School of War - Ep 41: Hal Brands and Michael Beckley on China

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

Hal Brands, Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Michael Beckley, associate professor of political science at Tufts University, join the show to talk about how an armed confrontation with China could be coming more quickly than most expect.  ▪️ Times  • 01:30 Introduction • 02:28 Danger Zone  • 05:13 A Matter Of Timing • 07:55 A Thucydides Trap? • 13:07 Historical Analogies and 1914 • 20:32 Getting To The Long Game • 25:37 Sleepwalking Into War? • 31:10 China’s Problems And Plans • 35:06 The “Lenin Trap” • 36:44 Why Does Taiwan Matter?     • 40:27 Commitments And Capabilities  • 44:37 What Will War Look Like?     • 48:24 Cold War Lessons  • 52:22 Getting Through The Danger Zone 

Few would now deny that the chances of war with China have increased in recent years, whether such a conflict would happen over Taiwan or the rights of treaty allies like Japan or South Korea. But how likely is war, really, and how soon is a crisis likely to be upon us? And how can we even calculate such things against the backdrop of a long-term competition between the United States and the PRC that could proceed for generations? Today, we'll hear from two scholars who suggest that the crisis is now, and that a war in the Pacific is more likely in the coming few years than most Americans would expect. Let's find out why and also hear how we ought to be preparing.

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Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show today, Hal Brands. And welcome to the show Michael Beckley. Hal and Michael are both fellows at the American Enterprise Institute. In addition to that, Hal Howe teaches at Johns Hopkins Seis and Michael teaches at Tufts. Gentlemen, thanks for joining. Thanks for having us.

Thank you. So the principal topic of the day's conversation is China and a book that you gentlemen have just written that makes some recommendations about what American strategy towards China should be. It's called the Danger Zone. And first, I have to commend you for the title, which I'm just going to assume as a reference to the movie that largely formed my worldview and political attitudes, Top Gun. And don't correct me if it's not.

Was that the truth? 100%. 100%. We're riding the wave of pop culture. Something I try to do with every book. I called the last book, Twilight Struggle to try to grab some of the Twilight Saga fans. And so now we're trying to match the Maverick wave. Outstanding.

Well, look, I think it might be useful to start by just, I'll ask you guys, just kind of state your your your your your thesis as it were you you propose that competition with china is is not a marathon but a sprint what do you mean by that i'll take a crack at this one i think the the basic thrust of the book is that china is more dangerous than we often think because china has got more problems than we often think i think the the dominant conventional wisdom for a few years has been that China really presents a hegemonic challenge the United States and perhaps is going to overtake the United States economically and militarily in the coming decades. We think that's wrong. We think it's actually unlikely that China is going to overtake the United States as the preeminent

global power, largely because China's running into two really profound problems that's going to struggle to solve. The first is economic stagnation, a variety of things. factors are just going to make it far harder for China to grow at anywhere near the rates that it has grown in the period since 1978. And we're seeing that in action today. And the second factor is strategic encirclement. China is stirring up more and more opposition to its own influence as a result of its own assertiveness in places like the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea or the border with India. And so as a result of this, the problem we should be worried about isn't a future where China has effortlessly overtaken the United States. The future we should be worried about

is a scenario in which China worries that it won't be able to accomplish its goals, which are quite ambitious peacefully, and thus decides to take greater risks and use greater coercion to accomplish those goals while it still has the opportunity to do so. And chief among those goals, of course, would be incorporating or reincorporating Taiwan into the People's Re-Pympersonation And so what we need to be worried about is not so much the competition in 2045. It's the competition in the latter half of this current decade, the late 2020s, when China's window of opportunity to accomplish things militarily will be quite appealing and its willingness to use force will be rising because it worries about danger ahead.

Got it. And just as I was getting ready for this interview this morning, I saw this piece by colleagues of yours. Oriana Mastro and Derek Scissors that takes issue, I guess, with this argument, but it seems to me sort of by the margin of a decade or so. That is to say, these are your colleagues at AIA. I guess this is how lunchroom disagreements at AIA work out.

We take them to the pages of foreign affairs. If you're proposing that the next 10 years or so are the danger zone, to use the phrase, their suggestion seems to be that while indeed this is not some sort of indeterminate competition that's just going to go on without necessarily a limit, It's actually the following decade, it's sort of the 2030s into the early 40s. Why do you think the crisis really is now rather than a decade from now?

I think with something like Taiwan, there are specific factors that make the mid to late 2020s especially dangerous. And I do want to say that we don't rule out conflict in the 2030s as well. And I actually think there's more similarities between our arguments. I don't think they read our book before writing that article. So, you know, I think there's some mischaracterization going on there. But in terms of the 2020s and Taiwan, you know, there's going to be this mass retirement of a lot of Reagan era warships and guided missile submarines and long-range bombers that is just going to cause this temporary dip in American offensive power in East Asia. So that makes this an especially large window of opportunity for China to rush through.

