School of War - Ep 64: Dan Blumenthal and Fred Kagan on China’s Three Strategies for Taiwan

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Dan Blumenthal and Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute join the show to talk about the three strategies that China can use to seize control of Taiwan. ▪️ Times  • 01:40 China’s three approaches on Taiwan  • 02:09 Persuasion • 07:35 Complimentary campaigns  • 10:34 Dominance of discourse power • 14:40 Talk, talk, fight, fight • 18:45 Coercion  • 26:51 Speaker Pelosi's trip to Taiwan  • 30:02 Compellence • 35:24 CSIS war game conclusions  • 42:33 Fighting for themselves • 46:48 Ukraine or Taiwan, who gets what? • 51:38 Xi Jinping’s dilemma

Regular listeners to School of War know that a theme of the show is a potential war with China in the Western Pacific, specifically, the prospect of a fight over Taiwan. We've talked about this scenario and how it might go down with policymakers like Mike Gallagher, Tom Cotton, and Mike Pompeo, and with scholars and China experts like Hal Brands, Randy Schrever, and Ian Easton. Today, we've got one of the smartest guys in Washington on the subject of China, Dan Blumenthal, and one of DC's sharpest strategic analysts, Fred Kagan, to take a comprehensive look at China's strategic options for seizing Taiwan. Their conclusion is that while an invasion is possible, China actually has a course of action available to it that would be significantly more challenging

for America to defeat. Let's get into the details. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. 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. We shall fight on the beaches, which will fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. Delighted today to be joined by Dan Blumenthal and Fred Kagan, both our senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute. Dan is the author of The China Nightmare, among many other qualifications and accomplishments. Fred is the director of the critical threat projects at AEI, also amongst many other accomplishments. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for having us.

Great to be with you. So today we are going to talk about a new project that you both are involved in, the project on alternative strategies for the coalition defense of Taiwan. Yesterday, the first report of this project came out called China's Three Roads to Controlling Taiwan, and you identify those as persuasion, coercion, and compelance. And I thought maybe we should just take them one at a time. What are these three approaches that the CCP has? Should we start with persuasion?

What does it mean for the Chinese Communist Party to use persuasion to take control of Taiwan? Well, thanks, Aaron. And what I'd say is that persuasion is, It's not, you know, a nice, soft approach. There's always a threat of force in the background. But the basic attempt here is to convince the United States and the rest of a possible coalition that might come to Taiwan's defense, that Taiwan is part of China, that the one China principle, as opposed to the one China policy, which we could get into, governs relations between

rest of the world in Taiwan, that China is the aggrieved party that the United States is violating a whole set of agreements that it made with China. All of this, of course, is not true. It's China's China's attempts essentially to persuade others that it is true and then in turn to persuade Taiwan that there is no other choice, but to agree to the political terms that China demands of it to reunify or unify with the People's Republic of China, which it's never been a part. But there's always force in the background. There's always intimidation in the background. It's a diplomatic and informational campaign in the main with military intimidation in the background.

So that's persuasion. So an obvious question to follow up on that, Dan, you know, popular sentiment in Taiwan, as I understand it, for reunification with the mainland on the CCP's terms, is not strong. It's not a popular position, if anything, Taiwan over the years, and you correct me if I go wrong here, has grown more comfortable with a sense of itself as, you know, a de facto independent nation, even if not a de juree independent nation. So a persuasion strategy on the face of things seems like something that would have made sense a generation ago. But, you know, in the Taiwan of President Tsai and young people who, you know, are largely divorced

from the history of the 1940s, you know, what sense does it even make? How is this even feasible? Well, so what you're saying is absolutely right, and Fred should chime in just because he's seen some of the same efforts on Putin and the Ukraine before he invaded. What you're saying is absolutely right in the absence of any real costs that the Taiwanese have to pay. So in a cost-free environment, the majority of Taiwanese would say we're in, or do say, we are an independent country. and we want nothing to do with China. We want nothing to do with reunification and so on. But if China can create a situation that is not cost-free

where the threat of forces is very real, where it looks like the United States is not able to help it defend itself or to come to his defense, where the rest of the world is acquiesced in some measure in China's position that Taiwan is always part of, has been part of, the Taiwan's always been part of China, then I think the polling data starts to change, would start to change quite a bit. And again, you know, the diplomatic efforts on the part of China worldwide is to say, hey, look, we've got 100, we've got 180, we've got 200,

depending on the time of the year, countries that agree with us, that you are part of us, and you have no choice, essentially. The only choice you have is we will inflict great pain, war on you or you can decide to come to terms in terms of political reunification. So that's the thinking. That's still one of the main thrusts of Chinese policy. The thinking is that they can also peel away enough Taiwanese in the Taiwanese business community, people who do get something out of the relationship with China who say, you know what, it's just not worth it. It's not worth it to put up resistance anymore, even diplomatic resistance. And we're going to come to some agreement with China that we wouldn't otherwise have come to.

