School of War - Ep 141: Matt Pottinger on the Defense of Taiwan (Boiling Moat #1)

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Matt Pottinger, distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Chairman of FDD’s China Program, and author of The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, joins the show to talk about how a war over Taiwan might start and how it may be prevented. ▪️ Times      •      01:13 Introduction      •      03:11 The Boiling Moat     •      04:54 Is Xi serious?     •      11:35 How to deter China      •      17:40 Out with the old, in with the new     •      24:30 Mapping the scenarios     •      30:14 No such thing as an accidental war     •      35:44 A cognitive trap     •      39:22 Left with no choice Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Today, we welcome back Matt Pottinger. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who are not these buildings there. We shall fight on the beaches.

We will fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram, and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Matt Pottinger.

He's a principal at Garnaud Global. He's a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was Deputy National Security Advisor from 2019 to 2020. Senior Director for Asia on the NSC before that. He's been at the Wall Street Journal. He's been a Marine. It goes on and on.

Matt, thank you for making the time. And welcome back to the show. Aaron, thanks for having me. Great to be with you again. Last time you were on with our mutual friend, Mike Gallagher, discussing regime-changing China, as your critics would have it. Yes, my critics would have it. It was slightly more nuanced argument than that.

I thought it was, but sometimes people don't read the full text. You know, who can blame them? It was a long article. It was. It was. I was disappointed when back in, well, it was a year ago, Gallagher and I did a piece on the anniversary of the Korean War. What China thinks about the Korean War. And it was a little spicy.

We kind of stuck up for Douglas MacArthur a little bit in the piece. And, you know, I have kind of a background in spicy, spicy opeds and pieces. And I was really anticipating backlash. And it was just for like 24 hours. It was just crickets. And I was really embarrassed because I kind of built this up. I was like, oh, we're going to piss some people off with this. And nobody, I mean, with due respect, I'll just, I'll just politely say what you said. It was a long piece. So who knows.

And then thank goodness, 24 hours in, the Chinese government, China Daily responded with a furious diatribe condemning the whole thing. So thank goodness. Somebody was reading. It turns out it was the propaganda elements of party that were actually reading the foreign affairs article. That stirred it up and created, generated some debate elsewhere. So, you know, sometimes you have to, sometimes you have to thank our adversaries. for, you know, interrupting us when we're making mistakes and so forth. Your most important recent claim to fame and the reason for this interview is you are the editor of and a contributor to as well. You write several chapters in it. A book called The Boiling Mote about defending Taiwan. And that's what we're going to talk about today. I think, by the way, this is a really important contribution. It's a really rich book packed with sort of, well, usable analysis and recommendations, even for those of us who follow this reasonably

closely, which is, as you know, you know, not something you would actually say about many things that are written on the subject. So, first of all, thank you for, thank you for all the work that obviously went into this. I was really lucky. I had just a fantastic group of people contributing to the book from, you know, Larry Diamond, who sort of planted the seed in my mind in the first place. He's a great scholar at Stanford University and a colleague at the Hoover Institution. He wrote the forward of the book. But then I had all these, I had all these practitioners, you know, scholars, too. Some of them are scholars and practitioners, you know, like Mike Hunziker. who was a Marine and teaches at George Mason University.

And, you know, Mark Montgomery at FDD, who was an admiral who used to run our planning process for the Indo-Pacific Command. So it was just a really amazingly good cast of people who contributed, which made the project more worthwhile. We're going to have Mark on the show, and I hope some others as well, to talk about their contributions.

And I agree it was, it is a fantastic cast. So look, I think I want to move into a couple of, of the arguments that you make in the book and your own contributions in detail. Before we get to that, though, there are a couple things that you do spend a fair amount of time in the book establishing. I actually think, for the most part, a lot of the audience will take them as something they don't need their arms twisted over. But it's worth sort of saying aloud, you know, is this really as bad as everyone seems to think? Does she really mean this? Are we really going to do this? So that's sort of issue one. I want you to, you know, lay out the case,

