Peak China and the Lessons of the Cold War (with Hal Brands and Michael Beckley)

Welcome to Shield of the Republic. A podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and dedicated to the proposition first articulated by Walter Littman during World War two that a strong and balanced foreign policy is the indispensable shield of our Democratic Republic. Eric Edelman, counselor at the center for strategic and budgetary assessments, a Bulwark contributor, and a nonresident fellow at the Miller Center. My cohost Elliot Cohen is traveling, but we’re lucky to have today to really terrific guests who have just published a book danger zone about the coming potential conflict with China. So I’m glad to welcome Hal brands and Michael Beckley.

Hal is my colleague at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC where he is the Henry A Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs. He’s also a columnist for Bloomberg opinion and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. And Michael Beckley is associate professor of political science at Tufts and a nonresident, senior fellow at AEI, and he is also the author of a book

I much admire unrivaled about why the United States is going to remain the sole superpower. So Alan, welcome to both of you.

Thanks, Eric. It’s great to be here. Thanks so much.

This is a very timely conversation since Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, has just managed to touch down and spend about twenty four hours in Taiwan. Which has caused an awful lot of kerfuffle with the People’s Republic of China, including some additional flights into the air defense information zone of Taiwan and the declaration of all sorts of military exercises around Taiwan and prognosis of all sorts of serious consequences from the spokesperson of the Chinese foreign ministry, the the People’s Republic of China’s foreign ministry. So this is a great time to have this conversation, guys. Now, you believe in your book that we have hit peak China. And that China, which has been rising for the last thirty years or so, is now beginning to head into decline.

President Clinton once said that a weak China would be as big a threat to the United States as a strong China and people have been predicting coming slow down or collapse of Chinese economy for at least twenty years, if not longer. So explain to us what what you all mean by peak China and what are the consequences of it for US policy in the Indo Pacific?

Well,

you know, China has been rising for so long that most people just assume its rise is like a constant of the international system, but a a key point we try to make in the book is that the past forty years of peace and impressive prosperity are sort of an anomaly in modern Chinese history and that this exceptional rise we think was basically the result of exceptional circumstances that are rapidly disappearing. You had just a period a long period of US engagement, which China and hyper globalization, which gave China this opportunity to become the workshop of the world. You had a Chinese government that was willing to embrace some semblance of reform and opening, you had the greatest demographic dividend in history where China had anywhere between ten to fifteen workers per elderly retiree in its population in the 1990s and 2000s. Most countries don’t get anywhere close to five to one. And then you just had self sufficiency in most resources and that easy access to raw materials made growth incredibly cheap for China.

But now all these tailwinds are starting to become headwinds, and that’s why we think it’s time to start talking about the end of China’s rise and what that means for the international system. And

just to add to what like that, I think the the

other

dimension that’s really important here is that one reason China was able to grow so rapidly in the thirty years after nineteen seventy eight, which is typically dated as the beginning of the reform and opening period is that the outside world and particularly the Democratic world was deeply committed to and invested in Chinese growth and and the growth of Chinese power and diplomatic influence. This was the case with US policy certainly during the cold war when China was a tacit ally vis a vis against the Soviet Union for the last twenty years of that conflict. And then during the period of engagement of China, for about a quarter century after the end of the cold war. And it’s often been observed, and I think this is entirely true that but over that period, no country did more to assist China’s rise than the United States. What’s happened now, of course, that that condition no longer obtains.

The United States has decided that China is its principal geopolitical rival, and you were seeing more and more countries around the world become more and more skeptical of China’s intentions and more and more worried about Chinese power. And so when Chinese leaders look out at the world. They no longer see a world that is is welcoming and supportive of China’s rise. They see a world that is increasingly primed to push back militarily, diplomatically, and economically.

Well,

I’m glad how you raised the issue of US engagement and the sort of phase of US strategy towards China that it represented. We actually talked Elliott and I did in our last episode with Aaron Friedberg about that because Aaron, of course, just published a book that sort of goes through the whole history of the engagement strategy and its its failure and the difficulty people have had. And accepting that it’s it’s failed with China. But given what both you and Michael have said, so if China is peaking and it’s now running into, as Michael said, headwinds rather than tailwinds. Is that bad for the U.

S. In the sense that you’ve just discussed that we’ve decided. It’s our most important, you know, geopolitical competitor. So, you know, maybe

a little, you know, problems for China economically and at home is not such a bad thing? Well, it depends entirely on the timeline that you look at the question on. And so over thirty to forty year time horizon. Yeah. In in geopolitical terms, this is good news for the United States.