So then to be clear, and I want to come to Ukraine in just a second here, to be clear, we're not talking about necessarily when we speak of persuasion, a campaign that is designed to make realistically, to make the Taiwanese enthusiastically, you know, propose a referendum and joyfully embrace their long-lost compatriots across the strait. Rather, it's almost a generation of a sense of hopelessness that then in combination, perhaps, with other factors in the future, which may even be hard to predict sitting here today, would contribute to reunification. That's correct. But as we sit here today, the Chinese continue, interestingly enough to offer incentives for those who are more amenable in Taiwan to this persuasion campaign,

more incentives in terms of business incentives, more incentives in terms of, you know, access to the mainland and so forth. So, so it's, it's a bit of, it's a bit of both, but, but you're, you're, you're right. The, the actual persuasion campaign, you know, let's have a referendum and everybody decide to join China because it's better. I don't think China realistically believes that would be the outcome anymore. And what do we see when we, we look at Ukraine with the sort of persuasion analysis cap on? Well, before we, I mean, before we get to Ukraine, I think there's, it's also, it's important to think about the Chinese actually, going to have to manage some kind of successful persuasion campaign anyway, unless they actually

want to be perpetually having to conduct some kind of counterinsurgency sitting on an angry, resentful Taiwanese population forever, which is certainly not the desired end state that she is going for. So it's important that we not sort of in our minds magic this whole problem away by, you know, they invade and then somehow they don't have a problem anymore because they, this only makes sense for the Chinese in a certain way if they get to a certain end state. And that end state has to be very widespread Taiwanese acceptance of the reality that they want to create. And even if they create it by military force, they're still going to need to have the acceptance. So I think it's, you know, part of what the argument that we're making is,

that these campaigns are complimentary with one another. They're not mutually exclusive. And the persuasion campaign anyway is going to have to succeed somehow because the Chinese are going to want Taiwan to end up, I think, looking more like Hong Kong than like Xinjiang at the end of this. And so this is going to be important. From the standpoint of Ukraine, this should be worrying Xi Jinping a lot because Putin thought that he had a campaign underway and had been told by his intelligence agencies that lots of Ukrainians were with them, that the Ukrainians wanted to join the Russians.

I mean, they drank all of the vodka-laced Kool-Aid that they poured out for themselves about how they'd won over the Ukrainians and all they needed to do was knock over the Zeletsky government and then it would be fine. And that turned out to be completely wrong. So if Xi Jinping is not a fool, and I think he isn't a fool,

he's probably asking some pretty hard questions of his intelligence people and the popular front people and the people who are doing this political work about how exactly how far do they think they've gone here and what kind of sympathy do they think they can generate and so forth. And also, you know, what do they think this would look like if he engaged in this in various, you know, by military means, by coercion, by other means. it's you know ukraine i think is probably a warning to she to ask a lot of a lot of questions on a lot of fronts and this is the first set of questions that he should probably be asking because russian just got it's completely wrong and just another thing i want to make clear for for listeners it's clear in your paper and we've sort of talked about it briefly but just to focus on it for a second when we're talking about persuasion we're not just talking about persuading the Taiwanese the Taiwanese government talking about the world and us you know there's a campaign underway to

persuade Americans that the defense of Taiwan is hopeless, I take it to be one of your points. How are we dealing with that and responding to that? Well, frankly, and we're not really fighting that very much in the information space. So there's something that Chinese called dominance of discourse power. And it's very, very important in Chinese doctrine, military doctrine, as well as just CCP political warfare doctrine. And dominating the discourse, it's essential. And part of that is to convince slowly but surely to keep kind of whittling away at support in the case of Taiwan.

And while there is, you know, quite a bit, while there seemingly is quite a bit of support right now, rhetorically for the defense of Taiwan, certainly President Biden has now said four different times that we would defend Taiwan if attacked and so on. He hasn't gone further to explain to the American people why we would do that, why it's important. why it's important to defense interests in the Western Pacific, why it's important in terms of upholding the liberal order we want to uphold, and so forth. And so what China is doing around the world is they're going around to countries and saying, you know, you should say, you know, let's do business together,

let's have a diplomatic relationship, but please sign on to our one China principle. And they're getting a lot of countries to do that. And at the end of the day, either let's sign up to the One China principle or please do recognize Taiwan if you do recognize Taiwan. And at the end of the day, if push Kim to shove and China really started to put pressure on Taiwan, what they need is a whole lot of countries to stay out of it, is to stay neutral. They don't need necessarily countries to sign on with them. That's not what they expect.

They need a whole list of countries that just say, you know what, either we don't have a dog in this fight or why is anyone getting involved? Because we've all agreed that Taiwan's been part of the People's Republic of China in any case. So the persuasion campaign is global and is focused at the United States to try to isolate the United States as well. I mean, I think the Ukraine case offers a lot of base for us to worry also because the Ukraine case was about as straightforward as it could possibly be. Russians attacked a country whose independence and territorial integrity, they themselves had freely guaranteed in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. So the case is in reality and world is as straightforward as possibly be.

And nevertheless, we're having all kinds of arguments about, well, did the people you provoke the Russians? Or is Ukraine really part of, is Crimea really part of Ukraine and don't the Russians actually have some claims and all that kind of stuff? When you think about how much muddier the discourse is that the Chinese have already created on Taiwan, And then you think about the fact that the requirement for Americans in Ukraine is fundamentally to spend money, but the requirement in Taiwan is going to be to spend blood. I think we need to be very concerned about how strong American support will actually be if we don't contest this Chinese narrative that they're putting over that is really aimed at exactly what Dan said, just having us say, well, wait a minute, why are we going to fight?