if you would succinctly. And then the second one that I think we should try to move through relatively efficiently is who cares, who cares? You know, one, one, an island, big island, but an island nevertheless in the western end of the Pacific far away from us. We're not a treaty ally with Taiwan. We have no legal obligation. So, you know, does Xi Jinping actually mean that, mean, mean what he says? And why does it matter? You know, he, I, I think that one of the lessons of Ukraine and a whole lot of other catastrophes over the past hundred years or so is that when a dictator tells you what he's thinking, or more accurately, when he tells his own government and his own inner circle what he's thinking, we should take that very seriously. And I think the record has been

building, there's remarkable consistency. And we've also seen an escalation in the rhetoric, first of all, from Xi Jinping, you know, I laid out in the first chapter a lot of what he said about Taiwan. But, you know, fairly recently he has said that the essence of everything that he's trying to achieve, calls the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, you know, that the essence of it is unification. And that means Taiwan. He also told President Biden last year when they were in San Francisco in November that, you know, as one senior administration official put it, C. Jinping told Biden, you know, peace is all well and good, but actually we need to move to now solve this problem, as he puts it. And that tells me that he's elevating the goal of changing the status quo,

to annexing Taiwan over the goal of maintaining a peaceful status quo. So I think we should take his words very seriously. We should also take his actions very seriously. And let's look at what the actions are. According to our Secretary of State, he is the, he is, Xi Jinping is the overwhelming number one supporter materially of the Russian war in Ukraine. This is the largest war in Europe since World War II. China is the primary backer of that war.

materially, diplomatically, propagandistically, you name it. Beijing's also the number one supporter of Iran, and Iran let loose, you know, funded and let loose its terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, particularly beginning with the Hamas, October 7 attacks in southern Israel. Beijing is the number one supporter of Iran, and now it's even hosting Hamas delegations in Beijing. So if you also look at how Beijing is ramping up pressure on the Philippines, You could argue that what happened just recently was actually an attack on the Philippines

because you had Chinese sailors with bearing axes, boarding and confiscating Philippine government vessels. So why is Beijing doing all this right now? I mean, Xi Jinping is setting the table. He's creating the context that he may believe is necessary to distract us and spread us thin ahead of the really big move that he's been planning all along. and that he's been signaling about all along, and that he's been building a military for all along,

which is to coercively annex Taiwan. So I think this is quite real. Just briefly your question on, you know, so what, right? I think the so what is best answered in a few different ways. One is that the geostrategic consequences of a forced annexation of Taiwan, the economic consequences and the consequences for the future of democracy are all quite severe, quite significant. And Beijing, really, the model to think of is not the argument that, gee, this might be domino theory playing out again the way that we had

thought domino theory might play out in the 1960s and 70s with Vietnam, but didn't in the end. This is more akin to Japan's rampage across Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, the first half of the 1940s before they were defeated at great cost in World War II. And what Japan was pursuing was what it called a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity sphere. And it's remarkable how similar the dynamic is and how even similar some of the rhetoric is that Xi Jinping uses. He's given speeches that are called the Asia for Asian speeches, one that he gave in

Shanghai, another were remarks he made in Singapore, where he's really saying, look, China's going to provide for the security of this region. And whether you like it or not, and we're going to, we're going to push out the Americans and anyone else that you want to have an alliance with to guard your sovereignty, because your sovereignty is, you're a little country and we're a big country, and we're going to own this region. So that's really the model that we're looking at. You know, in terms of what would happen to the world economy, we quote one hedge fund manager, you know, who watches global economics pretty closely, who says it would be an instant global recession. China attack. Part of the reason for that is because Taiwan produces the vast majority, more than

90% of the world's high-end semiconductors. I mean, if you look at your stock portfolio tonight, you know, sleep, sleep well, my friends. Look at, look at your, you know, your mutual funds and your S&P 500 index funds and all these things that you're, they're supposed to be part of your nest egg. All of the top companies are wholly dependent for their strategies on a steady supply of Taiwan semiconductors. You know, invidia. Microsoft, you know, Amazon and Google, you know, you name it. All of these things depend. All of the whole AI revolution, all of this depends on Taiwan semiconductors. So if that capacity is destroyed or it is put into the hands of Beijing, look out. They're going to use that as leverage in ways that are