There's also a number of reforms that the PLA is making that could make it much more. capable in terms of carrying out a blockade or an amphibious invasion that are come to fruition. I mean, this is why some of the top military commanders and intelligence officials in the U.S. government have been signaling and stating explicitly that they are very worried about this exact same period. And then there's also just some other factors. You know, the United States and Taiwan have these ambitious plans to revamp their militaries and make Taiwan a prickly porcupine by the 2030s. the United States will hopefully have a more diversified base structure in East Asia and more long-range striking power by then. And so if the Chinese are looking at that and looking at the current

situation where the U.S. and Taiwan don't seem to have gotten their act together to the same extent, it just creates a moment of maximum opportunity and therefore a moment of maximum danger for the U.S. I think we also shouldn't discount just the fact that Xi Jinping is going to turn 70 next summer. In the 2030s, he'll be in his 80s. So, you know, there may be some. some factors there as well, but for something like Taiwan, we focus on these very scary military indicators that seem to be flashing red during this decade rather than later on. Got it. Let's, I want to come back to this. I want to say, I want to come back to 2022 and this question of what to do in the near to middle future. But your book takes a broader view historically as you

build your argument in ways that I found genuinely fascinating how knows from previous conversations. I find that the ham-handed use of historical analogies and the sort of simplistic presentation of very complicated books to be deeply aggravating. So I was actually happy and, you know, edified. I learned from your discussions in the book of Thucydides and also World War I and World War II as well, the examples of the German Empire and the Japanese Empire. Let's start with the Greeks and this question of the Thucydides trap. What is theoretically, supposedly, a Thucydides trap? And why do you suggest in your book that it doesn't quite get the situation accurately? So I think the idea that Thucydides trap is that the danger of war, particularly hegemonic war.

So war between kind of the two most powerful actors in the system, a war over the very rules of the global system, is most likely when you have a rising power that is overtaking or about to overtake an established power. And that creates more assertiveness on the part of the rising power. It creates insecurity on the part of the established power. And you get kind of a spiral of tensions and war is the result. The Thucydides trap is taken, as the name implies from Sturidon history of the Peloponnesian war. and it's meant to mirror the explanation that he gives of why Athens and Sparta came to blows in the great Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BC.

There is obviously kind of an elemental truth to the idea that you get instability when global power dynamics shift, right? And so the U.S.-China relationship is more fraught now than it was 30 years ago, in part because China is much stronger now than it was 30 years ago. And so it can assert its interests vis-a-vis the United States in more places and more forcefully than it could in the past. And so as far as that goes, like, that's fine. The challenge is that it's not always clear that the road to war is as simple and straightforward as the Thucydides trap would suggest. And as some of the contemporary interpreters of Thucydides would suggest.

And so there's great work by Donald Kagan, who passed away about a year ago, the great historian of the ancient world, who basically argued that the Thucydidean theorem didn't even really capture what had brought about the great Peloponnesian War in the first place, that it was actually sort of the fear of imminent decline that led the combatants to start taking greater risks and brought them into conflict. And I think that's worth keeping mind. because when you look at a lot of the great wars of the last century, they weren't brought on by sort of confident revisionist powers who thought that the future looked great for them. They were brought on by revisionist powers who worried that their power was peaking vis-a-vis their rivals, that they were going to be confronting grave dangers if they waited because they had made so many enemies in the course of becoming more powerful and more sort of. And so they had to go now rather than waiting.

You can certainly see that in a lot of the calculations that say the German general staff is making in the summer of 1914, once the July crisis breaks out. You can certainly see that in the calculations that Imperial Japan is making in 1940 and 1941 as war with the United States is looming on the horizon. And Mike has pointed out in some work that he's done that's incorporated in the book, but is also part of a separate project that he's been working on. You can actually find the same thing in a wide range of historical cases over the past 150 years or so, that when fast rising powers slow down, they don't typically mellow out. They become more prickly, more assertive. And expansion, even violent conquest is often the result. And so we call this kind of the peaking power trap or the peaking power syndrome, that revisionist powers, countries that want to reorder the system become most aggressive when they start to worry that time actually. is not on their side. Yeah. Let's talk about Germany for a second, Imperial Germany, that is.

You gentlemen are certainly not the first to draw the comparison between the PRC and, you know, Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany. But I think you take your discussion in a direction that will be surprising to a lot of people, because I think a lot of people believe we're taught that the First World War began as a kind of accident. And so if indeed Germany bears response, for the First World War, it bears it to roughly similar extent, to a roughly similar extent, as the other major power is involved. It was, you know, you guys know the argument that maybe it's worth drawing out a bit for the audience, you know, entangled alliances, secret diplomacy and all that stuff that Woodrow Wilson tried to get rid of afterwards at first side. Those things sort of structurally

caused the war and pinning it all on Germany, or that probably overstates it, pinning much of it, most of it on Germany is not, not accurate. But that's not exactly the direction you, you take your discussion. And I take it that you wouldn't want to, you know, as it were, take that understanding of 1914 and then grafted onto today, that the danger today is that, as it were, we might just sort of stumble into war. It might be an accident. And that will be the primary cause. And so as such, we should, you know, accommodate and so forth. Can you guys kind of spell out your, what you argue there about Germany? Well, first of all, we reject that interpretation of the First World War. I think it's sort of unfortunate that that's the popular understanding of the war. There's been a tremendous

amount of excellent historical scholarship that takes that on directly and says, no, actually, what caused World War I was that Germany figured out that it's not going to just zip past its rivals without a fight. And they say, look, ever since Germany was formed in 1871, it's soaring, its factories or spewing out iron and steel, it's rising very roused. It was this big heavyweight by the turn of the century. And so German leaders started to dream some very big dreams. They wanted an enormous sphere of influence, a middle Europa or middle Europe, as they called it, on the continent. And they were pursuing under Kaiser Wilhelm the second, this world policy that is all about gaining colonies.