But didn't we agree? Aren't the Chinese just doing what we all agreed on? Yeah. We could just, not to linger on this first one of the three, but I want to talk a minute about ways in which these sort of manners of acting are deeply rooted doctrinal approaches in the Chinese approach to things. I've been for reasons that Dan knows well doing a fair amount of reading about the Korean War recently, and it's reading a wonderful book, this kind of war, which I recommend to, to all listeners. But the author does have a kind of tick from time to time where he will sort of throw up his hands in attempting to characterize

either North Korean or Chinese decision making in the war. I'll say, well, sort of Eastern, you know, they're proceeding in a sort of Eastern manner, you know, this sort of example after examples. One of them is the way in which, you know, armistice talks are used as a kind of way of, you know, building support on, you know, this kind of the talk, talk, talk, fight, you know, we are, talking and fight at the same time and they are playing to mutual advantage. And I sort of read that, I don't know, it just sounds like good strategy to me, you know, it sounds like, it's, it's hard for democracies to do, but if you have actual control of the complete apparatus and no one harassing you, probably the kind of thing you should do if you're trying to get practical

goals on a battlefield, and you can't achieve that through other means. You know, to what extent is some of this sort of, you know, so I guess I just want you to speak to that. To one extent is sort of like something alien to the Western way of thinking and, you know, we'll never wrap our minds around these mysteries. And to one extent is that the Chinese are just quite good at this and have always been quite good at this, and we need to be savvy about it. Well, it's a terrific question, Aaron, and I'd say, as we have in the paper, at heart it's very Western in the sense that it's Marxist Leninist, you know, and it's the Chinese Communist Party coming to power through these psychological strategies,

their own theory of how they came to power was essentially that, you know, you have a strong party, a strong Communist Party that does political work to shape the environment, The arm of that party is the military. It's very important here. It's not the professional military that's loyal to a constitution. It's the arm of the party. The military's main job is to help the party expand its political power. And, of course, the Chinese Communist Party had very direct experience with that

in its revolutionary strategy against the Guamong, the KMT, which was expand into base areas and use the military. do so. And then what they call United Front Work, which is essentially banned together with other groups that are not part of the party, including your enemies, and disintegrate them from within. That's Maoist strategy. So it's, and that's their theory of how they came to power. And you can see that very much in terms of those are the three things that they still believe will get them Taiwan. Very strong party. Xi Jinping is strengthening the party. a strong arm of the part, military wing of the party, the PLA, whose main job is to expand

the power of the PLA now into Taiwan. And the United Front work, which means these days working with groups on Taiwan that would be friendlier to CCP rule on Taiwan and disintegrate the Taiwanese society from within in order for the CCP to come to power. So it's both Western in terms of communists, a certain kind of, let's call it communists with, Maoist and Chinese characteristic. So it's a combination of the East and the West. And of course, this is what the Russians have excelled at. And the Russians have been fantastic at getting the West tied up in knots fighting. I used to tell a very sour joke that's becoming even more sour. You know, what do you call it when the mechanized Air Force, Airboard,

naval and missile forces of two countries are attacking one another. In Ukraine, we call it a ceasefire. Because that was the condition under the Minskakords when in principle the Russians were a mediator in their own conflict and they were negotiating in theory even as they were attacking Ukraine. So this is not at all just an eastern thing. And it's also not just Marxist-Lennonist.

This is a shrewd technique for taking advantage of the West's desire to see things in a certain way. That's exactly right. There are some things that are particular to Chinese strategy, and you mentioned the book, this kind of war and the Korean War. I mean, you know, it's the focus on these stratagems,

these focus on these sort of talk, talk, fight, fight at the same time, these focus on deception, you know, is very much, very much baked into the DNA of people's liberation army. Yeah. Well, let's shift to strategy two then, or road to coercion. What would be involved in a coercion strategy for CCP control of Taiwan? Well, it's a close cousin of persuasion. You need persuasion to set conditions for coercion.

We, in our paper, I think, evoke an image that is familiar to most people who love movies, which is the godfather. And, you know, when the film producer wakes up with his favorite horse's head in his bed, he then decides, quote unquote, to do, make a decision that he otherwise would not have made because the threat of force is so credible. In fact, violence was already used, right? And the CCP writes about this very clearly in its various campaigns. analysis and campaign textbooks and so forth, which is you have to show and use violence

in order to make people do things that they otherwise wouldn't do, short of a full-scale war, you know, and whatever the, you know, there are all kinds of analogies that can be drawn to what the horse's head would be in the Godfather movie. But let's just take, for example, the show of force that the Chinese engaged in after Speaker Pelosi visited Taiwan, right? So first there was the threat, which everyone took very seriously because it was credible. If she comes, you know, we had a conversation in the United States about whether the Speaker of the House was safe. I mean, that's how far they've gotten with kind of messing with our minds. And it's not force in order to conduct war.

It's forced in order to have that psychological effect, right? And then, you know, and then we've decided, I guess, that the Speaker McCarthy has decided not to go to Taiwan instead to to meet with President's eye in California. So that's coercion. I mean, that's coercion with persuasion. That is getting us to do something or stopping us from doing something we otherwise would have done for fear that they will inflict more violence than we're ready to take.