going to be quite destructive to our wealth and prosperity. It's going to be, it's really going to hurt. And finally, democracy. Taiwan is rated frequently by groups that care about this kind of of thing is the most democratic country in Asia and also one of the most democratic ones in the world. And it rates above the United States across most of those vectors just in terms of how democratic it is. Even in things like how well are women represented in government. Taiwan is now twice elected a woman for the top office of the land. Women are mayors of many of the main cities and so forth. So if that is stilettoed in the heart, that means that Beijing is destroying the first successful ethnically Chinese or largely ethnically Chinese democracy. And it's a rule

of law, prosperous, successful democracy, much more prosperous than mainland China. And Beijing wants to erase that example from the face of Europe. You make the point powerfully in the book that deterrence is cheaper than war. You say of the war in Ukraine that one thing is clear that it would have been a heck of a lot cheaper to deter this war than it has been to fight it, even at a remove as we are in the United States. What are the elements of deterrence with China with regard to Taiwan? How do we deter China? Yeah. So first, I mean, we focus on the military dimension, not because we think that the diplomatic and economic sanctions threats and these things don't matter. They do matter, but none of them have a chance of working if they're not rooted, if they're not really built

on the foundation of a very strong military deterrent. And so deterrence is an active psychology. Okay. What you want to do is persuade a decision-making elite in the adversary camp that war is not in their interest, that they're better off seeking peaceful solutions or simply giving up on certain goals for the time being because the cost of a war, particularly a war that they could, if lost, would. be much higher than the cost of maintaining the status quo. Now, in the case of Beijing,

Xi Jinping has made things simple for us because there is no real ruling elite. There is, there is really one man, and it is C himself who has the power to make decisions about war and peace. This is not, this is not his dad's or, you know, his predecessor's Politburo. This is a Politburo that is stacked with total loyalists and where Xi Jinping makes decisions about everything. There's no inter-party democracy at play here, okay, or intra-party democracy. So what we have to do is persuade Xi Jinping that this would be a really risky gamble, that if he rolls the iron dice of war, he may lose everything personally and also in terms of the party's monopoly on power in China.

I'm curious to know if you've taken a look at some work that John Lee, at Hudson has produced recently a report on deterring China. It made the following really interesting argument. I'm just curious to know your response, namely that he agrees, every reasonable person agrees that a hard power deterrence by denial, you know, military-centric strategy is needed. However, we should not ignore deterrence by punishment in stages of the conflict leading up to the climactic moment. That is to say, we can't let, in John's view, she get away with what he's doing at the second Thomas Scholl right now without some form of punishment. If we just say, economic sanctions never worked, deterrence by punishment never works. We've got to be hard power oriented.

We've got to do deterrence by denial. We've got to make sure that he knows that he's not going to make it across the straight of Taiwan. In fact, what we will do is we'll sort of build up all this pressure on the climactic moment. But what he will be learning along the way is he can take all these incremental steps. He can, he can violate Taiwanese airspace, et cetera. And if we don't punish in some non-military way as he takes these incremental steps, however much hard power will have set up on the, on the, you know, on the goal line, he will learn all the long, wrong lessons along the way. That's, that's John's argument. I found it kind of intriguing. Yeah, as you just laid it out, I agree with John's argument. And I, and I, and I'll read his

piece in detail because John is excellent. I, you know, he's written. and all kinds of things that I agree with. So I'll definitely check out his latest. But the way that you just summarized it, I think he's right. Now, I would add that Taiwan doesn't need to be the one that imposes costs, you know, military or other types of costs on Beijing over the course of Beijing pursuing these military incursions and things like that that are short of something really, really dangerous. But others should impose the costs by proxy.

