A Trip to Taipei

Welcome to Shield of the Republic. A podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. I’m Eric Edelman. I’m a counselor at the Center strategic and budgetary assessments and a Bulwark contributor in a non resident fellow at the Miller Center, and I’m rejoined by my partner in All Things Strategic, Elliott Cohen, who is the Robert E Osborne, professor strategy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Arleigh Burke Chair of Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a World Traveler recently returned from the Indo Pacific, which is the priority theater for the United States. It’s the pacing challenge.

That we face, from a defense point of view according to the National Defense Strategy and the National Security Strategy So Elliot, welcome back from your travels.

Well, thank you. It’s good to be back. I am, jet lagged, actually. That’s what I am. So if I’m let’s go here at the unusual.

It’s not, it’s not impending dementia. It’s just getting over a twelve hour flight back from, from Tokyo. I was on a, I guess this is what we’ll be we’ll be talking about. By the way, I I hate the term pacing challenge. I I’ll rant about that a little bit later in Secret Podcast, but it it it makes it seem like it’s a race.

When it’s really actually more like a wrestling competition. And, you know, no nobody talks about the opposing wrestler as a pacing challenge. But that’s that’s just me.

Well, we’ll get into that. So tell us where you were and, tell us what you saw and in particular, I’d love to hear from you. We’ve got a a presidential election, very consequential one coming up. In Taiwan. I’d love to hear from you on on how you see that playing out and what the implications are for the US position in the Indo Pacific.

Sure. So this was a trip organized by my colleagues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here. The delegation was led by variably by Doctor. John Hamry. Who’s the president of the CSIS with a lot of the heavy lifting done by our China chair, Jude Blanchett, who’s really quite a acute observer of China who we’ve had on the podcast.

In addition to myself, we were joined as well by Seth Jones, who’s the in charge of our international security programs. And then we had a couple of ringers, who I think you know from, AI, Zach Cooper. And, Emily Kielcrest from the Center for New American Security. So it was, it was a small, but a really pretty high quality group. So we went to we were in Taipei for, I think, over four days, for full days, in a couple of half days at either end.

And, terrific set of meetings, including with, president Sai, who’s coming to the end of her, total of eight years as president. We’ve met with the other presidential candidates. We met with, the foreign minister, Joseph Wu, with the National Security Advisor, the vice minister for defense, a whole bunch of academic experts from academia, Seneca. And, you know, along the way, there were journalists in that Tachets and the American Institute in Taiwan, which is our de facto embassy there. Then from there, we went to Tokyo for a couple of days, and that was really just spent at Yacoska at our naval base there.

Talking to some senior naval leaders, getting some informal briefings about what’s going on. And, we’ve included two ship visits to the, Reagan, which is a whacking big aircraft carrier import, then a, Japanese Frigate, which is a much smaller ship, but really quite remarkable in its own way. It’s one of the new class of ships that the Japanese are introducing. So let me, where to where to begin on all this. I guess the first thing that I would say is, you know, you mentioned the election.

I’ll say something about that, although that to me is not the most important thing. You know, the leading candidate remains William Lie of, the Democratic people’s party at the DPP. He he is in the lead. He is being careful since he has been pinned as being pro independence. Now I’ll digress for just a moment.

One of the things that really I find deeply troubling, or maybe I’m trouble that other people don’t find it troubling enough is, you know, we we the the whole language that we use to talk about Taiwan is wrapped in lies. So, you know, we we, the worst possible thing, a a Taiwanese presidential candidate can do is to say that they’re in favor of independence because that would stir up the wrath of China and, of course, of our own government. Well, of course, the fact is that Taiwan is completely independent, you know. They’re not part of China. But I understand why we have to say it with a one China policy.

In the same way when the president of Taiwan pays a visit to the United States. It’s actually not a visit. It’s a transit because they are actually en route to Saint Kit’s with which they still have diplomatic relations. The Chinese, by the way, try to squeeze them out, everywhere, including in the Caribbean. And I tend to think that those falsehoods, even though necessary at some level, perhaps in the past, are corrosive, and I’ll go into that a bit later.

So let me just say that I think, what the competition all four of the candidates go at great lengths to say they don’t wanna provoke China. All of them go to great lengths to say, no, we’re not gonna do anything crazy like declare independence. The other parties Say, well, we think we can manage relations with China much better. We have the KMT actually, the kuomintang. Which had been the party of Shanghai Shaq, which after all fought the civil war with the, communists has probably the closest relations to the mainland, but the others have some relations as well.

And they said, well, we can really connect much better with the Chinese. I think that’s, like, halfway true. I mean, I think they the Chinese have a particular version. The DP p. They they hate them in particular, but the fact of the matter is the Chinese government does want to absorb Taiwan.