And that's what Taiwan lives with on a daily basis. President Saingwen calls it a cognitive coercion campaign because its main purpose is to have a psychological effect, or she says disturbance in the mind. It's the constant display of force around the Taiwan Strait. It's meant to box in and it's meant to make you question your judgments. That's coercion. And it's enough coercion could lead to the kind of outcome, combined with persuasion,

could lead to the kind of change in sentiments on Taiwan that we were discussing earlier on. And it seems like the goal of coercion, maybe even an extent of purpose, persuasion, but that what is being sought in us is self-determinance, right? We are meant to, we are meant to decide that there's a line. Whether or not, I guess, it's been drawn explicitly for us. Walk, walk me through that. Right. So I'm using the, I'm picking on the speakers, you know, but we are meant to decide that that Speaker McCarthy going would have crossed a line that wasn't set beforehand, but that would have crossed a line and led to an amount of violence that we want ready to live with. The next, which in my view, and I think Fred agrees

with me, is going to invite more of this, right? So the next time the Chinese are, don't want something else to happen, an arm sale or are unhappy. The presidential election happens next January, 2024. Well, you can bet right now the pressure on the United States government to silently put pressure on the Taiwan presidential candidate, the DPP presidential candidate, the more independents leading candidate to not say things on the campaign trail that the United States thinks China would object to is pretty high. So they are essentially gaining influence over our policy process, changing the nature of our relationship with Taiwan through the threat of force. and the lines can constantly change.

This kind of campaign offers you a lot of flexibility to change the lines. You know, we're unhappy with this, don't do it. We're unhappy with that, don't do it. Oh, you didn't do it. Now we're unhappy with the next thing you might do. And that's how coercion works. It works psychologically over time to sap the morale of Taiwan, to make people in Taiwan question whether, well,

if the United States isn't willing to send the speaker, then perhaps the United States really isn't willing to defend us. So what options do we have? And over time, over time it just kind of erodes that sense of safety. I really think it's important just to drill into this issue about when we were talking about the safety of the Speaker of the House, because what we were saying was that we seriously thought that the Chinese might commit an egregious act of war against the United States by deliberately downing a U.S. military aircraft with the person who was third

in the line of succession for the presidency because they were not willing to have that person go to Taiwan. We were seriously entertaining that possibility, which is insane, because there's not a universe in which that was going to happen in the current environment. But the fact that we put that out there actually powerfully advanced

this Chinese co-operative. campaign and encouraged them to continue pushing here. And all of the aerial activity that they're engaged in all the time, all of violations of the Taiwanese Air Defense Identification Zone, all of the maritime activity that they're engaged in, on the one hand, it's normalizing this kind of pseudo-violence. They're not actually using force most of the time, but they're threatening force. And on the other hand, it's daring anyone to say, to push back on them in any way, But there are not a lot of really good ways of pushing back on them because we're not going to shoot.

Taiwanese are not going to shoot at the planes and violate the ADIZ. We're not going to push back on them. But you can see as you start to imagine, how can that roll forward to put much more increased? Well, how close to Taipei are they going to fly? And how close are they going to sail? And how much is the encroachment going to go? And at what point are they going to start, you know, swapping paint with ships trying to get into port in Taipei or elsewhere in Taiwan? And that kind of calculation, it's not just the bullying of today, but it's also the thinking through this escalation pattern.

And this is what we're seeing with ourselves in Ukraine. The Russians have actually done very little to escalate, right? But we are so freaked out about the prospect of Russian escalation that we've become thoroughly self- deterring because we're drawing red lines in our own minds. We don't even wait for Putin to tell us what the red lines are. Say, you know, attack them is a red line, right? Well, okay, that's us. That's us negotiating with ourselves out of fear of escalation, even though Putin, doesn't escalate. So what the Chinese have demonstrated is a willingness to increase pressure,

and their escalation threats, I think, would be more credible at least up to a certain point. And again, we've got to reorient our minds of thinking about how we're going to push back on this. I'm curious to know how sophisticated you think the Chinese were about this aspect of the speaker controversy, because there were some interesting dimensions in, you know, intra-democratic party politics that play here, right? The speaker has a long history of, you know, being pretty good on China, particularly when it comes to labor issues and the Chinese impact on the U.S. economy. I mean, she is from a tradition in the Democratic Party that has been sort of sound on that issue set from the start, even if not to universally serious, perhaps,

in my view. And certainly there were plenty of folks at the White House, on the other hand, who, as it were, we're in the mood to self-deter, right? They thought that this was a bad idea, and this was a kind of intramural fight played out in our politics, ultimately, speak, to what extent do you think that that is like a happy accident? The Chinese are just sort of enjoying watching this play out, or to what extent do you think they are actually aware of and manipulating things at that level of detail? Well, so I think that in this case,

the only way that this was successful from the Chinese perspective, I mean, you could say it's unsuccessful because the speaker ended up going, but successful in watching this debate unfold in the United States, and the self-determence on the fact that the next speaker is not going, is you've had to set conditions if you're China for many, many years, right? So you have to, A, prove that you're, you can be really violent and you can react really violently and build up a credible threat of violence. You know, B, you have to convince people that this issue of Taiwan and, and who goes to Taiwan is so sensitive and is so core to your national security, that, you know, that, you have to