and and I say that because I don't want Taiwan to give Beijing a pretext. You know, it's not, it's not that there would be an accident that would cause an accidental war. We can talk more about the myth of accidental war here. But what I would say is that Taiwan should not hand Beijing a pretext, whereas I think the United States, Japan, Australia, other actors should be imposing significant costs on Beijing for what it's doing in the Taiwan straight around Taiwan and also around second Thomas Scholl, which, you remember the Philippines, which administers second Thomas Scholl, it's just a little islet with a squad of Filipino Marines guarding it. A rusting old Hulk of a ship. I mean, that is

an incredible situation, actually. I know. Those guys are heroes, and I love them, and they should have the full support of the United States. But it's not enough for us to say we have an ironclad commitment as we keep, you know, saying over and over again. We actually need to impose costs. That doesn't mean a head-to-head confrontation, you know, but what it does mean is we build up the price for Beijing. You know, you want to seize a small government boat from the Philippines? Okay. How do you like these apples? We're going to put permanent camouflaged mobile anti-ship missile systems on several islands in the Philippines by invitation of the Philippine government

and give the Philippines capabilities of its own that could hold the Chinese Navy at risk. So, good, congratulations, China. You just seized a rubber raft from, from Philippine Marines, and you chopped off, you know, Filipino sailors' thumbs to get it. We now, we've now just inserted new capabilities that could sink five capital warships from your Navy. So I think we need to be looking for those sorts of diagonal ways of coming in and raising the price for Xi Jinping to be waging this sort of gray zone warfare. against our friends and allies. You identify in the book some shortcomings that we have in terms of building up our

military deterrence. One, munitions, something that's been much on everyone's minds since, certainly since Ukraine kicked off, if not before. Two, a lack of planning and rehearsal amongst allies or potential partners in such a conflict. Where do we stand on both those things? Have we made up any of the gap on munitions? How is it possible?

especially with the Biden administration's, you know, sort of relentless focus on diplomacy in the region, which has yielded some fruit. How are we behind on military coordination? Like, just give us a little Well, one of the ironies of the Ukraine war is that it has reawakened our defense infrastructure. And actually, we've been replacing old systems with new, better systems as we've provided supplies to the Ukrainians. So people who argue that, you know, we can't afford to support Ukraine. Actually, you know, the Ukraine war, paradoxically has put us in a better position to deal with a Taiwan threat, at least along some of the vectors, some of those weapons systems. But that's only the first awakening, right? We're sort of, you know, starting up the, you know, those manufacturing lines that already existed, but we really need to break

the model that exists right now with these cost plus big contracts. We have a, we have an oligopoly effectively of defense contractors, defense manufacturers. We need to break. We need to break. that wide open, the way that Elon Musk broke open NASA's monopoly on space lift, you know, getting satellites and people and moon rovers and all the rest up into space. We now are able to do that thanks to private innovation far more cheaply and more successfully and even more reliably than we were able to do before. So we need to apply that kind of a model. What I write in the book that it's sort of like Operation Warp Speed, where we had this public-private partnership to create a new vaccine, actually several new vaccines to deal with COVID. We did that in record time by relying on

and incentivizing private sector innovation by giving them a little bit of a backstop, just telling them that, look, if you make the vaccine, we will pay for it. And then work on trying to test it, and make sure that it's safe and effective and so forth. So we need to take that kind of mentality to our rather creaky defense industrial base. And then on planning and coordination, what are the deficits there and where do things, Dan? Yeah. So, I mean, look, even though we have a terrific relationship with Japan, for example, and our navies are quite well synced up, you can, you know, if you get a chance to talk to Monty, Mark Montgomery, he can give you a lot about that. But then if you, if you go from the Navy or even Grant Newsom, who contributed one of the Japan chapters to our book,

But aside from our two navies, our air forces, our ground forces, the interoperability between even their own joint forces, much less between ours and Japanese joint forces, is just not there. And there's no real excuse for that. It is political will and nothing else that is preventing that kind of coordination from leaping ahead. We should also be, in fact, by law, you know, I can't remember if it was McCain's final NDAA that he contributed to, but there's a requirement in there for the. the Pentagon to conduct training with the Taiwan military beyond the long established training

that's already been taking place. We've been training Taiwan's Air Force for decades, but we need to be working together with their Navy and learning to at least coordinate, if not become interoperable. I mean, coordination, better coordination would be a force multiplier in its own, you know, even if it's sort of you go left, I go right, you know, just sort of deconounce. conflicting, you know, and building up to coordination to actually eventually interoperability. That's going to go a long way. There's another part of it, though, that people don't talk about as much, which is simply how much time is the President of the United States spending actually preparing for scenarios? I mean, I see photographs of Xi Jinping wearing camis showing up in, you know,