And so one of the arguments that that we make in this book and that Mike made in his prior book is that all of the fears about China effortlessly overtaking the United States as the world’s e leading economic military power it overblown. That that’s almost certainly not going to happen. At least not on any on anything like the timeline that the many people have predicted. In in the near term, however, it could be more of a problem. And so this is where the history becomes relevant.

If you look at a number of past instances of great power rivalry, revisionist powers by which we mean countries that just wish the international system works differently than it does today. They feel as though they’re somehow slighted by the international system and want a bigger share of the goodies. Those countries often become most rash, most dangerous, not when they are deeply confident about the future, not when they think they’re on an upward trajectory, but when they think that their power, particularly their economic power has peaked relative to their competitors and maybe about to decline. Because in many cases, during a period of ascent, their leaders have made great promises to the population or to the the selectorate and authoritarian regimes about what they can accomplish and how they can reorder the world to their liking. And they start to see that moment of opportunity begin to wane.

And so there’s often a temptation to act more boldly in the here and now to try to grab what gains one can before the window closes. You you can see that in Germany’s behavior prior to World War one, you can see it in Japan’s behavior prior to World War two. And in a variety of other cases, really over the past hundred fifty years. And and so a peaking power can actually be more militarily dangerous in a sense that’s more aggressive than a country that still thinks time is on its side.

So in some sense, this is like the flip side of the so called Thucydides trap that Graham Allison has talked about that rising powers are always bound to clash with one another. This is really a question of whether as China faces it’s inevitable inability to match the United States. It tries to seize this window of opportunity. This is something Hal, you and I and others who worked on

National

Defense Strategy Commission four years ago worried quite a bit about that it wasn’t the long run that was the problem. It was sort of the medium run. And that’s really, I think, you and Michael are kinda talking about in this book. And, you know, going back to Mike’s earlier book, this was probably a bad week to be taking the position that the U. S.

Is really in terminal decline a week in which we announced a five hundred million dollars package of additional military assistance, bringing it up to eight billion for Ukraine attack on Ayman’sawaheries, showing that the United States after twenty years, if you blow up our buildings, we’ll track you down and, you know, kill you. And and in the face of all these Chinese threats, the a US speaker of the house, you know, flew into Taipei and flew out without any immediate terrible consequence. So how much do the Chinese really believe this, you know, idea that we’re in terminal decline? I mean, obviously, since two thousand and eight, nine and the great recession, they seem to have accepted this notion that the US is in decline and they’re inevitably rising. So how much have they processed of the fact that maybe this is not really working out the way they anticipated.

Howard Bauchner: I think there’s sort of a duality. On the one hand, they, I still believe, think United States is in decline that the United States, they they highlight the internal political chaos in the United States or screw ups like the the way that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was conducted or even something like the war in Ukraine. You know, they’re quick to point out that the United States and allies seem very scared about getting directly militarily involved in our content to sort of arm from the sidelines. So there’s that that perception that I think makes China sort of cocky on the international stage that this is their moment. They can make big moves right now.

At the same time, they also are very well aware of a lot of the liabilities that their system has racked up internally, the economic slowdown, the increasing strategic pushback that China is getting not just from the United States by countries really at every corner of the compass in Asia and even beyond where you even have Europe starting to increasingly side. Against China. And so I think it’s possible for them to both think that the United States is a shambolic mess, although albeit one armed with tremendously powerful capabilities while also being worried about their own long term trajectory. And to us, that actually makes China especially dangerous just because it does create those windows of opportunity, where if they push hard enough or they punch the United States in the face hard enough, they can maybe get it to back down or to fold but that they have to also move quickly because time isn’t exactly on their side as trends currently stand. Howard

Bauchner: The issue about China not making a lot of friends around the world and actually creating a lot of enemies is interesting. I mean, Ed Ludwig talks about Chinese strategic autism, the the fact that they have taken any number of actions that have actually facilitated the US operating from a position, I would say, comparative advantage, which is our globe girdling system of alliances, not just in East Asia, but in Europe as well. I mean, Michael and Hadi both I think made the point that in the book certainly that China’s approach to COVID is not exactly what it plot it from countries either in the region or around the world. The so called World War, your diplomacy did not go down well. I think in Europe, I mean, the attempt to Boycott, Australia because Australia had the temerity

to

seek a investigation into the origins of COVID. I mean, that’s something you out in the book. I mean, all of that seems to have kind of made the alliances seeking to contain China more robust. And what is it about the Chinese that kind of makes them strategically autistic? I

think part of it is geography. And and so, you know, China has very interesting strategic geography. On on the one hand, it has the advantages that come with being both a maritime and a continental power, but it also has a lot of the disadvantages and one of those disadvantages is that when you are a great power that’s situated within Eurasia, if you become very powerful, if you become aggressive, you are an existential threat to the countries around you. And so over history, what we’ve often seen is that when would be hegemon’s arise in Eurasia, they tend to get surrounded, cornered, and killed by their adversaries often in partnership with the United States. And so this is, you know, one of the oldest stories in the international system in in one respect.