Full stop. And informal relations continue because there’s a lot of Taiwanese business on the mainland. So I think a lot of this is It’s part of the charade that is story of Taiwan and and China, and which I think is in the long term a source of trouble. I have other things, but what what direction would you like to go, Eric?

Well, let’s stick on the election for a second and the question of independence for Taiwan. I mean, you and I kinda lived through this a little bit back in two thousand seven eight with the then president gentry Bien, and the potential for a declaration of independence. And, you know, president Bush was pretty forward leaning president, but he was, you know, quite quite cross with Shenfui bien for doing that, and we sort of made our unhappiness. No. Now, the circumstances, of course, are quite different between, you know, two thousand seven eight and fifteen years or so on.

But the DPP candidate was before pretty loudly pro independence. He’s muted that a little bit. How do you see the election, you know, playing out and what what would be consequences be of assume a DPP victory for the sake of argument for a second?

Let let’s again, let’s in the name of precision, say the issue is not independence because they are

in It’s a declaration of independence.

It’s a declaration of independence. And and, you know, I I I know you know that. But but it it irks me no end that when our government talks about it, we said, well, can’t have independence. Well, they are independent. And actually, we are committed to helping them preserve that.

That’s the the weirdness of it is the question is a declaration of independence. I look, if I were a time when Ace had won a declaration of independence too, but, like, you know, responsible leaders, I would, you know, bite my tongue and not declare it because, you know, it you know, alienate your most important patron in the United States, really your only patron, and quite possibly would trigger more on the part of the Chinese. I I get worked up about this, Eric, because I think the fixation in Washington with this issue prevents us from dealing with the many other issues that are come into play when we talk about guaranteeing actually substantive independence or let us say the freedom of Taiwan. Because what happens is and I’ve I’ve noticed this actually even in the couple days since I’ve been back, I mentioned I was there. You know, the first reaction is you know, whatever that happens, you can’t have independence.

What what has happened for the last fifty years is we always go over to the time when these leadership and we shake our fingers under their nose and say, don’t you dare declare independence? And that is sometimes, kind of expanded to include instructions to go sit in a corner in color. With crayons and don’t bother the, the big boys. The the reason why that’s a problem is that that has inculcated into Taiwanese’s leadership, a habit of passivity. So at a time, when we really want them to be doing a lot more to defend themselves, When every conversation begins, don’t you dare?

Guess what? They don’t show a whole lot of initiative, and then we’re surprised. You know? So, anyways, to go back to the elections. Sorry.

Maybe it’s the jet lag, but I’m just ranting and raving more even more than usual. No. Go for it. You know, we it was interesting. The the Quellenang candidate, Doctor.

Who, who we met with was actually probably the most I found someone in some ways the most compelling character. He’d been the chief of police and Taipei, been the, mayor of of new Taipei, very successful mayor for ten years. He’d, you know, a fairly charismatic leader, but his basic views I think are not fundamentally different from DPP. And and I think all of them are in the same place. They don’t wanna provoke a Chinese invasion.

They know that China is getting more and more dangerous from their point of view. They feel keenly the increasing pressure on Taiwan, and it has increased a great deal. I’ll talk a little bit about that in a moment. And they would kinda like to go back to the status quo, which was You know, Taiwan doesn’t talk about independence. Everybody exceeds to this myth that there’s one China when there really isn’t.

And people get on with you know, their lives and with with making, with making money. The the danger that all of them face is that, she has made it very clear that he intends to have Taiwan incorporated into the mainland on his watch. And the way the Chinese are doing this is they are it’s a campaign of unremitting pressure, the increasing violations of something called the ADIS, or defense.

In information

zone. Information zone. You know, used to be that there are three lines in the Taiwan straits. There’s the median mine, so median halfway between the island, and the mainland. There’s the twenty four mile line and the twelve mile line, which is really that’s the sort of sovereign territorial waters.

But at twenty four miles out, you can begin intercepting people. What’s happening is the Chinese, they’ve begun crossing the median line routinely, that that you they did not used to do that. That happened to the Pelosi visit. Yeah. And and, of course, but, of course, we haven’t reacted to that.

And, you know, we haven’t pushed back on that. We, you know, the the Chinese do this all the time. They’re always pressuring. So they’re conducting bigger and bigger extra jobs.

So they’re slicing the salami center.