military command headquarters all the time, you know, doing war games, overseeing various combat operations that they're training for. I don't think, you know, President Biden, you know, it doesn't seem like he's got a lot of working hours in the day to begin with in his current state. But this is something that we need to elevate practice for various crisis scenarios. So there's a higher degree of confidence about what to do, given a crisis that gets thrust into our lap. So regular listeners to the show will have heard me make this comparison before, but there's this, there's this guy on Twitter. I think Column will correct me here. I think his name is Andrew Rhodes.

He does these great maps. And one of the maps he's done is he takes the Taiwan off the coast of China and he flips the axis. So Taiwan is, you know, elongated on the, what is that, the X axis, the map, the Chinese coast above it. And then he superimposes the tactical control measures at a high level from Operation Neptune on it, you know, from June 44. And it's identical. Like the distances, you know, sort of the beach complex. in Normandy, like it looks like Neptune or Overlord, you know, it looks like the invasion of Normandy, which, you know, Neptune's the naval component. And if you contemplate what it would

have looked like in June 1944 for the Allies to do that, but without the air and maritime superiority that we essentially had, I mean, it's basically unimaginable. I mean, it was, it was bloody and difficult as it was. And we almost, I mean, Omaha almost didn't go our way, you know, let alone, I mean, if the Luftwaffe had been picking off ships, you know, in the channel and ships had been going down because of U-boats and everything else. So my question for you is, obviously, there's a, you know, there's a, there's a scenario here where China just goes for, goes for the gold, goes for the throat, launches D-Day, the United States and Japan get involved from the get-go.

And that's a very difficult scenario to imagine quick, even with all the problems we've just been discussing. That's a very difficult scenario in which to imagine quick Chinese success. I mean, that Taiwan straight is just a real liability for them. On the other hand, as you know, there are other scenarios that start to get more concerning. One, you know, is for whatever reason China loses on D-Day, but China's got a lot of stuff. So just because they lose once doesn't mean that the war is over. And they do lock us into some sort of attritional.

Maybe they got a small foothold, a small toehold, something. One way or the other, it keeps going. And as it keeps going, we run out of stuff before they run out of stuff. And so take that as problematic scenario one. Problematic scenario, too, somehow the United States or Japan or both actually stay out for a few days or longer, allowing it to build up substantial forces over purely Taiwanese opposition. And then there are further scenarios, right? There's a blockade scenario, which a lot of smart people whose opinions I trust on thing, they're more worried about blockade scenarios than invasion scenarios, basically for the reasons we're discussing right now. Yeah.

It's more dangerous. How do you think about all this? How do you think about all these different scenarios and iterations? And how do you recommend others think about this as policymakers as they are planning and preparing? Yeah. So first of all, the good news is even though we're dealing with all these, you know, in my book and in our conversation right now with like these worst case scenarios, the optimism that my co-authors and I emerged with having done the research and the writing of this book, we emerged with optimism that this war can be deterred. that this dictator can be deterred because there are capabilities that can be stockpiled and

trained with and combined with one another in ways that would have made the Normandy, you know, overlord operation impossible. And, you know, the Nazis did not have control of the air. They didn't have the ability to reach out and touch our ships that were massing, much less when they crossed and anchored right off the coast of Normandy. They had machine guns and artillery, you know, to kill men once they had already hit the beaches. And in the boiling moat, you know, that metaphor is really what we're talking about. It is that feature of water and the types of weapons that already exist, just not in sufficient quantities, or new technologies that have been developed but not yet turned into real military

programs, you know, that that give us hope, you know, significant hope, even confidence that if we, if we really hustle here, we can make an amphibious assault just insane, an insanely bad idea on the part of Sizien Pien. Now, why do we focus so much on the invasion scenario? We also write about these gray zone scenarios. We write about blockade. We believe that if we collectively, Taiwan, Japan and the United States, first and foremost, but other friends, if we have the will and the capability demonstrated to be able to repel an invasion,