They wanted a piece of that colony action like all the other great powers were getting. But then during the prelude to war, the Kaiser and his aides didn't feel confident because they, realized that Germany's brash behavior and rhetoric was starting, it's wolf warrior diplomacy, if you will, was causing its encirclement by hostile powers, namely Russia and France, as well as Britain, they end up forming the triple-ontante to block German expansion. So by the time you get to 1914, there isn't this idea that, oh, you know, we're all friends and, oh, we might stumble into a war. No, time is running short. Germany is losing ground economically even to a fast-growing Russia. Britain and France are basically pursuing economic containment because they're blocking

Germany's access to oil and other important resources. Germany's only ally, Austria, Hungary is being torn apart by all these ethnic tensions. And I think most importantly, you have a shifting military balance where you have France building up its military. Russia is adding its military and railroads. Britain is saying, we're going to build, we're going to bear you with battleships. You know, we're going to build way more than you could possibly muster. And so, So even though Germany was for the moment, the top power in Europe, German leaders were looking ahead to 1916, 1917, and saying we're going to be hopelessly overmatched by that point. And so the result was this now or never mentality. And, you know, there are literal quotes from

German leaders saying, we must defeat the enemies while we still can. And I'm paraphrasing here, but they say things that are basically the same, but even if it means provoking a war. I mean, I should emphasize though that these are obviously extreme cases. We don't necessarily think China is Germany. And there are other pathways that have a lot more to do with just when your economy starts to slow down, you worry that your own domestic market is oversaturated with excess capacity. Great powers tend to turn to mercantilist expansion. They try to carve out new markets and resources abroad, especially if other great powers are imposing trade barriers against them. And so this explains more, less catastrophic forms of expansion like the United States. It's great spate

of imperialism in the 19th century is actually driven by a series of economic depressions that cause people to freak out because they think they've already tapped all the greenfield investment opportunities on the American continent. And so we need to start pumping exports and investment into Latin America and East Asia, then build the big navy to defend those far-flung assets, then annex territory to secure that. So I mean, there are multiple pathways here. The German encirclement example is just one of the pathways, probably the most extreme.

there's other ways that countries could end up involving themselves in conflict that are maybe somewhat more consistent with that stumbled to war, but it's still not this idea of, oh, we had no intention to hurt anyone and suddenly, you know, a single assassination causes us all to wage the worst war the world had ever seen at that point. Maybe I could just add something to this. I mean, I think that it's important to note that when we talk about the causes of World War I, it's not so much that we're saying that the things that you mentioned, Aaron, are unemployed. right? And interlocking alliance commitments, hair trigger military plans, like all those things clearly play a very important role in the July crisis. But you got to keep two things in mind.

One is that the polarization of European politics that brought a lot of those things about was primarily a reaction to German power and German assertiveness, right? You don't get a triple on top between Russia, France, and the United Kingdom without the fear that Germany's rise and increasingly assertive behavior had provoked, right? The Schlefen plan was a response to the fact that Germany had managed to create its own encirclement by annoying France in 1870, 71, and then, you know, breaking its reinsurance treaty with Russia thereafter. And so it's got a two-front problem and so on and so forth. So these things are not independent of each other. And the second is that it's not as though European policymakers, a policymakers in Germany in

particular, didn't realize that this system of alliances and the system of military mobilization plans created a degree of crisis instability, as we would call it in 1914. The issue was that the Germans understanding this knowingly took the risk of, at the very least, a continental war. And in the estimation of people like Von Molka, a global war, including Great Britain, just because they thought that, you know, now would be better than later. Right. And so these exes explanations are kind of interwoven. And what we're trying to do in the book is point out how you can have a very fraught and complex situation that can sort of be pushed over the edge by a peaking revisionist power that worries the time is not on its side. Right. Right.

And, you know, though there were any number of people, you cite, maybe it was Von Malka, you cite at least one in the book who feared that such a war could, you know, be devastating, even destroy Europe. It was nevertheless the case. I guess, an enormous difference between this set of circumstances and today, that plenty of people, leaders in all of the major capitals going into that war thought that they could win. They could win a general war in this just straightforward simple sense of coming out of the war better than how they started it, you know, politically, economically, and so forth. It turns out that the war was met the expectations of those who thought it was going to be

so devastating, whereas today, with nuclear weapons being something genuinely new under the sun, I think there must be general hesitation about general war in every capital potentially involved, right? So that is one important difference. But I do think that the discussion is really important. I'm thrilled that you gentlemen devote so much time to it in the book because, you know, as you know, and I'll try to be neutral in my terms here, but those who tend to favor intervention and confrontation in foreign affairs love to talk about the 1930s. And then I love to talk about the failure of the policy of appeasement and Nazi Germany and so forth.

And those who tend to favor restraint and accommodation love to talk about 1914 for all the reasons that you are kind of criticizing or at the very least, we'll say, complicating and adding some nuance and texture to. And I, you know, that's why this historical analogy seems so important to me. It suggests that if your critique of the common understanding of 1914 is correct, that as a result, today we might be a little bit more skeptical of policies of restraint or accommodation when it comes to China. Is that fair? I think there's some fairness there, although we also spent a lot of time talking about the Imperial Japan example. And there, you know, the U.S. oil embargo plays a big role in driving Japan to Pearl Harbor. And so we try to draw some lessons from that.