that you would actually risk war over it, which is essentially a bluff. I mean, as Fred said, if you're China, you're not going to start a war, unless they are so much crazier than we think they are, in which case we should be, our policy should be much different than it is. They're not going to start a war over the fact that the Speaker of the House is visiting Taiwan, but you had to set conditions and let enough experts in the United States who were engaged in debate with one another on pages of the Wall Street Journal in New York Times, think that. So this wouldn't have succeeded if you didn't go back for 20 years and set those

conditions in the first place. So it has to be believable, it has to be credible, you have to have planted enough seeds in the information space and the discourse space in the United States to have credible people, you know, columnists from the New York Times, and again, we can argue whether they're credible or not. But there's a very good. They're viewed as credible in the U.S. system, actually go and argue that the Speaker of the House isn't safe and shouldn't go to Taiwan. So that's a lot of work. That's a lot of information work. That's a lot of psychological work.

That's a lot of military work. And what we really want people to get from our paper is if the Chinese decide tomorrow to escalate and do a full-scale amphibious invasion on Taiwan, it will have been not going from zero to 10. will have been after a set of incremental moves on a daily basis to increase the pressure on Taiwan. And it will mean that one of these other campaigns have failed. Well, let's talk about that then. Let's talk about road number three, compelence, the exciting slash tragic stuff. This gets broken down into several possibilities, right? At least blockade and invade.

Talk us through what the balloon going up actually looks like. Right. So from, you know, I would say an escalation from a coercive campaign, which the Chinese are not clear about doctrinally how much violence they'd be willing to use and still be, you know, it's still being a coercive campaign. From our perspective, you know, you've moved into a compelling campaign once you've started to do things like isolate and blockade the island, for example. And, of course, the most extreme compelling would be to actually invade the island, occupy the island, and change its leadership, right? There are other scenarios that are possible. But you've actually decided that, if you're China, you've decided that persuasion and coercion aren't working. You have to do something to compel, you know, the new reality that the PRC controls Taiwan. We see in our paper we go through an isolation scenario, which would be, which if you look at the geography of Taiwan and so forth,

Taiwan being an island, could be very attractive to Xi Jinping, so creating some kind of blockade and forcing the United States or others into a situation where they'd be the ones to actually, quote, start the war by, you know, by convoying or, you know, shooting at Chinese ships. There are pros and cause to this kind of scenario because you've taken outweigh the element of surprise and sort of fetical plea of an invasion. But as we get into the actual conduct of an amphibious invasion is so very unattractive still for Xi Jinping, that the isolation campaign seems to be one that we should worry about in the first instance. So I'm obviously not the China expert here. That's what Dan brings to the fight. What I bring to the fight is just sort of a lot of experience looking in military campaigns and different environments, contexts, and from different perspectives. And I see in this China debate a lot of

concern that's very understandable on the U.S. side about whether we could stop a Chinese invasion and under what conditions and at what cost and a lot of justified concern about that. I think this is something we need to take very seriously. But I think some of those discussions that I'm hearing don't think quite as much about what this undertaking looks like if you're the Chinese. And then just finished mentioning, you know, it's not a very attractive prospect. It really isn't a very attractive prospect. If you think about what is involved in a massive amphibious invasion of an island, opposed by an adversary against whom you have no reason to be confident that you can secure air supremacy or air superiority, even for that matter, can't have any basis to have confidence

that you're going to be able to exclude or attack submarines from the area. You can't have any confidence that we're not going to be able to get off long-range missiles and so forth. People don't do that. I mean, conducting a contested amphibious invasion in that environment is something, I'm not sure what examples you actually can point to in history. So it's a very dicey undertaking, and I think it's very easy for us to get so caught up in our own understanding of our own vulnerabilities and weaknesses,

which I'm all about identifying and fixing, that we don't we tend to make this look imagine like this would be easy for the Chinese and imagine that if you're she you just look at this and say oh yeah the Americans are so dorked up that you know this we don't need to worry about any of that stuff but real political leaders who are contemplating putting a couple hundred thousand of their personnel into harm's way who are not completely insane ask some hard questions about you know how many how many guys am I going to lose you know, how many troops ships are going to go down here? And how many guys are going to get mowed down on the beaches?

What is it actually going to look like? It's not clear that Putin had those conversations with his military. And it's one of the ways that we got into this situation in Ukraine is that I think his military didn't understand and he didn't understand. It's going to go down. But given that and given how obvious that was, again, I go back to, unless you think that she is a maniac or a fool, she is going to have been asking his military these questions in a hard way.

And frankly, from his perspective, I don't see a lot of basis for him to be very reassured about the answers that he would be given in the next few years. Yeah. Well, this was the upshot of that CSIS war game that a lot of folks have been talking about for the last, oh, gosh, month now or so. Namely, to put it in terms that you just suggested, Fred, it's a bit like overlord or Neptune, I guess, but the Germans have. have U-boats throughout the channel and the Luftwaffe is alive and well. By the way, it has precision standoff munitions. Just pop it off your ships. Not necessarily uncontested and at will, but, you know, able to,

able to sink large numbers of your things as they try to make it to the beaches. And I mean, you, you are a much better and more thorough student than me, but also I cannot think of an example quite like that at any scale. I mean, what were the Argentines like in the air over the falklands? Like I can't, you know, like I can't, I'm searching here. So the CSIS thing was interesting because it, you know, it was focused, right? Unlike what you're, what you've published here and what you're working on, it sort of declared it up front.