we believe it is far less likely that Beijing would pursue a true blockade, which is also an act of war. But because if Beijing attempts a blockade knowing that it can't really go further, if everybody knows this is the best he got, right, then we're going to have a lot more confidence breaking that blockade and forcing China to have to have to. take escalatory steps that ultimately don't lead to a successful, a successful control of Taiwan because they don't have the ability to actually cross the straight and impose control. So the better we prepare for a full-blown invasion, the less likely the blockade. Now, there's scenarios short of that, for example, of what you could call a quarantine,

which is sort of a selective blockade, right? The quarantine is sort of a way of avoiding the declaratory step of a blockade, but selectively going after certain so-called contraband. Maybe Beijing says that they're going to stop ships carrying American weapons that were providing to Taiwan. It is a long way. Quarantines are not easy to enforce either. We were lucky, frankly, that Khrushchev blinked during the Cuban missile crisis because it would

have been quite difficult for us to simply stop those ships without, without escalating to something that would have, would have really been war. And so, but that is something where, again, the United States and Japan have to help Taiwan. We can't depend on Taiwan to take care of the steps, you know, all of these gray zone steps when they simply don't have a big enough Navy to go eyeball to eyeball for every ship or for every airplane sortie that comes over the median line in the Taiwan Strait. It's not advisable for Taiwan to run itself ragged with its relatively small air force, you know, putting its pilots and its equipment through the ringer. Rather, there should be asymmetric ways of doing that. And I also think that we should fill in.

We should be doing intermittent, unpredictable patrols in the air of the Taiwan Strait. So should Japan, for that matter? All right. The thing that I have been most excited to talk to you about today, you make the claim in the book, that there's no such thing as an accidental war. And this involves a lot of, there's a lot going on here. There's one element of it that I want to make sure we get to, which is the question of the First World War.

I have been obsessed for an embarrassingly long period of time now with the quote-unquote sleepwalking into war, sleepwalkers argument, mostly associated with a book by guy named Christopher Clark, but it's an old argument, it's older than that. The notion that World War I was kind of a whoopsie. No one is really at fault slash everyone's kind of, And I have been obsessed for a long time now that, no, there was someone at fault, and it was for the most part the Germans and that they started that thing.

It seems, and as you know, as you know, and as probably listeners to the show know, you know, this kind of argument tends to be a stand-in or a stalking horts for deeper ideological considerations. People like me, who tend to be a little bit more aggressive than are thinking about foreign adversaries tend to resort to example. from the 1930s and the failures of appeasement against Nazi Germany, people who tend to be less aggressive tend to go to 1914 and emphasize the way in which wars that, quote, unquote, nobody wants can happen anyway. And so I've been obsessed with what seems to me to be the fallacious quality of the argumentation about 1914 for a long time. I was so thrilled to hear you speak in an event not that long ago. And I realized that you were a fellow 1914 truther. And so my question You know, how long have you been a conspiracy theorist with me?

Yeah, look. And how can you make this bold claim that there's no such thing as accidental war? Yeah, I learn from historians instead of trusting political scientists. I, you know, historians study real history. The best political scientists do as well, but political scientists, science is, is interested in theory. So there are a whole lot of theoretical accidental wars. in the future, but not any true accidental wars in the past that have been detected yet by historians. Now, I learned about this, and by the way, that is a, that is, I admit that that is a

counterintuitive claim. It's, it's one that I had to, I did not come too readily, but I was persuaded, most of all, by the writing of Jeffrey Blaney, who was a Melbourne, Australia based historian and writer, just a brilliant guy. And one of his books was called The Causes of War. The last edition was sometime in the 1980s. And in this book, he really conducts almost like a detective investigation on like, why did the war start? All these mysteries about why war start?