I don't think the situations are directly applicable. Like if the United States just constrains China's ability to make advanced semiconductors, I don't think that then means they invade Taiwan. And in fact, we advocate a number of targeted restrictions and are fairly hawkish. But we also try to make the point that a key historical lesson is not to overreach, specifically because we think the long term trends are favorable to the United States. And so the goal is just to get to the long game. So that doesn't mean you have to oppose every Chinese initiative or try to choke out the

Chinese economy, you definitely don't want a repeat of the domino theory where you're stamping out your adversary's influence everywhere at all times around the world. We try to find areas where the United States should either stand aside or even encourage various Chinese initiatives. You know, China wants to build a bunch of tunnels and roads and hospitals across developing countries, then the United States should be encouraging that in many areas. And I think the areas where the United States trades with China should still vastly outweigh those where the U.S., where we advocate, the U.S. should limit or cut ties. We also point out that the United States should be avoiding symbolic moves that provoke China but don't actually do anything to deter it. So, you know, like a Nancy Pelosi

going to Taiwan kind of situation. And that, you know, we need to keep various back channels and diplomatic avenues open so that U.S. and Chinese policymakers can devise face-saving compromises to various crises that are probably inevitably going to arise just so that, you know, we all wake up alive the next day. So I think while we certainly have this Germany example in there, it does make us skeptical of just a pure spiral model where anything the United States does that is remotely hawkish is going to provoke China and shouldn't be done. On the other hand, we try to balance it with other examples of areas where both from the Cold War, from the pre-war period, where the United States maybe could have found, you know, softer ways to cajole its adversaries.

So I will go for the red meat here. And I would actually, Aaron, take your point, one step further. And I think it's fair to say that the formal academic study of international relations in the United States and to a degree in Britain as well is really a product of World War I. And a certain interpretation of how World War I began and what it was about and why the piece after World War I didn't work is central to the study of international relations, either today. It informs concepts like the spiral model, which Mike talked about. It informs our understanding of what type of piece is likely to work and what type of piece is not likely to work and so on and so forth. And I think it's also the case that a lot of the lessons we take from

Rural 1 are based on a pretty severe misunderstanding of what actually happened, of what actually happened in July 1914, of what the war was about ideologically as well as geopolitically and what made things fall apart in the 1920s. This is a separate hobby horse of mine. I'm going beyond what we've written in the book at this point, just because I can't let this one go. But I do think it's a really important point to drive home that the received wisdom about World War I is debatable at best.

And in fact, it's been complicated by a number of great scholars. I don't mean to suggest that we're the first people to point this out by any means. And it may actually push us in unhelpful directions today. Well, no, I mean, I love digressions. Well, I promise, we'll come back to the meat of the argument in Danger's Zone. But as we launched into this aspect of the discussion, I actually pulled Fritz Fisher off my shelf. Because how what you just said, you know, not to skip from one, you know, charged debate in the pages of foreign affairs to the next. But this does raise the question of ideology, specifically that while imperial Germany was not Nazi Germany, nevertheless, it's war aims.

as outlined by a scholar like Fisher, you know, there are parallels. There are parallels to the war aims of Nazi Germany in the construction of a, you know, a continental empire of sorts, a certain attitude towards the Slavs, etc. That are very reminiscent of, you know, later Nazi sort of understanding of Germany's place in the world. And so if we also think that rather than a kind of, you know, sleepwalking and, a series of accidents, you know, that the ideological goals of Imperial Germany or a motive force for a cause of the war, then it would cause us to also think that in 2022, we should pay some attention to the ideologies of the main players today, certainly China, but also ourselves, to be fair.

What do you think? I mean, I'll take a quick crack at this one. First, I love the fact that somebody who actually works for a living has a copy of Fritz Fischer on that. I think that's fantastic. I mean, I think there's kind of a couple of points to to make here. One is that, and I'll get to the ideology point in a second, but the first is that, you know, whether you think accidental war is what happened in 1914 has implications for how you think about the most likely path to war today, right? And so if you think that the war broke out in 1914, even though no one wanted it because of a complex series of, a complex series,

of interlocking commitments that made de-escalation very hard to achieve, then what you're probably most worried about today is kind of like an unforeseen and unwanted incident in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait that entangles China and a U.S. ally, and then you get escalation that kind of happens spontaneously out of that. And so maybe what you focus on are risk reduction mechanisms and channels for communication and a crisis and so and so forth. And I don't mean to suggest that those things aren't good, even though the Chinese really haven't shown a whole lot of interest in them going back about 30 years at this point. If you think that what happened was that one set of leaders decided to take the risk of war to achieve their political objectives,

even if they didn't fully foresee what was going to happen, then maybe you worry more about sort of a deliberate Chinese decision for war to accomplish something vis-a-vis the Philippines or Taiwan or whatever, understanding that conflict with the United States is possible, perhaps, likely resulting from that, even if they don't fully foresee how it's going to go. On the ideology point, I think this is crucial. I think that a number of German historians, Wolfgang Momsen, among others, have basically made the point that from the German perspective, World War I was much more. infused with ideological elements than we remember largely because of how the war turned out