Yeah. It is all salami slicing, you know, like seventy two aircraft up in the air, I think, to the east of the island, more and more, operations around it, a continued diplomatic offensive against the remaining places that have relations with Taiwan, more and more bellicose rhetoric, a lot of cyber stuff, a lot of disinformation campaigns, So they’re under a lot of they’re under a lot of pressure. And not surprisingly, I think the Taiwanese wonder whether we will really come in and bail them out. And of course, we go over we go over, and we say, well, you know, are you people really prepared to to fight to defend yourselves to the last. But, of course, we’ve conditioned them not not to be bellicose.

So it’s that that was actually, in many ways, my my dominant feeling coming out of this. They’ve they’ve had fifty years of diplomatic and military isolation. And it’s a big problem, by the way, for their military. And, you know, we We just don’t. We we seem not to get it.

So just one last thing. So we, you know, we’ve begun saying, oh, what you really need is a porcupine strategy. You know, lots of missiles so you can sink the invading.

I would just like to point out that my colleagues at CSBA and I’ve been advocating this for, like, fifteen years.

Okay. So it’s it’s fine, and I’m in favor of that to a point. But here’s the problem, invasion’s not the real issue. The issue is — Right. — but even more to the point.

But even more to the point, The populace of Taiwan, there’s so, you know, we get very critical. The Taiwanese for wanting to buy fancy jets and tanks and submarines. Understood, but for the people of Taiwan who are not military experts. You know, they want to see their own airplanes flying overhead. They do want to see the big pieces of military equipment.

And you know what? This is back to our friend Klasmitz. This is all about politics. There’s a reason for them to want those things. The the political reasoning for it is actually, I think, pretty sound.

So, you know, ideally you want them to do both. But here’s the catch there. I mean, a lot of money. They are increasing their defense spending. They’re going up to two point five percent.

Which historically have been

quite low. Yeah. Which have been quite low, but they’re going north of that. They’ve ended military service to a year, all well and good, but, you know, their questions, well, you’re gonna be with us. So Well, why should they think that?

You know, we do have, according to newspaper reports, one hundred, two hundred American service personnel on the island. Marines special forces training them. But of course, they never show up in uniform. So no time on these, you know, there you see some American tourists with short haircuts and ripply mussels maybe, but You don’t see these people.

It’s not divisible presence we have with the other East Asian allies.

It’s it’s, you know, we don’t do ship visits. It’s idiotic, truly idiotic that the officials who are responsible for Taiwan in Washington can’t visit. So if you have a deputy assistant secretary of state or of defense, who is responsible for our relationship with that island, They can’t go there. And you know what? You can’t really do business effectively with a place that you can’t visit.

Ditto, you know, senior military people. I mean, so we’ve created this Kafkaesque world. Now I’m not saying blow it up all at once. But I I am saying there are things you can do that will enhance Taiwanese’s self confidence that’ll help nudge them to do the things you want them to do which will probably irritate the Chinese, but heck, they irritate us a lot too. Which we we don’t do.

And then, you know, the la just the last part of this is so this is a military that’s been isolated for fifty years. They haven’t re I mean, there are some minor exceptions to what I’m about to say. They they have they don’t train with other militaries. They can’t overtly send a mission, say, to look at a country like Finland, your favorite. I mean, the Fins are actually a very good model for them because they have a relatively short prescription period, I think, for one year.

It just extended it, not long ago from four months to one year.

Right. So it’s so well, the the Tony’s net went from four months to one year, but point is the Fins have military service that I think is mandatory services about about that long. But what they have is a very well developed reserve system. With training stuff and a very well developed civil defense civilian resistance system. Best thing in the world would be if The Taiwanese could send open delegations to Finland and vice versa.

And, you know, on their own, I wouldn’t expect the Fins to to do that. But if United States can broker something, well, that would be a good thing.

So, wait. Let me let me let me let me back us up a second if I could. So just for the sake of our listeners who may not, you know, follow this all in detail. You know, we you’ve made reference to our, you know, one China policy. This is really goes back to the Nixon kissinger opening to China and the Shanghai

communicate of nineteen seventy two in which both China

and the United States agreed that Chinese on both sides of the strait, that is the Chinese in Taiwan and the

Chinese on the mainland believe that

there is only one China but the United States very strongly in its statements, suggested that, we would only countenance peaceful unification, you know, of, the, island with the, the mainland. And then subsequently, when we established formal diplomatic relations under the Carter administration in the late seventies. The United States Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act which obligated us. We we had had a treaty with the Republic of China that committed us. Like our treaties with the Republic of Korea and Japan to defend Taiwan, an article five guarantee that was negotiated by John Foster Dallas in the mid nineteen fifties, after the first, Taiwan Straits crisis or, you know, Kimoyan Matsu crisis, the Taiwan straits crisis of fifty four.