We're just talking about invasion scenarios. We're kind of setting all these, would they invade sort of to the side? We're just saying, we're assuming they're invading. Here's how it would work. And the upshot was it's not pretty. It's not pretty at all. Now, one of the lynch pins of their conclusions, right, was that this, this, this relies on the Taiwanese fighting. For their scenarios to be bad for the Chinese, it can't just be a kind of

coalition campaign in the air and at sea. There has to be an effective deterrent on the ground as well, and it has to fight. So when she is hearing the reports about that in the years to come, well, first of all, I guess do you agree with the premise? This is question one. And question two is, what do you think she is going to be hearing in the years to come about that? Well, let me first. So we, those are sort of the next state. of our own work. Obviously, in broad terms, we would agree that, you know, in that in that sort of scenario, the Taiwanese would have to be trained and armed in such a way as to contest the Chinese at the beaches. But I guess the way we've come at it is, is to begin with

is sort of starting with, okay, let's see. That is absolutely a necessary condition, but it's insufficient condition because if the Taiwanese are able to deny an invasion at the beaches, you know, a porcupine can not be eaten, but it can be starved, right? So if the United States and Japanese and others can't open the slox, sea lines of communication, then the Taiwanese defending at the beaches doesn't succeed, you know, and that's why the isolation campaign in the blockade is, is germane in a positive and a trip. You can starve this country if it's not going to be resupplied from Japan and so forth. But let me just, if I could go back to, so you need to turn Taiwan into porcupine as a necessary

condition, but you need to do a lot more of other things as well. You know, I'm very happy the CSIS game kind of went down as you describe it, because one thing that we were very careful to do is to say, wait a second, okay, so when you're talking about escalation to an amphibious invasion, you're talking about at some point early in the conflict attacking a U.S. ally, Japan, and U.S. territory, Guam, which in the last year or so, with all this focus on the Chinese have some imminent invasion plan, I think was not part of the discussion, because that's a more radical move than Vladimir Putin has made. So there you have no ambiguity. The U.S. is in the war. And not only is the U.S. in the war,

probably every other U.S. ally is somehow in the war as well. You know, that means that the Chinese would be willing to start World War III in order to get Taiwan back. So we're really challenging and interrogating that, that basic assumption, right? So either you do that, right, either you attack Japan, and there's no scenario in which you kind of attack U.S. bases on Japan and your Chinese, and you think that you haven't just attacked Japan. I don't think anyone makes a distinction at that point, and Guam. Either you do that or, as Fred said, you leave yourself open to U.S. air power as you put

200,000 troops by the island. So we're interrogating that assumption very carefully. We're looking very carefully for Chinese assessments of what they think would happen if they attack Japan and Guam in terms of at the geopolitical level, the geopolitical response. The second thing that's very important here is the Chinese have not been in combat since 1979. So this would be a harder invasion than Normandy without any of the same officers trained and with combat experience that the United States had to conduct and the British had in order to conduct Normandy. Now they're doing a lot of good things from military perspective. They're a lot of training and exercising and simulation, but not a single Chinese officer has been in combat, really since 1979.

So we're interrogating those two things very carefully, and that's why we think that for Xi Jinping, these other options still look much more attractive. I think a lot of the issue is, you know, if you think about the kinds of risk calculus that she has to engage in, because I've heard people say, you know, well, how many Americans even know the Qam is American territory? You know, our Americans can regard themselves as a war just because they attack QWAM. Now, I personally think the answer to that is 100% will know as soon as the Chinese actually attack one, but that's, you know, that's another story. But I also think that's kind of irrelevant to

the discussion, because if, in order for that to be interesting to she's calculus, she has to be confident that the answer is going to be actually no, Americans are not going to decide that they're in the war. A lot of what we're trying to do here is just turn this around and think about what calculus are you implying that she does or does not have to make in order for this to make sense. So one question is, does he have to be, does Taiwan have to be a porcupine in order? for this to look like a bad idea? Actually, no. Candidly, in my judgment, if she is confident that we can maintain

air and sea power in the near vicinity of his invasion fleet such that we could sink some significant portion of it, I don't know that he has to be confident that the Taiwanese are going to fight like demons on the beaches. That already looks pretty unattractive, or it could potentially look pretty unattractive, depending on what kind of losses we're talking about as he makes the calculus.