and what happened after the war. We tend to think of it as kind of like this amoral struggle between empires. In reality, there was a very strong sense in Germany that Germany is kind of mixed but mostly autocratic system was superior to Western democracies, the German sense of community and sort of individual sacrifice in the service of the national good was super. to Western individualism, and that becomes more pronounced as the war goes on. And in fact, even though the obvious difference between war aims in 1914 and 1939 is that you don't have at the beginning at least the same kind of totally toxic, racialized ideology that drives Nazi Germany by the latter part of the war, when Ludendorf and his friends have

basically taken over the German government, you're seeing more and more of that, particularly in the East. I does connect back to our book, and so I'll bring this question to an end, I guess. If you want to understand why China is so threatened by the existing international system and so determined to revise it, you can look to power dynamics, you can look to a variety of things, but you've got to look to ideology as well. An autocratic China that is run by the CCP is just going to have a very hard time feeling secure in an international system that is dominated by a democratic superpower because China worries. that the norms of a liberal international order could ultimately be fatal to illiberal rule within China itself, right? And so there is a very strong degree of ideological competition clashing systems of government at work here. And I don't think we can really understand

what's going on in the U.S.-China relationship or why China feels the way it does about the United States without understanding that. Can I just add one quick point? I don't, you know, for some people that get uncomfortable when you start talking about abstract ideologies, I think in China's case, there is a more tangible, specific ideology that lends itself to some very scary conclusions, namely that China is a ravenous power. The Chinese Communist Party has cultivated an ideological narrative that there are lost Chinese territories that need to be taken back one way or another, and they support that narrative because it helps their legitimacy, because that's their claim to fame. They unified the country. They saved the country from the century of

humiliation. And now they're going to make China whole again. And these aren't these aren't abstract ideas. They are actual physical pieces of territory like Taiwan, big chunks of India and 80% of the east and South China Sea. So even if you are a hardheaded realist and think that the, the epic clash between democracy and autocracy is just in the heads of neocons around DC, I think you can still look to the more specific ideology that China has espoused, that the Chinese Communist Party has baked into the textbooks and raises Chinese children to believe in. That leads to a lot of the same kind of outcomes that we're worried about for other ideological reasons as well. Well, let's, before we finally come back around to what America's strategy ought to be,

which is where I'd like to finish and where, you know, I think ultimately your book takes us. Let's talk a bit about Chinese strategy. We sort of got a bit of a sketch. or the worldview now, how does China propose to go about, you know, freeing itself from the shackles of liberal imperialism, as it were? What are its aims and what is its style? I think I'll start with maybe two quick components. I mean, one is building that kind of old school physical empire. And we've seen this with past great powers that, you know, besides repression at home, when things get tough, you also try to carve out an empire abroad because that means secure buffers for your homeland. and secure supply lines, easier access to markets and resources, and to squelch ideological threats,

especially if you're an authoritarian regime, you don't want democracies popping up in your, in your neighborhood. And in China's case, aside from the ideological narratives, we just talked about, I mean, China, there are legitimate security concerns on the Chinese side, namely because they are critically and chronically dependent on foreign markets and resources. So roughly almost 40% of China's economy is wrapped up in international trade. That's almost for the United States, it's just over 20%. And China, more importantly, imports roughly 80% of its oil, computer chips, advanced manufacturing equipment, medical devices.

It's the largest importer of food in the world. And 90 plus percent of this trade flows through the east and South China seas, which are surrounded by potentially hostile states, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and you have the U.S. Navy prowling around. So I think part of China's strategy has always been to try to take control of these areas. And it's just been a matter of how they've gone about it. In the 90s and 2000s, when their economy is booming, they can afford to take a more peaceful and patient approach just because the Chinese found that they could take territory away from rivals without firing a shot. The British handback Hong Kong, Portugal gives up Macau, half a dozen countries settled their

territorial disputes with China going into the 2010s. But now we just worry that China, you know, as other countries are less enamored of making money in China's slowing economy and more willing to push back. Beijing is starting to flex its military muscles and we're seeing that in all kinds of range of ways. I think the second part of the strategy, though, is to carve out that economic sphere of influence in the global south. And I think this emerges, the impetus of this emerges in the early 2010s when China's leaders started to believe they needed new markets abroad because they had overcapacity in the domestic Chinese economy. saw a rise in protectionism around the world as countries were scrambling to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. And they were looking ahead and saying, we're reaching our demographic peak. We can't just rely on internal consumption and investment forever. And so the obvious outcome of

this is something like Belt and Road, where China extends a trillion plus dollars in sovereign loans to other countries. And those mainly developing countries are taking these Chinese loans to employ Chinese workers, to build infrastructure, install Chinese telecommunication systems and smart city systems. And so just to try to create these sort of synospheres that potentially lock partners into China's embrace. And if they can do that, that's great for China because it means steady demand for Chinese goods and services. It means solid diplomatic partners. There are political scientists have shown that these countries that China has partnered with are more likely to vote with China in the UN. They're willing to ditch Taiwan and also just to prevent democracy from