But the Taiwan Relations Act replaced that guarantee with an obligation, legal obligation under US law to help Taiwan by providing for it’s self defense for them to defend themselves. What role we would play in a contingency over Taiwan was left ambiguous. Now president Biden has said four times that the United States would defend Taiwan And his minions have, you know, afterwards, you know, done yes minister and said, well, what the president meant to say was that know, he adheres to our policy of strategic ambiguity. All of this I think may have thoroughly confused the Chinese and left our position actually actually ambiguous, which is probably not a not

a And it confuses the time

of these two.

Not a not

a terrible thing I suppose from the point of view of the, PRC, but to to get to the heart of the matter, why should any of this matter to our fellow citizens. Why do they why do they care? I mean, you know, sort of Vivic from the swami has said, yes, we have to defend Taiwan. Until under the Chips Act, we can make all the chips, and we don’t have to worry about TMC, which makes, you know, I don’t know, sixty percent of the world’s, you know, high end microprocessors, and then we can just let it go to the Chinese. So why does it why does

it matter? I I think that’s that’s a very good point. By the way, my my advice to, present Biden’s millions on this occasion as a number of others would be just don’t say anything. Just let it hang there. It’s okay.

Anyway, why does it matter? Well, okay. Let’s proceed from the narrowest things. It is true that Taiwan is, this complete powerhouse the manufacture of chips, it is, by the way, not entirely clear that they will be able to be replaced. You know, they’re having troubles with this facility that they’re building in Arizona.

With unions, with finding enough engineers, and so on, but in case that’s a long way off. So they are a strategic asset It it is even if we ever get to that point, it would actually be a considerable strategic asset to China to get their hands on that. Point one, point two, Taiwan, if you look at its geographical position, not that far south from Japan, along the so called first island chain. If that becomes part of China, then from a kind of a strategic point of view, from a kind of a military operational point of view, it is a very much of kind of a forward projecting air and naval presence, which will make it very hard for us to maintain a strong military posture in East Asia, and that includes places like the Philippines, as well as Japan. A lot of sea lanes run right by there so that you can expect, I think, a ripple effect.

In terms of endangering our position. For sure, other countries, Japan and the Philippines, it would feel endangered by this. They’ve made it very clear to us that they want us to be engaged there. If we are if, you know, if after all the commitments that we’ve made, including the president saying things, but everything under the, Taiwan Relations Act, we don’t deliver in terms of helping the Taiwanese preserve their independence, then they have to ask themselves very hard questions. About will the Americans come to our rescue?

And my guess is the answer will be, we’re no longer so sure. And the thing to remember now is that, you know, what are the alternatives? Well, one is you bandwagon with the Chinese. I think that’s probably what the philippines would do. Japanese may or may not do that.

South Koreans may conceivably do that. That’s Yeah. There are major strategic asset too. Let’s not forget that. Or you go for nuclear weapons.

Because the Americans are not reliable. You know, one of the things we’ve done is we’ve taken nuclear calculations off the table, both in this case and in the, Ukraine case. And I think in both cases, they applied. You know, countries either countries are gonna think the American will be there to guarantee their security or they go nuclear. And if they go nuclear, it’s much more dangerous world.

And finally, let let it be said that this is a population of twenty four million people who live in freedom who want to live in freedom. I the we talked to a bunch of the pollsters. It’s very clear they do not wanna be absorbed into China. They really don’t. They don’t wanna be part of a you know, a, reactionary dictatorship, you know, that really has now gotten pretty totalitarian.

So there’s a there’s a stake for us there, and it would be a, I think, an enormous blow to our credibility around the world, but not just to our credibility to, but to the the cause of freedom. And the United States does have a stake in the cause of freedom. Apparently, I might add, every single Taiwan niece that we spoke to in government and out, said what you are doing in Ukraine is very important. And, we, you know, we we are the United States is backlogged on, delivering something like about fourteen billion dollars worth of hard military hardware to Taiwan, they said the priority is getting, military hardware to Ukraine. That’s our that’s our fight too.

Although, by the way, it’s not clear that a lot of what we’re sending to Ukraine witness necessarily be

a lot of it is not funded. Right. But what it it was, I think, striking to all of us, they would bring up Ukraine. And they would insist it is fair. What you are doing there is very, very important.

It bears directly on our security.

And you can take take that in a number of ways. Right? So on the one hand, there is the geopolitical question of US port to Ukraine and how that’s read in Taipei, how that’s read in Beijing, all of which is terribly important. There’s, you know, another kind of element here, which is, what is what’s going on in in Ukraine say about the changing character of of war. The nature of war stays the same, of course, but, you know, we’re on the, you know, brink, I think most people believe of a massive change in the way that war is conducted because of autonomy and, artificial intelligence, robotics, etcetera.

