreign affairs calling us out too so it's always great when you're a PhD advisor and your colleagues are arguing about why you're waiting for immediate family exactly my three-year-old starts telling me that's when I know I've really messed things up I mean there's there's so many different data points that could show that we're wrong the one that you mentioned you know does XI Japan really care uh or uh what Andy Nathan argued was that look the Chinese think much more long-term about something like Taiwan and they don't necessarily need outright political control they just want to manage the situation while they focus on all of their other objectives especially regime security at home there's also I mean we could just be fundamentally wrong about China's trajectory internationally which would be especially damning for me considering my first book was about how China's you know not going to catch up but if China restarts its rise because it Masters AI or something like that and plows ahead and you know the combination of automation at home and opening up new markets across the global South creates this viable Empire going forward I mean our whole view of China's trajectory internationally would be proved laughably wrong I mean I hope the this and with this book my first book I didn't want to be proved wrong as an American but this book I hope we are proved laughably wrong so hopefully these things will will come to there and and the Taylor Frable has written stuff about how regime insecurity has in the past caused China to mend fences at least on its Continental periphery uh I don't think he applies it to the maritime domain or to Taiwan um but maybe there is similar you know a similar kind of logic here the Omni balancing you know sort of uh argument so I'll try to be brief Karis templeman I'm a fellow at Hoover and I manage the Taiwan project there um so I I am in full agreement with the first part of your argument about China kind of uh slowing down maybe they're going to reach a kind of Wiley Coyote moment at some point in the near future where they're out over the cliff and there's a sudden realization that you know their their future trajectory is not what they thought it was my question is about the second part of your argument which is there that if they reach that moment they're likely to lash out and try to lock in gains rather than to turn inward and I wonder what evidence you have from past behavior and this ties a little bit to Taylor for Evil's research of lashing out versus turning inward when you have these kinds of regime crises either economic or or political uh and just a final point I'm a little uncomfortable with drawing analogies with with Germany or other things from 100 years or 200 years ago if there's evidence from the PRC regime itself uh as a comparative political scientist I'm more comfortable with kind of explanations that that root Behavior within the regime itself rather than its position within your interstate system so your thoughts on that so I mean I'll just answer briefly and I'm sure Michael have something to have something to add I mean we wrote a piece maybe a year ago trying to answer exactly this question and looking at kind of previous Chinese uses of force and as Mike talked about earlier that they're often in response you know whether you're looking at uh the Korean War um sort of second Taiwan straight crisis thing like that they're often in response to perceptions of a closing window of opportunity or approaching window of vulnerability but then also they interact in interesting ways with PRC political Dynamics right and so part part of the Korean War decision is basically using mobilization to kind of consummate the revolution at home and things of of that nature so so there are some some parallels in in Chinese history but but the other part of it is you know look we're trying to make a case that is based on you know plausible reading of how this particular uh system is performed in the past but we're also trying to make sort of a broader argument here and so I think there's some you know perhaps it makes one uncomfortable as a comparativist but there are you know this this long series of cases which Mike has looked at in in Greater detail where you look at basically every fast rising power that then slows down over the past 150 years or so and you get these sorts of Dynamics and and I believe every Pace right and then the question is like house how severe is it and the severity is conditioned by trade expectations that's conditioned by regime type and and so on and so forth and when you start mapping that onto the Chinese regime that's where you start getting concerned and so I think if you sort of triangulate between characteristics of this regime behavior of this regime and then sort of the larger sweep of cases that we're looking at it gives you reason to plausibly be concerned about this sort of turning Behavior yeah I mean with China's behavior and you can correct me if I'm wrong but with Taiwan you know my understanding is that China's strategy up until about 2016 was you know with some glaring exceptions obviously relatively peaceful and patient trying to use the economic instrument and then isolate Taiwan diplomatically and then it's after these peaceful reunification means start to disappear that China really starts upping the ante and so you could point to something like the the show of force that China's been sustaining for two years now in the Taiwan Strait is possibly signaling now whether that will spill over to actual conflict You could argue is different I also look at something like Belton Road which like people assumed was just this like we're here we're gonna launch ourselves but you also when you read in the documents and the kind of analysis that Chinese strategists were doing it was also a response to economic problems at home and then the new security concept of having to build strategic fulcrums around the world and expand the military power projection capability also emerges from this fear that if you don't secure those far-flung lifelines