Why does peace last as long as it does at the end of a war? And it's really the best book on the subject. But it's not the only book on the subject. Corey Shacky at the American Enterprise Institute alerted me to two other books. She actually wrote and she's another truth or here or whatever. We're going to get our tinfoil hats together. Let's get our membership cards. We've got to get a website. She wrote a very good article last summer on this very same topic on the myth of accidental war. But she alerted me to two other historians. One was the Oxford and Yale historian Michael Howard. I've got his book on my desk and I read

Evan Lourdes' book, he was a member of parliament, a socialist, labor and then socialist member of parliament. He's since died in the United Kingdom. And he wrote a book called War in International Society, where he also investigates. So you've got

these people from very different backgrounds, different traditions, but they're all have historical training and the sensibility of historians. And they investigated several hundred years each of war, and none of them could find an example of an accidental war. So that brings us to World War I. If you look, and I write about

this in the book, but if you look at the decisions that were made, there were a lot of stupid decisions. There were a lot of decisions that were based on really bad assumptions. There were a lot of mistakes made with those assumptions, including about how long the war would last or who would win that war. But there was no accident in those shots being fired. Those were, fully deliberate decisions that were made really on all sides. The Germans made the ultimatum, you know, at the end of the summer of 1914. But, you know, when the chancellor said, look, we're going to roll the iron dice of war, may God help us, he knew that there was some element of chance involved, but he was also quite confident. And so were his generals that this

was going to be wrapped up within a matter of weeks, months at most. And that they would still have enough power left over after whipping France to turn around and whip the Brits and the Russians as needed. And so the Brits thought that they could fight. They did come into the war. They thought that it could be very quick. You know that the French thought that it would be quick and that they would be victorious. The Tsar was a bit nervous about how this thing was going to go, but he was reassured by his advisors that no, Russia is going to emerge victorious from this one. And also, you know, I think, I can't remember what the outermost sort of expectation was for how long the war would last, but we're talking about months. This ended up being a four-year conflagration that killed 21 million

people and wounded another 20 million. That was accidental, but not the decision to get into the mix of it. So we need to disabuse ourselves of this sleepwalking fantasy. There was no such thing as sleepwalking into war. And the argument, I mean, here's the way it works, it seems to me, right, is that because everyone was prepared for war, and everyone had made very sophisticated plans, had developed operational concepts, mobilization schedules, ways of using newfangled rail technology. The military exigency of being successful once a war started

to drive the political decision-making slash take the political decision-making hostage until you had a war, again, in the view of the sleepwalkers that nobody wanted. And so today, we must be careful. In a sense, it's the opposite if you want peace, prepare for war. Actually, the real upshot of the accidental war hypothesis is preparing for war will cause the war. That is to say, it will, well, first of all, it'll risk the accident itself, right? It could risk some incident at sea that no one's looking for that all of a sudden escalates. So that's one obvious way.

But in another way, it could develop, as you develop these strategic, concepts, you start to think, okay, well, if I'm going to succeed in my concept, that means once event A happens, I need to follow with event B very quickly. Otherwise, I'm going to lose in the way I'm conceptualizing the fight. And so all of a sudden, you're off to the races. And so as a result, we actually should prepare less if we don't want war. We should be cautious. We should be restrained. Is that fair in your view? And two, what would be the results of that? Yeah. I mean, that is a cognitive trap. It's a cognition trap. that people stumble into because they start to project human relations, you know,

interpersonal relations onto interstate relations. And it's not a good way to think about the world. You know, I don't, you know, if I'm in an argument with my wife, I don't, I don't you surrender immediately, I hope. Yeah, I surrender instantly in order to maintain the peace. That is not the way that we tried that with Adolf Hitler. You know, we tried it at various points. the Cold War during the detente period of the 70s. We tried it earlier, you know, in the Cold War, when Stalin just said, hey, you know, game on, I'm going to roll even deeper into Europe. You know, so it is the, it is exactly backwards. And I know that this is often counterintuitive for people, but the history doesn't lie. And if, if you don't prepare, you start to invite a situation where,

an aggressor begins to believe that they have an advantage that they can press in ways that that really do then lead to a big conflagration that can pull in other countries and so forth. So it is, weakness is provocative. Strength is not. If we want to maintain a peaceful balance in the Taiwan Strait, we should actually give up even thinking about the term balance. I actually, I don't like the term balance of power because it creates the wrong image in our minds.