But I think the nature of the Chinese system has a lot to do with it as as well. I mean, one of the things that we’ve seen increasingly over the past decades since Xi Jinping has been in charge is a China that is just increasingly insensitive to the reactions that its own policies provote, whether though that’s the will for your diplomacy, whether it is the crackdown in Hong Kong, the the border disputes within the the pressure on Taiwan, this is a regime that’s become increasingly willing to push on multiple fronts at once and then occasionally seem surprised that it elicits more concerted pushback when it when it does that. And one of the interesting examples of this came in the fall of twenty twenty one. And a story that really wasn’t picked up much in American media, there was a group of seven Democratic countries from Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia that conducted pretty significant naval extra sizes in the Philippines. Basically, as a warning to to China not to think that it could impede freedom of navigation or that it could reorder the Western Pacific.

To its liking. And and you’re seeing more and more of these initiatives come together, whether it’s the quad or office or the deeper US, Japan, planning on how they might respond to a Taiwan contingency or the ways in which even relatively minor European States like the Czech Republic and Lithuania are taking an interest in the security of Taiwan. You’re you’re getting into a place where China’s facing push back not just locally or not just regionally, but even even globally.

Yeah.

I I think just to double down on the idea that the nature of the Chinese regime. I mean, dictatorships just generally don’t do self reflection all that well. They have to maintain this image of the all knowing, all powerful dictator. And no one has killed the messenger more than Xi Jinping. He has investigated more than three million senior CCP officials, one point five million have been punished, including people at the various highest levels.

And so that obviously creates this sort of echo chamber makes it hard for a dictionary to get feedback. And just the nature of the Chinese system, what you often see is the government Beijing will set some very ambitious target. And then rely on underlings basically to carry those out whether it’s provincial governments or wings of the bureaucracy or the military. And they often are falling over themselves to try to meet that narrow target in any way possible to hell with whatever costs come along along the way, and we’ve seen this from the disaster of the Great League Forward all the way up to the Wolf Warrior diplomacy today. And there’s just so many I mean, we could go into so many different examples, like, just from twenty twenty one.

In addition to the example, Hall gave earlier that year in March, the United States and a few of its allies sanctioned. I think it was four Chinese officials over abuses in Xinjiang and China responded with this wolf warrior meltdown where they lap sanctions on multiple European entities, politicians, and that ended up causing the European Union to suspend its major investment treaty. With China. So we’ve just we’re just seeing this over and over again. And at first, it looks just astounding the level of self defeating policies by China.

But when you get a better sense of how the Chinese system operates the incentive structure that various people in the system have, it starts to make a bit more sense. So in your view, is conflict with

with China between the United States and China, you know, four are gained. Is this just inevitable? And we’re just now waiting to see what will set it off? Or do do you see a way to prevent conflict from from actually erupting? I

I don’t think conflict

is inevitable. Rivalry, I think, is certainly almost inevitable for, especially for the next ten or so years, which we call the danger zone just because China already is displaying a lot of the nasty traits that you would expect from peaking power. The the rapid military build up, the slide to neo totalitarianism, the attempt to essentially carve out an economic empire where its firms will have privileged access to markets and resources. A greater

East Asia co prosperity

sphere. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, just these very euphemistic terms. I mean, they call it the community of common destiny, which sounds very much like what the Japanese we’re we’re considering. And so that’s that’s terrifying. And so I think just given that, I mean, China is at the end of the day putting forward a fundamentally different way of life in term in the international system as well as a different relationship between the ruler and people within a society.

And I think it you know, we can maybe get into the the ideological aspects of US China competition. I think those often go underrepresented, but I think that’s very much and parcel of this because China at the end of the day is trying to construct an alternative world order that I think would be highly detrimental to the interests of the United States and sellers. Well,

Mike,

since you raised it, let’s go there because this is something that Hal has written about, including a couple of pieces he wrote with my colleague at CSBA Tokoshiya Shahara. This really goes into the whole question of the ideological competition, political warfare, that China has been waging in Russia as well for that matter as you all acknowledge in the book.