So are they looking to Ukraine also for potential lessons to be learned about how they then how they should array themselves, how they should think about fighting?

Again, bear in mind, they we have contributed to this. They are isolated They don’t get to have military attaches wandering around the front lines. They don’t have delegations, at least formally, of military officers coming to visit. I think that their concern about Ukraine is is is on several grounds. One is American credibility.

They, you know, the United States would lose credibility if after having made the commitments we’ve made, we backed off But I think they also think that there’s a deterrent value in terms of China that the Chinese, you know, will look at, what Vladimir Putin did trying to gobble up a, weaker neighbor. And, you know, all of a sudden, finding all the Western powers arrayed against him. And his country suffering terribly, and may think twice. So they’re, you know, they’re concerned about both sides of it. The the The question, the problem I’m I I really do find myself thinking a lot about the problem of of helping them develop an effective military when we don’t when we simply don’t interact with them all that much because there’s no other country in the world that’s gonna interact with them if we don’t.

Although my impression is there’s much more now discussion than than there has been in in than there was, say, for instance, when I was under secretary of defense.

Well, I mean, to to go from virtually zero to one hundred or two hundred people is it is at one level, that’s a huge increase. If you go by, what is it that’s needed, which is I think what the where the the question that you should always ask is, you know, not looking at how much we’re doing, but is it enough? That it’s the answer is it’s not enough. And we we really do need to do more, and we do need to do more to help help them modernize. I mean, they don’t have you know, the leadership examples, for example, that we could provide.

They don’t have a lot of the technical expertise. We don’t we don’t exercise with them. You know, there’s just a whole world of things that we could provide to make them more you know, a much more difficult target for, China to to gobble up.

I wanna come back to the blockade problem in a minute, but before we go there, you know, even before Ukraine, the Taiwan East had had, the example of the crackdown in Hong Kong. To galvanize their attention. You were talking about, Taiwan’s increasing, you know, defense budget. Then you had, Ukraine, And then you’ve mentioned the, you know, heightened activity in the straight, the overflights, the the exercises post Pelosi visit in which, for instance, the Chinese Navy essentially surrounded Taiwan. They didn’t actually declare a blockade, but they, you know, were pretty clearly signaling their capability of actually putting one into place.

So looking at all of this, I mean, how did you find this reverberating in in Taiwan?

Well, that I think probably the most important thing was Hong Kong. Because that gives the lie to one country two systems. Which have been the the Chinese slogan that, you know, we can have one country, but we can have two different systems, and you’ll have autonomy and stuff. That was a lie. And, you know, they will not trust, like, like, most people were the neighbors of To totalitarian countries, they won’t trust them, and they absolutely shouldn’t.

Now whether we’ll convince ourselves that somehow you can have a negotiated agreement that that the Chinese will adhere to, that’s another matter. But, you know, if there’s if there’s one reliable lesson of the last century, I think it is you can lie on the communists to violate their sworn word whenever it’s convenient for them. And I think that’s a pretty good rule to to take away. And so it was in Hong Kong, and so it’s been in in many other, in many other cases. You know, the the result of all this is that they are not I think they’re not inclined to really come to terms with China except in sort of negotiating motives, motives for vending.

And that’s and that’s about it, but they are not interested in that the and I think the polling data really does bear this out. There’s just no interest in unification with China. I mean, there’ll be There’ll be people I have to say particularly rich people who won’t particularly care because you can make a lot more money. You make a lot of money in China or you could. And they may not care about it.

But I think most Taiwanese just they don’t. They don’t want that. And, you know, when you go there, it’s it’s a normal, free society. Newspapers denouncing politicians, politicians denouncing each other, people living lives as they choose.

As you know, there’s a school of thought in Washington, DC. It was reflected in some precincts of, what passes for the Republican Party intelligencia and certain precincts of the Congress that China is the only thing that matters and anything we’re doing from for Ukraine is subtractive for our ability to deter and defend, Taiwan, You pretty clearly have indicated that’s not the way the Taiwan see it, which is very interesting.

It’s not it’s not the way the Japanese see it either, by the way. And it’s not the way the Australians see it. I mean, it’s, you know, this is, I think a mutual friend of ours once used the phrase. Mart smart stupid. You know, when when people people think they’re being very clever and you know, in this case, sort of, you know, many many matter nicks or,

too clever by half.

Yeah. Or toy soldier Tallirans, they, you know, they, well, you know, we’re gonna make be very bold and strategic and make a choice between, the endo Pacific and Europe. The only problem is the locals think that that’s an idiotic idea. Yeah. And and and and we can rely on the locals to actually understand this better.