Now, he could decide that he doesn't care, and he could decide, and this is where the porcupine strategy becomes important, that he's willing to take whatever losses in the initial wave as long as he ultimately gets it, and he's confident that once he gets a few Chinese soldiers on the island, it's all over, that is more encouraging to him than the prospect of, I get people on the beaches, and then it's a huge, nasty fight. But what we're doing is talking about changing his calculus. And I think the point that we're trying to make here is the base risk calculus that he's got to look at is already pretty unattractive to him when you start thinking about I either go to war with

the Americans and the Japanese right up front or I'd let them have a free shot at my invasion fleet as it's sailing across or some combination because just because he attacks up front doesn't mean that we don't still get to shoot at the invasion fleet those are those are pretty nasty considerations to begin with and so I think we're just interrogating as Dan said the thresholds that we think Xi would need to reach, including thresholds of success or failure in these other lines of effort that, frankly, are much less risky from Xi's perspective

and give him a lot more off ramps before he would decide, oh yeah, I think let's do this invasion thing and see how that works out. Well, let me ask a question though about the scenarios in which Taiwan is not able to mount, you know, a truly intimidating defense of itself. Doesn't that pose a political problem for us? right in the sense that you know one of the reasons why the u.s-israel relationship is is relatively

strong is this correct perception in the united states the israelis fight for themselves right maybe i'm going to start making stuff up but like maybe one of the reasons why the u.s japan alliance is relatively uncontroversial is the notion that japanese would fight to defend themselves even if they require on it rely on us for a strategic deterrent and other other things perhaps how is it going to play out if let's say persuasion and coercion or successful to some of extent and there is mass internal dissent in Taiwan and they can't really are we defending ourselves are we not do we have a military do we not and the president turns to the american people and says it's time to step up and take some real risk here how does that how does that work well it's it's a terrific question

and i think that's the way the chinese are thinking about the question which is which is if you look at which we're looking at very carefully for our next set of papers and so on if you look at the thrust of the information and disinformation came at pain on Taiwan it's to it's to so discord and to portray Taiwan as chaotic and weak and indefensible and so on. And that's supposed to reverberate back in the United States. And I think you're right. Generally speaking, the United States, you know, comes to the defense of those who defend themselves. I think in the case of, you know, so one thing that we've learned from the Russia-Ukraine situation,

if we look at carefully when we discuss, you know, when we discuss a Taiwan situation is, yes, the Ukrainians, you know, have shown an unbelievable will to fight. But there's another lesson here, which is once a war actually happens and it's not theoretical, the U.S. reacts much more strongly than it thinks it's going to beforehand. And I think that's the case in probably every war the United States has been in. And no assumption holds anymore, right? So if the United States woke up and all of a sudden, given the attitudes about China right now that have been building over the last few years, And given the very big latent and not latent concerns that China is a malign actor, if the United States, I think, woke up and there were missiles flying and destroying this place that it has 23 million people and is important to the economy and so on, I think that the United States would think very differently on that day than it did the day before. about the importance.

You mentioned the Korean War, right? I mean, so we were not supposed to defend Korea, right? Until, you know, it looked like, you know, the Chinese and the Soviets were on the march in Korea. And then, guess what? We fight a bloody war in Korea. And that's our history, in my view. That's our strategic history.

We all of a sudden realized, wow, this is really important. And it's not just important because of Taiwan. It's important because of our interests in the Western pursuit. in our alliance system. And I think that those are the kinds of things, you know, so there's this risk of overestimating she's risk calculus and maybe he'll overestimate his own ability to succeed in underestimating the way we react, which is actually very strong when it comes to things that we didn't think were a vital interest on the day before, but are our vital interests, and we know that the day of. So I'm conscious of everyone's time here, but I do want to

We got one more question in that is another topic much on people's minds, and that's the relationship between a potential war in the Pacific with war in Europe, actual war today in Europe, and this question of whether or not, even American support such as it is for Ukraine, is already coming at the expense of preparing for a potentially, Fred, I know you would reject this premise, but many who would make this point would say a more strategically significant coming fight over Taiwan. I'm going to assume that this group is not friendly to this view, but what's the case? What's the case against it? What's the case against the fact that you're X number of munitions, X number of systems, X number of whatever. And right now we are sending a lot of it.

We're saying a lot of money to Ukraine. We've got, you know, lots of forces positioned in Europe, the Russians have shown, you guys know the arguments. What's the case against it? I mean, there's some really straightforward cases against it that I'll make the simple ones and can make the complicated ones. The mechanized forces that we've deployed to deter the Russians from escalating against our lives, we're pretty sure we were not going to be using those in the Western Pacific because it's not exactly a mechanized theater when you're doing this kind of thing. So we can take that off the table to begin with.

And then we can talk about the munitions and so forth. And yeah, there is a set of things that were given the Ukrainians that it would be good to give the Taiwanese and people have been talking about giving the Taiwanese. and we should do that. And we're running low on stocks and I understand all that kind of stuff. Now, there's a solution to that, which is we could, like, build more of these things. And that's a whole, it's fascinating to me that we're having a conversation that sort of doesn't recognize that we have this defense industrial base, which we should have mobilized as we

were providing this stuff to Ukraine. We have chosen not to. So this is a problem we have created for ourselves, but it's also a problem we could solve for ourselves that we actually sort of got in gear and built this stuff. But the last thing is, again, desirable as it is for Taiwan to look like an indigestible porcupine, at the moment, it's not like the Taiwanese have this stuff now. The balance of deterrence is being carried by American F-35s and aircraft carriers and attack submarines and B-21 bombers, none of which we are using in Ukraine or going to give to Ukraine for a whole bunch of excellent reasons.