you become much more vulnerable so that those aren't like I think we should avoid using things like lash out because that's not even though we've said that at various months that's not exactly our argument that they just go crazy and go on like a Hitler style Rampage around uh East Asia it's more that these countries when they come under pressure realize they need to get proactive and then in the course of becoming more economically and Military proactive they start to fall into more um into more conflict thank you we've got a couple in the corner there I wonder if we can bundle them to make sure that everyone gets in on time um Jim Fury and then Chris Ford um thanks Jim fearon FSI and uh political science so I I haven't read the book and this is kind of clarifying apologies on that um so I was a little confused by or I'd like to ask you about uh I think Michael you said you thought that invasion of Taiwan was less likely than not but which surprised me because I thought that as I know stood it you guys are predicting a diversionary conflict so that you know their their external competences in is you know stable or increasing but they're facing increasing domestic insecurity well I guess also a question are you predicting a diversionary conflict sometime in the next 10 years where and if so like how does that work do you see a particular kind of shock uh or is that not right are you thinking more it's going to be some kind of deliberate uh or trending domestically as bad and we're you know when we see adequate military estimates we're just going to go um and then last thing uh um how do you think things are going to change after the party Congress next week or will will will we see do you think that we're going to see a a change in direction or new initiatives from Xi Jinping in this area or or not I think that you know there's pretty good evidence that that's preoccupied them and some of their behavior with respect to the Pelosi visit has been conditioned by that but I'm curious what you think I think oh we're gonna bundle yeah uh thanks uh Chris Ford uh uh Hoover fellow and also uh director of the miter Corporation Center for strategic competition um I'd like to draw out a little bit more if I could on the sort of the policy prescriptive implications of your analysis uh taking the analysis arguendo uh we're either going to face this Danger Zone in the short term perhaps as early as 2027. um and or we're going to get through that somehow I suppose and then we'll in which case we'll have a longer term strategic competition challenge um in which maybe China's economic luster has dimmed but you could make the same argument you could make your own version of the kind of analysis about how the wheels are gradually slowly falling off the Chinese economic Miracle you could make the same argument about many of the countries of the West including our own and so we would still be in a strategy competition with uh you know maybe a slowing China but we're not exactly in a in the Primrose seat right now ourselves um so I guess either either with respect to this short-term challenge of how is it that we prepare for the potentiality of that Danger Zone in the short term at a point in which our acquisition pipelines and our funding pipelines and all these sorts of things are you know not going to produce much by way of new dramatic results just in the next three or four years or we have a long-term competition problem in which we have to somehow face off with another power that is pretty good at organizing the many facets of its uh National levers of power if you will uh in a context in which we don't and don't don't have those tools don't want our leaders to have those tools but yet have to compete with that power nonetheless so either which other part of the sort of scenario tree one takes what does your analysis point us in the direction of by way of what you know when when we work with our federal sponsors for example what should we be advising them about how to uh to answer the dilemmas that your analysis presents why don't you guys take those two and then we have a final three um Let Me Maybe do gym and you do those um so um Professor so I I think major war is just generally not very likely for some of the reasons that Aaron sketched out so that's all I meant by that comment but I just worry that a war over Taiwan is becoming more likely over time I don't think it's a diversionary argument per se um Aaron's done some some research on this but argument is more just it's a strategic and political problem from the Chinese side and if they care about Taiwan as much as we think they do that if it's going to be forever separated from the mainland that they might start turning and flexing their military muscle given the the lack of alternative options and in terms of the party Congress I mean it's it's hard to say for sure but I'm I would bet that Xi Jinping will be able to focus more on foreign policy once he's locked down his he's ensconced himself you know as a dictator for life um and we'll be able to start moving further afield and I also don't know if China has much of a choice just given how stretched it is around the world now economically diplomatically as well as militarily it's just heavily involved at this point so I don't know if there is any I just the idea of like China retrenching to something seems completely out of the question even if there are problems at home that she should want to focus on um so so in a way the answer is is both right and so we're arguing that there is this near-term imperative but even if you do really well then that merely gets you to the longer term competition right but but hopefully over the course of the longer term competition the inherent strengths of American society and the United States plus all of its allies are greater than the inherent strengths of Chinese society and while you know I think I take I take your point about sort of apparent weaknesses in the United States model today um I feel fairly confident saying that sort of the the structural problems that the United