Their neighborhood better than we do. Yeah.

So, but I’m interested in one other theory. So you know, for a long time, people have been concerned, that, China was gonna overtake the United States as the largest economy. They’ve been engaged in a double digit annual defense build up, since ninth late nineteen nineties. In many ways, the capacity that they have for ship building, the,

yeah,

the size of their navy, the anti access area denial systems, the investments they’ve made in military capabilities that make it very difficult for the US military to operate. The way it has traditionally operated in the Western Pacific, that that was our big problem. Last summer, Hal brands and his co author, Mike Beckley, you know, appeared on shield of the Republic. Talking about their book, the danger zone in which they argue that actually we are hitting peak China. China is actually about to decline.

And lo and behold, you know, we’ve now seen a China that is really bedeviled by economic problems. Xi Jinping is relieving a bunch of military commanders corruption, you know, whether that’s part of his domestic political calculus or whether it’s got to do.

Or the minister suddenly disappeared.

Sort of foreign minister suddenly disappears for having an affair with a journalist.

Well, the the affair was not the issue. He they had

a child who had American citizens.

With American citizens. Yeah. Right.

That was the deal breaker. But but, you’ve also, you know, you got this question where these military officers removed for incompetence, where they’re removed because it’s got to do with Xi Jinping’s domestic situation. Or does it does have to do with corruption in the military genuinely? That was, you know, the the pretext, but is it genuinely concerned about the impact of corruption on the military as the Russian military’s corruption is exposed to frailty of its military. I mean, all of this is, you know, swirling around?

I mean, do the Taiwanese have any take on this? Do they think it’s peak China and that it’s on the and that I mean, by the way, the argument that it’s peak China it doesn’t shouldn’t, you know, make anyone feel, warm and fuzzy. In fact, you know, the suggestion by brands and Becky is this this might be a urgent problem, you know, might be something that happens in twenty twenty seven, not twenty thirty five. So we have ten years to get ready for it.

Right. So if, Just to to that point. I mean, there are there are two possibilities. One is if, China is in deep economic trouble it turns inward. It doesn’t have time or energy to make mischief elsewhere.

The other is, no, if China’s in deep economic trouble, they try to relieve it by looking outwards and in particular pushing the, the Taiwan agenda through some use of force, and there are people on in Taiwan as elsewhere on both sides of that argument. And I think know, it’s only gonna be resolved by waiting and saying what what happens. We met with a very senior economist. I can’t I’m not allowed to say more than that. Not Taiwanese, but who happened to be in Taiwan.

And he argued very convincingly actually as everybody else did, that the time when it that the Chinese really are in deep economic trouble, that this is not a, This is not a transient phenomenon. It’s reinforced by a number of people we talked to who had been talking to Taiwanese business people. There are a lot of time on these business people in China who come back and say, this is terrible. And we need to move and I’ve begun moving some of their businesses to other parts Southeast Asia. So there seems to be a general consensus.

You know, I’m not an economist, much less a Chinese economist, but We’re an economist who studies China, but it just seems to be a whole bunch of things that, you know, it’s an economy that have been driven by investment, a lot of it incredibly wasteful. You know, there’s like twenty four, twenty five million empty apartment buildings in China. That’s probably an underestimate. There’s, you know, the way to to get out of this bind would be by growing domestic demand, but they’re not. And in fact, as stocks, you know, when when stocks, take a hit, And when the real estate market takes a hit as it’s been doing, then people actually tend to spend less because they’re they’re worried about preserving their capitals that, you know, create something of a vicious circle.

They have a tremendous long term demographic problem. I think they may have already passed the point where their median age is older than ours, and it’s gonna get a lot worse, a lot faster. Xi Jinping seems either not to understand economics or not care about it. And so, you know, more and more of this, the economy is now controlled by the state owned enterprises the SOEs. So they’re, you know, it’s no longer a free enterprise.

You know, she went on the war path against the tech sector. Against places like Alibaba. So, you know, all that adds up to them being in deep economic trouble. Now the The problem is, as you said, they’ve with it, with the economic growth that they had. They’ve bought a lot of military hardware.

And they have developed their their military quite a bit. And they do you know, they have some built in strengths to include a huge ship building industry and and things of that nature. What we don’t know is something that is, I think, and this is lesson reinforced by Ukraine is we don’t know how good that military actually is. And we have some ways of measuring it and exercises. But, you know, how adaptable they really are under pressure, how much corruption remains, and there may be quite a bit of it.