breaking out. We have a whole section on the book that talks about how China is using this economic expansion to also empower and prop up authoritarian governments or cause shaky democracies to slide into authoritarianism by equipping them with digital surveillance systems. Michael, you know, it's ironic, is it not that the sort of, if you will, the Marxist analysis of imperialism. What, you know, U.S. corporations are often accused of doing, I'll leave aside the truth or falseness of that for another discussion, is actually, as you document, the strategy being pursued by an avowed socialist power. And of course, there are risks and downside to it as well. You talk about, quote-unquote, Lenin Trap in the book. What are the risks of, as it were,

old-fashioned imperialism? Yes, we stole that unashamedly from Walter Russell Mead, who wrote just a short column for the Wall Street Journal where he said, hey, like Lenin predicted all of this when he was writing about how capitalist powers inevitably face excess capacity in their domestic markets. And so go on a surge of imperialism. And his exhibit A was the scramble for Africa in the late 19th century where, you know, something like 80% of the continent is carved up in just a matter of decades. And then he noted that it's the great irony, as you just mentioned, is that communist China is falling prey to what Lenin said was the fundamental problem of capitalism, that it ends in imperialism, which then leads to great power war because these

different capitalist imperialist powers, their spheres of influence bump up against each other, and they end up clashing over it. So we thought that was just too good to pass up. We thought it was actually a very astute observation and loaded with irony. So just zooming in on what is quite likely to be the principal crisis here, Taiwan, why does it matter so much to China? What's the big deal? And then I think a harder question, but a very important one to address directly is why should it matter to us? Even if we, the United States, concede that China is an adversary, that the achievement of China's goals would be unacceptable to the American way of life. Let's say we concede the broader points. Why should the United States, should the, I guess first of all, should the United States defend Taiwan or participate in the defense of Taiwan?

and why? So I think there are aspects of this question that, you know, or some may be a little bit hard for Americans who aren't familiar with kind of Chinese narratives about the history of Taiwan, its relationship to the mainland to understand. I mean, part of the reason why China wants Taiwan is because they think it's theirs, right? That this is, this is a, you know, it is an inalienable part of what should be the People's Republic of China that kind of got up. away when Sheng Kai Shik ran off the mainland and escaped at the end of the Civil War and has been protected by this hostile foreign power of the United States ever since. And so the issue of Taiwan has become very deeply interwoven with Chinese nationalism. It's become very deeply interwoven with the narrative that the CCP tells about its own

role in Chinese history. Now, it's important to understand that the actual history of Taiwan's relationship to what we would consider mainland China is a lot more complicated and in some ways tenuous than the CCP makes out. But nonetheless, that's the argument that they make. There are also aspects of why China wants Taiwan that I think Americans can understand quite well because a lot of these issues go to kind of the strategic salience of Taiwan. There are ideological reasons why Taiwan is important, right? It's the only Chinese-speaking democracy in the world. Its very existence is kind of a poke in the eye to the CCP, which says the Chinese culture and democracy can't go together. It's important for economic reasons and technological

reasons. It's the place where the vast majority of the world's most advanced semiconductors are produced and so on and so forth. But I think the real salience is strategic. And so Taiwan really sits at the center of what's called the first island chain, basically this chain of features running up and down the Western Pacific that basically blocks China's access to the deep water of the open Pacific. And so China is essentially ringed by U.S. rivals and partners. If China can take Taiwan, it breaks that containment chain off of its coast. It gains access to some very valuable deep water off of Taiwan's East Coast, which is very important for things like allowing Chinese submarines to sort of get through the cordon and more

easily get out into the open Pacific. That's important, for instance, because Chinese ballistic missile submarines, their missiles can't reach the continental United States from the shallow waters off of China's immediate coastline. And it basically just makes every operation the U.S. would conduct in East Asia far more difficult. It makes the defense of the southernmost part Japan far more difficult. It makes the defense of the Philippines far more difficult and so on and so forth. And so you could be looking at a fundamentally altered balance of power in East Asia, one of the most economically vibrant regions of the world. If China is able to assert control of Taiwan, and if it's able to do so, then perhaps it can also shatter the credibility of U.S. alliance commitments and quasi-commitments in the region to promote this reordering of Asia to China's liking. And so that's why Taiwan is so important, both to Beijing and to Washington.

But let me, for sort of purposes of argument, let me push back a little bit, even though, you know, I'm pretty sympathetic to what you're saying. What alliance commitments do we speak here? What are, in fact, the U.S. obligations to Taiwan, as opposed to, for example, Japan, a full-fledged treaty ally to whom we owe quite a lot? Well, it's a bit of a mess, right? And so the U.S. does not have a formal treaty commitment to Taiwan in the same way that it has a formal treaty commitment to Japan or the Philippines or South Korea. And so there is not sort of the same, you know, in the European context, you'd call it Article 5 commitment to Taiwan that there is to other U.S. allies, although the exact numbering of the article kind of differs by alliance. The United States does have kind of an ambiguous commitment to Taiwan as a result of the Taiwan. Relations Act, which was passed when the United States broke diplomatic ties with Taiwan in the late