States faces are not on the same level as the structural problems that the China faces so you just want to look at the demographic issue right the United States is not looking at a 50 decline in population by the the end of the century right it's not looking at a massive we have a problem with too many retirees right and too few working age people but it's a dramatically smaller problem than China is going to have in that same area and you can go on on and on down the list in terms of the policy prescriptions I mean I think we'd basically agree with you in the sense that time is relatively short and you kind of have what you have at the moment and so if you're trying to deter conflict in the Western Pacific for instance well what are you left with you can you can try to feel as many of the capabilities that basically allow you to kind of flip the Chinese a2ad strategy around right so anti-ship missiles sea mines drones the treatable ISR and so on and so forth because what you're basically trying to do is just make a cross-strait Invasion look prohibitively costly from the plas perspective you can try to broaden the prospective Coalition that China would have to face by securing more explicit commitments from additional countries that they would not be indifferent to a Chinese attack on Taiwan and so when Xi Jinping thinks about the perspective Taiwan War it's not China against Taiwan it's not China against Taiwan in the United States it's China against Taiwan the United States Japan Australia and so on one and so forth you know some some of these things are I think were closer to them than others I feel fairly good about where we're going on kind of the broadening the Coalition issue if you look at some of the statements that are coming out of Australia and Japan these days and in other places we are sort of just just beginning and and so I think one of the things you know the good news about Ukraine war is it has broadened awareness of the limitations of the U.S defense industrial base and how hard it will be just to replenish the stockpiles that have been spent down to support Ukraine the bad news is that we still appear to be looking at it in sort of an incremental change perspective rather than kind of this is an emergency perspective I think that's a great segue to what will be our final question before turning to Larry for the last word and that's Mike Brown thanks Mike Brown uh brand new visiting scholar here at Hoover so I want to uh Echo what Mike mcfaul said uh this was to me the most thought provocative book I've read this year so it's it's really well done doubling down on the point you just made it seems like the the key for changing she's calculus is having him think that this is going to be costly so the mistake that all the aggressors have made and you gave great examples Germany World War One Japan World War II Putin recently is they think they're gonna win decisively and quickly and your article uh earlier pointed out even the US is not prepared for a longer term War how do we change she's thinking so not what would be compelling to us but what do you think the two or three things that would be most compelling to change his thinking about this is going to be too costly and so I'll mention two and then Mike can hop in one is just uh showing that the U.S military doesn't have a glass jaw right that you you can't basically U.S combat power in the Western Pacific on day one of the war with with mass missile strikes and so maybe that's you know more dispersing the the presence maybe that is you know hardening facilities things like that maybe that is just demonstrating the ability to fight through disruption and so on and so forth the second one I think the bigger one and unfortunately this is one we have less control over is changing his assessment of taiwan's will to fight right and and so what the you know what folks from you know when folks from Taiwan come through the United States they say their real concern is they don't think that she Xi Jinping believes he would have to reckon with much Taiwanese resistance he would have to reckon with American resistance but not Taiwanese resistance and so if you could somehow instill in in XI jinping's mind the idea that he's going to face the sort of whole of society resistance in Taiwan that Putin has faced in Ukraine my hunch is that would would be powerful I I would just add uh you know the more you can signal that this war what starts in Taiwan is not going to end in Taiwan that this would turn into a multilateral conflict um you know it's through through joint declarations and exercises and cooperation and interoperability that would probably uh be all to the good and then finally and kind of related economic resilience because a lot I think the Chinese feel well they depend on us way too much economically they would never you know the Europeans will fold like a house of cards because they want to sell us Volkswagens and stuff you know so like the more you can have more economic resilience among the allies and then disrupt China's ability to sanctions uh proof its uh its own economy as it's trying to do right now I think can convince XI that the economic costs would be extremely high and that you would have a fairly united multilateral front um even with a loss of of trade with China okay uh thanks has been a great session I'd like to uh put your book uh briefly in conversation with the book from yesterday and by yesterday I don't mean a decade ago I mean literally yesterday when Kevin Rudd uh spoke at Hoover about his book The avoidable War uh from the two titles you would think the books are massively in contradiction titled the avoidable war title becoming conflict with China although you don't say the coming war with China um I having read your book a while ago and just finished Uh Kevin Rudd's book found a surprising degree of overlap between your two books particularly in terms of a lot of the things you were just talking about how in terms of um basically peace through strength if I can put it that way some of the obvious lessons of deterrence