They don’t have a way of knowing either because they they don’t know. They haven’t fought since nineteen seventy nine and the last, which was against the Vietnamese and They didn’t give that good an account of themselves then. So

And and look, at the top of this, you have a dictator, and that’s the way to think about Xi Jinping. Who is an absolute dictator who gets rid of his rivals. And guys like that usually, I think, don’t get the straight story from their subordinates. So he may have a pretty poor idea of what’s going on. In fact, somebody was quoting, I think Stephen Cotton, the Great Russian historian.

About how do you understand these systems? I think I think he was talking about today’s Russia. He said, well, if you can’t understand from the outside what’s going on, I assure you if you’re on the inside, you know, even less. And and I think that actually may be true, and true in this case as well. So, you know, as you say, it’s not entirely reassuring that this is the case.

Maybe just the opposite. But but the consensus for sure seems to be that the Chinese economy is in a bad way. You know, they’re increasingly you’re hearing economists saying, actually, they the Chinese economy will never catch up with the American economy, which I think is perfectly perfectly plausible. You know, I always felt that some of the some of the projections of, Chinese economic growth and economic dominance is just too reminiscent of the things we heard in the seventies about Japan, seventies and eighties. About how Japan was gonna supplant the United States as,

cold war is over Japan one.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And that turned out, of course, not to be true. And in fact, what they may be headed for is something like what ch what, Japan has experienced where what somebody what’s called a balance sheet, recession where, you know, companies have enormous amounts of debt but they still have lots of cash flow from whatever their businesses are.

So they don’t invest any of it. They just pay off they try to pay off their debt. And the result is you’d get this sort of very long term stagnation, which is what the Japanese have had. But the Japanese started off rich. Chinese aren’t rich.

And so this could be a lot worse, for them. Plus, there’s other stuff like, you know, the impact of climate change and ecological catastrophe and so forth.

We’re gonna have to wrap our conversation up in a little bit here. So let me ask you to, you know, respond to two questions. One is, how would you grade the Biden administration on this? I mean, I’m not gonna say that China’s the pacing challenge. But China clearly has been the focus of their national security strategy, their national defense strategy.

They’re trying to obviously reorient, away from the conflicts, that have dominated us militarily for the last twenty years in the Middle East. How would you grade, you know, how they’ve done? And what do you think we should be doing? Either that’s additive or subtractive from what from what the Biden administration’s doing.

Well, you know, on the whole, I think this is the area where they’ve done the best. It’s in part because of a mutual friend of ours, Kurt Campbell. Who’s in the White House and is the coordinator who is, one of these days when he gets out of government, we’ll have to interview him. I hope I didn’t destroy his career by mentioning his name.

But We have other colleagues in the department fence, so I think, are doing a

good job too.

And we can ruin their careers as well if we wanna do that.

Well, take them all. I, you know, take I

was just meeting with one, but I won’t even mention it.

Take care of all the family’s business no, I I on this one, I give them credit. You know, for example, the this meeting that they were able to arrange with the Japanese and the South Koreans. That’s a big deal. That you have this kind of truck of the United States Japan and South Korea you know, the relations between Japan and South Korea are fraught for deep historical and cultural reasons to bring them together. That’s an amazing thing.

They’re, alive to the nature of the kind of geoeconomic competition with China. You know, people have this idea that things like sanctions, and and the like are, well, counterproductive because they don’t prevent economic growth. But but that’s not really the point. The point is you wanna protect yourself and you want it to some extent undermine the other guy over the long run. So I think they’ve been good on that.

The relations with the key, Pacific allies are strong. And are continuing I hate to say it in some ways. This is all continuation of work done by the Trump administration, but without any of the, the kind of crazy theatrics. So on the whole, I give them credit, I think on Taiwan, they actually have a lot to do. And I think there, the, the task is going to be to strengthen our commitment to Taiwan, to counter, you know, this Chinese squeeze and to maintain Taiwanese morale.

And the thing I came away worrying about was could you ever get to a point where the Taiwanese just sort of say, well, the Americans will abandon us. So why exactly do we want to go ahead with this?

Let’s make the best deal we can.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I I think of it a little bit as the New Hampshire test. So, you know, as I’m sure many of our listeners know, the State motto, which is on the license plate of New Hampshire, is a quote from the revolutionary war general John Star, live free or die. Now some countries, it’s very clear that they feel that way. Ukraine.

Finland, although even there in Finland, you know, compromised when it had to. Israel, I suppose. But, you know, that’s an awful lot to ask of people that kind of spirit of, you know, we would rather just you know, go down, have our cities leveled, and and

I’m not sure you can ever know it before the fact.

Right. And as as, you know, as I said, the, you know, the Fins cut their deals too. And I think we have not paid adequate attention to this dimension of our strategic relationship with Taiwan. And I do think you want to you wanna begin doing things that will give them the confidence to to then do the things that are necessary to do, to defend themselves adequately so that we can then help defend them. I don’t know what grade would you give the Biden administration?