So the core systems that are at the heart of American deterrence of the Chinese invasion at the moment are not involved in the Ukraine thing at all and aren't going to be. And the other systems are things the Taiwanese don't have now who like to give them, but are really a matter of whether we feel like mobilizing our defense industry in order to produce them. Yeah, to all of that, which is exactly exactly right. I mean, there's not a single munition in the U.S. force that we're using, you know, in the, in the U.S. force that we're using, you know, in the, in the, in the, the Ukraine, you know, that we need for, in other words, we're talking about javelins and stingers and short-range missiles that we want Taiwan to get, and we should get them, and we have a defense procurement problem, and I accept all that. But in terms of long-range munitions, Fred's absolutely right. We're not using them in the Ukraine fight. More importantly, I'd say,

here's who does not, here are the people who do not make a separation between the Ukraine fight and the Taiwan fight. Xi Jinping. So, Xi Jinping. is very interested in Russia prevailing in Ukraine and is very concerned for reasons that Fred said before about the West prevailing and sees that as a deterrent to his, you know, to his own that he doesn't divide the world up like that. He sees the West in the United States as a global actor, that if it defends, if it has the will and the sort of compunction to defend one ally will do so more likely in another theater. Tokyo rejects. the distinction. It's signed up right away to the coalition. Taiwan rejects the distinction,

which is kind of important. Seoul rejects the distinction. Camberg rejects the distinction. New Zealand rejects the distinction. Singapore rejects the distinction. The only people I think that don't rejects the distinction are in Sconson think tanks in Washington, D.C. A few people. I don't know anyone else who's actually living in the real world and has to defend their actual countries that accept that we have to make a choice or that the two wars or something. how unrelated, you know, that defeat it. You know, the best thing that we can do for all these countries is humiliate Putin and they would feel much better and happier about the prospect for war with China. I find myself perplexed by this talking point that's now, I hear it a lot

on the right in particular, that this is a failure of American policy. We've driven the Chinese and the Russians closer together, you know, through, you know, our actions with respect to Ukraine. And I think about Xi's dilemma looking at Ukraine. He kind of has a choice, I think. He can not get involved more, you know, he can not get involved in direct military support and risk Putin's failure. Having embraced Putin tightly, risk all the consequences that might come for Putin. That risk, I mean, the biggest risk, of course, would be a non-China-friendly Russia

in some post-Putin scenario, unlikely as that may be, but not impossible. Or he can make. militarily support the Russians in Ukraine, discard, I realize Dan I'm speaking to, to the expert here, but discard how many generations of sort of Chinese strategic thinking. You're going to have the Chinese Communist Party aiding a land war in Europe at scale, which, by the way, could still play out either way and run the domestic friction that would, in his politics, that would come from that. I don't know. I kind of look at that dilemma, and I'm pleased he's in it.

I don't know if you guys agree, but it sucks for him. As well put, it's also, you know, Xi Jinping did not need our encouragement to fall in love with Vladimir Putin. That was his best friend, you know, the person he saw and admired the most. It was Xi Jinping, not Vladimir Putin, I think, who first said that the greatest disaster the world has faced with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Xi Jinping said that. That was way before the war against Ukraine.

So this man supports Vladimir Putin. He supports his basic cause that he believes they are completely aligned when it comes to standing up to the West. It's some new version of the Sino-Soviet alliance that began way before Ukraine situation where Putin was supposed to smash the alliances in NATO and China is supposed to smash the alliances in the Indo-Pacific. They had been talking in this way cryptically way before. That was the February 4th, 2022 joint statement as well. So we certainly. didn't push them closer together. It was Xi Jinping's decision to back his, the man he admires the most in the world or used to, Vladimir Putin. Yeah, I mean, I just, Erin, I think you, sometimes you could be simple, simple, simple statements are helpful. I think, I kind of think we ought to blame the enemy for things the enemy does, you know. The Russians had identified us as their enemy a long time ago.

And this has been, you know, Putin's position is that we are the enemy and that his mission is to destroy NATO and reduce the United States back to being a hemispheric power in our rightful sphere of influence and get us to recognize his rightful sphere of influence and China's rightful sphere of influence in the Iranian rightful sphere of influence. That's been the Russian project for decades. And Xi Jinping has signed up to that project because that's the outcome that he also desires. So he's arranging himself on the side of our enemies. We're not making him do that. In fact, his embrace of Putin, as both of you have pointed out, is contrary to his interests in many ways. How are we encouraging she to do, to stand with Putin here? The rest of the

world is not. She is paying a price for this. So he's making a decision. He's making a decision to stand with a country that is our avowed enemy. And that's his choice. So yeah, I don't, I don't think we're pushing them together. I think he's showing his true colors and where he stands. I have much enjoyed our conversation. I'm looking forward to the further work of the project on alternative strategies for the coalition defense of Taiwan. My takeaway, maybe this is too pat, but this is sort of the hypothesis that I'm interested to see whether it's proved or disproved in your future research. But my takeaway is to use a quanticoism, the enemy's most likely course of action is persuasion and coercion capped by a blockade. that seems like, again, it's quite pat, but like having, having reviewed the invasion scenario,

which seems quite unpalatable, a much more defensible course of action. For the listeners' knowledge, both my guests are nodding. That keeps them off the record, though, in case this is wrong. Dan, Fred, this is an embarrassment of riches for this podcast to have you both on. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you so much, Aaron. That's great. This is a nebulous media production.

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