It creates this idea of a nice, neat scale that is evenly balanced on both sides, that basically if the two sides are equal to one another, that is how you achieve peace. We know from history, if you've paid attention to it and you've relied on great historians that have gone before, we know that actually that is the precondition for war frequently. An equal balance of power is often the condition that leads very quickly to war. What you want is a gross imbalance of power in order to maintain the peace. And that's why we had peace, you know, in the Taiwan Strait for decades. It's because Beijing knew there was no sense in challenging American primacy or even

Taiwan had a relatively stronger military with an unquestionable ability to repel a Chinese invasion. And so that's what kept the peace. It is now that we are roughly equal balanced that the likelihood of war is rising so rapidly. So I like, I've, I've, I've jettisoned from my vocabulary the phrase balance of power because it is a misnomer. And then this, this notion that accidental wars happen is related to another misconception or something you propose is a misconception, which is the provocation misconception. And you, you had mentioned Japan's quest for a greater Asian co-prosperity sphere

earlier in our conversation. I once went to the shrine in Tokyo, Yasakuni, am I getting that right? Yes. the Yasakuni shrine and the museum next to it. The shrine is to Japan's war dead, and there's a little museum there with limited English translations. And I mean, I have Japanese friends and colleagues and admire Japan's role in the world today.

I found that museum to be disconcerting. And there's a couple of rooms in it about the lead up to the war, the upshot of which is, gosh, you know, FDR just forced them to do it. He left them no choice. The embargo meant that they had to bomb Pearl Harbor. Otherwise, otherwise, they were doomed.

So what's, I mean, there's similar arguments about NATO enlargement and Russia. Like, what is your objection to this world of argument? Yeah, and I've been to that museum as well. And I found a lot of the displays to be offensive and disconcerting. I don't think it's an accurate view of history. Fortunately, it's also not a mainstream view of history. And I view that museum a bit separately from the shrine itself, but But anyway, we'll leave that can of worms for another day.

But what I would say is that the, if you look at something like, I've seen people try to compare, you know, the oil embargo on Japan to the U.S. trying to restrict Beijing from acquiring the highest end semiconductors in the world or even the means of producing the highest end semiconductors in the world, I don't think that is a good analogy. Because what we're doing right now is not trying to prevent, you know, Japan from, you know, from getting oil, in this case, from China from getting the modern equivalent, if you would like, of oil, which is chips. We're trying to prevent them from becoming OPEC. We're trying to prevent China from becoming the OPEC monopoly provider of high technology that we depend on for our prosperity. and in China can be prosperous without having dominance, you know, almost monopoly control over, you know, one of the most important inputs into the high tech modern 21st century economy. So I don't think it's a good comparison to talk about our export control restrictions on on certain high end semiconductor making equipment and the argument that, you know, FDR imposing an oil embargo was what really set Japan off.

Look, look at how far, Japan, look what Japan was doing by the time we resorted, by the way, to the embargo. Japan had killed millions of people in China by that point, had annexed the Korean Peninsula, had taken control through a treaty of Taiwan, taken control of it in a treaty with the Qing dynasty after the Qing dynasty lost a war in 1895. It was moving deeper and deeper into the most critical and economically vital parts of China. So, I mean, this was aggression on the march by the time we resorted to trying to deprive them of oil. I don't, I think that there was very little that we could have done short of

surrender and basically accommodating Japan dominating the countries of Asia that would have satisfied, you know, those, those who claim that the United States really started the war. But anyway, that's, that's, that's another reading of history. Well, that's the Part of the issue, isn't it, when it comes to these comparisons of 1914 and the 1930s, right, is that people who want to focus on 1914 in your view, and I think you argue it well, actually incorrectly in total, but nevertheless, just to take their premises for purposes of argument, they are emphasizing the risks of escalation. And for them, that drives their calculations and considerations, whereas you and I, for that matter, think that that view underrates the risks of accommodation. What does accommodation mean here? What does it mean to give the bad guys what they want? It means nothing good.

It means you got to give them more and more. And that's what, you know, focusing on the 1930s tends to lead you to. Matt Pontchere, you've been very generous with your time today. You're a busy guy and I have to let you go. But people should check out the boiling moat, your contributions, those of your of your contributors, and all look forward to having more of them on the show. Aaron, love your show and keep it up and look forward to listening to your next installment. This is a nebulous media production.

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