uh but he emphasizes some things I'd like you uh to react to and then I'd like to have you react to some other insights that I think we glean from the recent trip that some of us made to Taiwan uh his emphasis is strongly on and though I'm not a China expert this has been weighing a lot in my mind not backing China into a corner in terms of losing face uh feeling humiliated and feeling like they may have to react even though from the Strategic calculations that you that drive your book they may not want to or be ready or think it's in their interest uh and in this regard I continue frankly to be tortured by the Pelosi experience the Pelosi visit because on the one hand it was a huge confidence booster in Taiwan on the other hand it was a I think taken as a pretty serious and provocative slap in the face in Beijing and so this leads to the the other angle I I'd like you to finish up by exploring which is um I guess the most concise way to put it is how many slaps in the face can there be in a kind of cumulative uh Beijing absorption of small indignities and humiliations before they they change their strategic calculus and say we've just had enough we can't take it anymore we're not going to be humiliated or it's clear not that um they can't get Taiwan to voluntarily agree to reunify I think they can't be so stupid as to fail to recognize that that's over it's not going to happen the polling data the political data is obvious but that there's an incremental uh slippage toward toward Taiwan Independence maybe not a formal declaration but if the vision of the former recent very recent former Secretary of State um that the United States should establish formal diplomatic relations with the Republic of China Taiwan I mean what does that mean so um finally then to finish off this thought you think strategically but is there a danger of just as Obama would say stuff happening uh and are drifting into or backing into more of a of a kind of tragic accidental war that no one really wanted I think on the first question uh I share your your concern I think the United States right now is talking very loudly without having to big stick to back it up unfortunately I think that if you could have Unity of effort it should be an easy problem to solve like just don't do that stuff but just given political Dynamics I think politicians want to show that they are strong on foreign policy that they are competent on foreign policy and that they're tough with China and one way to do that is by of course you know promoting the Taiwanese so I think from a political perspective it may be harder to resolve but from a strategic perspective and we can academics can say oh don't do that all we want and that's kind of I've reached the limit of my power at that point essentially I also I mean in addition to the and I think what's more intractable to solve is we're also squeezing China economically while again not necessarily having the military power to deter any type of negative reaction and we've seen you know we mentioned the Japan example earlier that's obviously extreme but those kind of Dynamics and the Chinese have clearly I mean if you just read the documents I mean they they feel that this is really an effort to choke out their their rise and that they're going to have to take matters into their own hands so that and that I don't know how you solve because some even some of our policy recommendations are like you have to kind of you know Shore up our own technological uh competitiveness by cutting China off selectively you know that the obvious solution is just be more selective with it but I I don't know if that's going to be enough and then the other thing I worry about is just a slow mobilization scenario where we have these great plans to shore up the military balance in the Western Pacific and we just start to Trickle and there's like this Valley of Death between when we get those assets in theater to actually deter and when the Chinese see them coming over the horizon I mean that also can create sort of a use it or lose it Dynamic on the Chinese side so all three of those problems I I don't know how exactly um how you solve them maybe I mean I'll just I mean ideally you'd pick your provocations wisely right because you you have to provoke China you you cannot address the weaknesses that we have talked about without doing things that will annoy the the Chinese government um presumably you you could do it without you know doing symbolic things that for instance don't don't actually help Taiwan in an invasion scenario don't help it you know accelerate its defense preparations but do provide pretext or motive for you know the the major shrove Force we saw in in August I'm a little bit pessimistic in that regard as we talked about it at dinner last night because I think I think the sort of electoral politics in the United States are just going to be hostile to that sort of measured approach in the coming years ideally what you do right is you you would start dramatically Shoring up deterrence in the Western Pacific while also providing assurance that what we are not doing is trying to put Taiwan on the slippery slope toward Independence we're not walking away from our One China policy and so on and so forth but those those signals are just going to be very difficult to send you know given that you know what you mentioned with respect to secretary Pompeo is is just the first of what I imagine will be a series of very hawkish statements on on Taiwan related issue issues from you know Republican candidates who are running against China for president in 2024 that brings our session to a close I thank you for staying with us a little longer past time and I want to thank our presenters for a brilliant book and our discussions and questioners for brilliant questions this was the kind of discussion [Music]

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 41,786

Keywords: Conflict With China, War, Taiwan, Xi Jinping, United States

Id: Dathk5EdaLc

Length: 79min 53sec (4793 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 11 2022