I’m in pretty much the same place you are. You know, I think they’ve done a lot. I think our colleagues in the Department of Defense have have done a great deal both in terms of our posture and in terms of our work with allies that you highlighted. And not just, you know, Korea and Japan, a lot with, republic of the Philippines that I wouldn’t

know that wouldn’t anticipate it. Yeah. That’s a that’s an important story. The restoration of our ties with the Philippines.

We’ve got some access to bases that we, you know, we certainly didn’t have when I was in the Department of Defense. You know, president was just in Vietnam. I mean, and there have been some investments and capabilities that, get let us get after some of these operational problems that the Chinese have imposed on us I guess what I worry about, but my fear is that, a, it’s not fast enough. You know, it’s not fast enough to to the purpose that we have. And second, and I’d really like to hear what you have to say about this.

We we may, you know, I think we may end up being fast enough to deter the Chinese from doing something that is really difficult. Right? So the, you know, a massive invasion of Taiwan across ninety miles of water, It’s not ninety miles everywhere. That’s the shortest point. It’s longer in other points of the island.

That’s a daunting task. It would be hard unopposed, opposed, it’ll be harder. Chinese, you know, have developed some capabilities to make it harder to get there quickly, you know, in time, you know, they may think to do it, but it’s still a big big deal. But the blockade scenario worries me a lot. That one, you know, that one I think is harder for us to react to.

Particularly as China builds up its nuclear forces and becomes a near nuclear or nuclear peer of the United States. I mean, look at all the problems we’ve had with escalation dynamics in Ukraine. I think you would have this, you know, in the same way in this instance.

Yeah. I think that’s I think that’s right. And, to add to that, I would just say, this be part of a general critique. I mean, first in general, the administration tends tends to do the right thing kind of too late. I mean, that’s the Ukraine story.

There’s a broader, problem with the strategic conception, though, that I would and I would and what I would say there is you know, this hope that you can somehow revert to, a world in which we’re simply focused on the end of Pacific. It’s reverting to my loathing of the term pacing challenge. The problem that the United States faces is we we are in a nastier world that we’re we were in even ten or twenty years ago. We cannot exit the Middle East, although we would like to. There is gonna be a major and enduring threat to the security and safety of Western Europe, which is a Central and Western Europe, which is the vital interest of ours, and there’s the China threat, which is in some ways the biggest one of all.

And at the same time, we’re not really increasing our defense budget commensurate with that, and we’re not you know, kind of leveling with the American people saying this is we’re entering a dangerous phase of international history. It’s not always so, but it is so now. And then, you know, on, specifically on China, I really worry a lot that here you have an aging dictator. More and more absolute power, which means fewer and fewer dissenting voices. And somebody who is completely ruthless, you know, we we forget what the advantages you get are if you really don’t care that you might lose a couple of hundred thousand soldiers.

And I don’t think they would care. I that’s just not You know, the Chinese Communist Party’s DNA is one of total ruthlessness in the expenditure of human life. And it’s a terrible thing, but that that gives you certain advantages. So, yeah, it’s really, you know, invasion will be really hard. I I truly believe if he thought he could get away with it.

But it was gonna cost a quarter of a million Chinese lives? I don’t think she would hesitate for a moment. And I think he’d sleep perfectly soundly.

Well, on that really cheery

uplifting note, we’ll have to. Just be the jet lag talking, but I think so.

Yeah. I don’t think so either. Well, we we are gonna have, at some point, the not too distant future, our friend Ross Babage on who’s, you know, written about this. And, this is subject. Obviously, we’re gonna, you know, have to come back to, I think, from time to time.

We had our friend Aaron Freedberg on, but This is a, this is a, it’s not the pacing challenge. This is a, you know, monumental, challenge for, the United States of America as far as the eye can see.

Yeah. It’s it’s not going away. And, You know, I I I really do think that we’re I don’t know why it goes for the very purpose of this podcast. This is not just a question of managing one or two problems. It’s gonna be a question of managing multiple problems simultaneously.

And that’s gonna require not only statecraft, and military muscle, both of which are required, but also and and here, this is the one thing I would really I would criticize the administration for. The ability to explain to the American people why it matters. That’s the thing that’s missing in all this. And it’s been missing on Ukraine, and I’m afraid it’s largely missing in the Indo Pacific as well.

I agree. And on that note, that brings us to an end of this episode of Shield of Republic. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review, on Apple Podcast or Spotify or wherever you get Secret Podcast from. We’ll be back in the future with more uplifting observations about the state of the world. Thank you, Ellie.