1970s and as a result of a subsequent series of policy decisions taken since then. And the way it is often interpreted, although nowhere is this written down in stone, is that if Taiwan were attacked in an unprovoked fashion by China, the United States would do something to come to Taiwan's aid, whether that's armed sales or direct military intervention, is kind of left up to the imagination. But if Taiwan were to start the fight by declaring independence or something like that, the United States would have a far more diffident approach to the conflict. And so again, it's a little bit unclear because we have deliberately left it unclear. We have worried for a long time that if we gave Taiwan an ironclad assurance that we would defend them in the result of in the event of

conflict, it might actually encourage a Taiwanese government to do destabilizing things like declaring independence. I think the debate has shifted a little bit in D.C. as we have seen more and more indications that China is developing the capabilities to potentially take Taiwan and is showing more and more intent to not live with the status quo in the straight forever. And so some folks, Richard Haas, the president of the Council of Foreign Relations, for instance, has argued that we ought to move to a position of strategic clarity, something closer to a real alliance commitment to Taiwan. The Biden administration looked at that and basically said, we don't think it's worth it, right? It will basically annoy the Chinese, it will lead them to

try to undermine our interests worldwide, and we're not sure that we get like an extra gallon of deterrence out of that. I think where Mike and I come down in the book is basically that the strategic clarity versus strategic ambiguity argument is a little bit beside the point right now, that the U.S. doesn't so much have a commitment problem in the Western Pacific. It has a capabilities problem. But my hunch is that the Chinese have to assume from a military planning perspective that the United States would not be indifferent to a Chinese effort to take Taiwan. What they may doubt is whether we can intervene effectively to stop it. And so the big priority has to be beefing up U.S. capabilities, allied capabilities in the region, rather than focusing

on essentially declaratory statements of policy. Yeah. I read seven years ago, I read Ian Easton's very interesting book, The Chinese Invasion Threat, and I came away from it feeling sort of surprisingly sanguine about the prospect of a war over Taiwan just because in the way he structured his argument, he made it, he made at the time what was a fairly convincing case that this is a tough nut to crack for China, for the PLA. The straits pretty wide. There are only so many beaches. You got a mega city in the northwest. You got mountains in the east. You know, this is no one's idea of a walk in the park and the potential for things to go wrong for the Chinese, for the Chinese communists, I should say, are very significant. As I understand it, I understand it, the author there has

actually modified his view a bit in the years to come. What's your view of, let's say it is 2025. And you have a bit of a vignette at the start of your book that paints a picture here. what is the fighting around and over Taiwan and in Taiwan likely to look like? And then specifically to Hal to your last point there, what are the capabilities that we don't have, that we would need to have if the decision were taken to participate in the defense of Taiwan? So we worry that the war would go big and brutal from the start because China has sort of a dilemma. On the one hand, it obviously would love to avoid American intervention if it can. And so some people think, oh, maybe China will just take some offshore islands or have sort of

a leaky blockade to signal its intense. But the problem is those aren't decisive actions. They don't guarantee control. In fact, no blockade that I know of in the past 200 years has caused a nation to just give up its sovereignty to an aggressor. They're useful for softening up an adversary, but it's hard to do conquest via blockade. And with an offshore island seizure, that could be the worst of all worlds because it could rally the international community to start getting their act together. And you're still not in, you've lost the element of strategic surprise. So we just worry it could start with a Pearl Harbor style strike, not just on bases on Taiwan, but on the big American bases on Okinawa, because those are the only ones within 500 miles of

Taiwan and possibly even Guam, especially since China literally has missiles, they call the Guam killers in their arsenal. And so this is going to be a mass, you know, the nightmare scenario we imagine for the Ukraine war, you know, direct clashes between nuclear armed great powers is the reality from the first minute of this war. And so what can we do? You know, I think Ian Easton's, all those points are all relevant. Geography and just the weight of history that amphibious invasions are pretty much the double black diamond of military operations. And another factor that should work in favor of the United States and Taiwan, but currently is not, is the state of technology right now.

We live in an era of precision-guided munitions. Taiwan has some, but not enough. But, you know, the United States are fundamental strategy and many other defense experts. advocate this is to exploit the fact that today it is a lot easier to blow stuff up than it is to take and control territory. We're seeing that in Ukraine today. Masked forces can become sitting ducks for a high-tech minefield of precision guided munitions. And so what many, many defense experts are saying is, you know, Taiwan should load up on mobile missile launchers and armed drones. And the United States should be spreading out its base network and basically pre-positioning missile launchers and

arm drones near the Taiwan straight. And this is doable physically. I mean, this doesn't require photon torpedoes or new fancy technologies that we don't have yet. It's just a political problem. Because obviously, if you're Taiwan and you're a politician trying to tell your population, hey, if China attacks, we're going to take it in the face. We're going to become a prickly porcupine and just get into a defensive crouch while they pummel us. And then we're just going to try to sink all their ships when they come across. That's a difficult sell. It's much easier to buy some F-16s, which give the appearance. you can take the fight to the enemy.

And for the United States, I mean, there are bureaucratic hurdles here. You have combatant commanders that love giant multi-rule platforms like carriers and huge destroyers that can do all kinds of peacetime missions, but obviously would be not the ideal kind of weapons platform into Taiwan contingency. So there's just these political hurdles. And so one purpose of writing this book was to really show the urgency, but also the possibility of an effective solution to this. we just get our act together and move faster than we currently on.

Yeah. To your point about the prominence of fires, I have to say following what's going on in Ukraine, as a former infantryman, I feel a bit obsolete and out of date. Like my colleagues in the artillery community are suddenly back at the center of the conversation. Okay. So let's zoom out completely then. Start your discussion of American strategy broadly by drawing some lessons from the Cold War in America's ultimate triumph over the Soviet Union.

What are those lessons and how do they apply? to America's confrontation with China today? I think there's a couple lessons that are particularly relevant. And so one is that during the Cold War, as today, the American objective is not going to be so much kind of creating a single, seamlessly integrated global order that brings everybody in. It's going to be strengthening kind of half a world order around the country that is trying to disrupt it. Right. And so during World War II, we hope that we could create kind of a one-world system where the Soviet Union would play a constructive part of that. And in the same way that we

hoped that we could integrate China into a liberal international order that would increasingly go global after the end of the Cold War. Neither of these bets paid off. And so when the Cold War, what we ended up doing was creating, and Dean Atchison's phrasing, half a world, right? So basically a western half of the world that featured very deep patterns of military, economic, and political cooperation that was premised on liberal political values, at least to an extent, and that was able to remain stronger and more cohesive than the Soviet bloc, and so it prevailed in the end. I think that's kind of what we need to be focused on in the China rivalry today. And so whether it is forging deeper multilateral security cooperation in the Indo-Pacific through institutions like the

Quadrucass, or thinking about semiconductor alliances, or trying to compensate for for a selective technological decoupling with China by promoting deeper integration with like-minded nations. What we're basically trying to do is revive kind of the free world coalition idea, understanding that the key to success is going to be whether our coalition, right, sort of our block is larger, more cohesive and more powerful than whatever sphere of influence China is able to put together. And so that's one lesson. And the second lesson is just that when time is of the essence and speed is very important, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And so the United States spelled a lot of time pressure, particularly in the early Cold War, we worried either about

an adverse military balance or that kind of the non-communist world might just fall apart because of economic privation. And so a lot of our path-breaking initiatives, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Truman Doctrine, were put together on the fly in a few weeks or a few months. And we basically had to rally the coalitions that we could grab rather than waiting for perfect ones to take shape. That required rehabilitating recent aggressors like West Germany and Japan. It required working with one communist country, Tito's Yugoslavia, Tegnstein, another, Stalin's Soviet Union. And so we basically had to say, we're going to go with what we've got in order to shore up the defenses of the free world. And over time, we will develop this into the arrangements and

institutions that we think would be more ideal, but we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I think that's the key here as well. We can't wait for perfect solutions to take shape. The question is whether we can move fast enough on a variety of key dimensions to prevent China from running through near-term windows of opportunity so that over the long term, the strengths of our system, the strengths of our alliances can have an effect. You talk about the importance of, and I'm somewhere between paraphrasing and quoting you here, getting through the danger zone to the long game, as central to your thinking, what exactly do you mean by getting through the danger zone? Is it, you know, in your vignette, with which you open the book of a

sort of harrowing Chinese, or I should say, a PRC, PLA assault on Taiwan, the vignette concludes with the American defense establishment advising the president that really at this point, the only meaningful option we have available to us is the use of nuclear weapons, perhaps, you know, tactical nuclear weapons on Chinese staging areas. Other than that, we may see Taiwan fall, which is this, you know, harrowing suggestion that we're going to be participating in extended deterrence for a non-ally. And presumably you mean something like, let's get to the point where we can actually deter to get through the danger zone. Spell out what you mean by that. And then why do we, why are we so confident about the long game anyway? So I think the getting through the danger zone is we focus really

just on three main areas, first making sure that you can blunt a potentially, a potential Chinese assault on Taiwan. The second is that China has launched the most aggressive industrial policy. The world has ever seen to try to dominate what the Chinese called choke points of the global economy, goods and services that other countries can't live without, whether that's computer chips or medical PPE or rare earths or loans, and then use that to turn the screw on those countries. And so you also have to blunt that economic offensive. And then lastly, is the ideological offensive with a spread of these digital authorities. authoritarian technologies that are essentially a tyrant's dream because they make repression just so much

more efficient and effective than ever before. And so if you can just, the idea is just to blunt those, right, in the short term. And in the long term, we think that the trends are very much in favor of the United States and its allies just because all of the factors that really propelled China's rise over the last 40 years are starting to run out. China rode a wave of hyper-globalization and U.S. engagement to become the workshop of the world. Now it's losing access to a lot of those markets. China had this big demographic dividend with 10 to 15 workers per retire. That's now collapsing in the worst aging Christus world has ever seen. And it's a very cheap. It's plowed through all of those resources. And at the same time, you just have the China retreating into this ugly neo-tototelitarianism,

which maybe wouldn't be so bad if Xi Jinping was a savvy. economic reformer and a savvy international operator, but he no longer leaves China ever. And he's consistently shown that he will sacrifice economic growth if it enhances his own political power. So there's just a lot of things, a lot of headwinds that are really going to start to bear down on China by the 2030s. And so if the United States can just blunt some of these offensives in the short term, it can then come back and negotiate from a position of strength with a China that is going to be, we think, economically stagnant. We think it's not going to be near. as popular around the world because all those belt and road loans that China extended abroad,

even the Chinese government thinks half of them aren't going to be paid back. And so China's going to be into business of debt collection, which is not a great way to win hearts and minds. And so there's just a number of advantages that the United States will have. And hopefully there we can seek some kind of modus vivendi with China in the long room. Hal Brands, Michael Beckley, authors of Danger Zone, The Coming Conflict with China. It's been a fascinating conversation. Thanks so much for joining. Thank you. Thanks, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.