This is a little

bit, I think, issue that has been underplayed in the discussions in the United States. There’s been a tendency, I think, particularly in the chronological community to downplay this notion of autocracy versus democracy or authoritarianism versus democracy, which the Biden administration is actually at least, historically, adopted as a framing mechanism. But I think in the chronological community me if you think I’m wrong, but there’s just an awful lot of them that nobody believes in this. You know, it’s already become a market,

you know,

largely a market society. You know, the ideology is a died off, etcetera. That has become a little harder to sustain that point of view under GE because he’s very much become a kind of neo maleist. We we had Jude Blanchett on the podcast a couple of months ago talking about some of these ideological currents. But how since you’ve written on this, how should Americans think about the ideological component of this?

We’re used to that component in the Cold War. Which you’ve written about in other contexts, how should we think about

it in in the US.-China context? So the argument you sometimes hear from people who are skeptical of the idea that there’s an ideological dimension of the contest is that the Chinese Communist Party isn’t like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which felt that it had an ideological compulsion to spread socialism to the ends

of the

earth. And that statement happens to be both true and one hundred percent beside the point. And so the argument I think that the people who think that there is an ideological contest would make is is really twofold. And so one is that it is the clash of different visions of domestic order within societies that drives a lot of the clashing visions of international order in the globe at large. And and so the fact that China is an autocratic system.

It’s run-in an autocratic way. Means that the CCP will never be comfortable living in a world dominated by a democratic superpower because they recognize that in a world dominated by Democratic superpower or international norms, you know, favor Democratic rule and human rights. That that’s a world that is potentially lethal to the Chinese Communist Party. And in fact, the CCP believes very strongly that we have been trying to overthrow that government since the day it was established in October nineteen forty nine. And so the second part of this is that this means that when Xi Jinping thinks about the world that he wants to create, it is a world where autocracy, so not communism, not socialism, but autocracy, is at the very least protected and perhaps privileged.

China will be safer, ideologically and geopolitically, in a world where there are a larger number of autocratic systems and where democratic countries don’t set the rules of the road. And so I think this helps explain why China is so often involved in shoring up autocrats under pressure. Why it is so willing to instruct its fellow authoritarians and the technique of repression and provide the tools of repression to regimes from Southeast Asia to Latin America. That’s why China is so energetic about trying to rewrite the norms of international institutions. Body is under the UN umbrella essentially that have to do with things like human rights because this is a life or death issue for the Chinese Communist Party.

And so it’s trying to shape the world in a way that will be congenial to its continued rule at home. There’s really nothing unusual about this, by the way. It’s it’s what the Soviet Union did. I tried so union tried to create an international system that would be conveniently, the survival of communism, the Soviet Union. It’s what the United States has done.

A lot of our foreign policy has been about trying to create a world that is safe for democracy. And so we shouldn’t be at all surprised that the Chinese are doing something similar, albeit from a very different

direction. Yeah. I think

the motive is as classic as, you know, the concert of Europe helping Colluding to crush the French revolution. It’s the age old battle. But I I think you know, we shouldn’t also dismiss the the unique aspects of China’s offensive because first of all, it does capitalize on a disturbing recent trend, namely the recession and Democratic governments around the world, the number of democracies, and just the quality of democracy eroding. So China’s iron fist is knocking on an open door to some respect. And and second, and I think much more important is just the nature of new digital technologies can make authoritarianism so much more efficient and effective before.

I mean, the East Germans, the Nazis, the Soviets would have killed to have the kind of data collection and messaging power that China has collected through its tech companies and being able to funnel all of that data back to their governments and use speech and facial recognition technology to rapidly soar through images and get up perpetrators and to send subliminal messages through social media. I mean, it just you know, and at the end of the day, these technologies not only enhance autocrats and their power. They also help make the trains run on time and improve infrastructure. And so it frees dictators from that age old dilemma that they used to have of having to either pay more for guns or pay more for butter. You know, you had to pick one or the other.

Now they can kind of have both because these technologies are useful across many different domains, but really reinforce the hold and the surveillance capacity that authoritarian regimes have over their people. Yeah. I think this is a really important point that people sort of misunderstand or the

minute you start talking about, you know, the ideological competition, people throw up the argument that Hal mentioned, which is, no, they’re not trying to spread Marxism and Leninism. They don’t really believe in that. So it’s less about the spread of Marxism and Leninism than it is about the discrediting of democracy and alternatives to authoritarian rule. And this this is what you own when the book label is democracy prevention as opposed to our efforts at democracy promotion. And and this is as as you say, Mike, this is part of the democratic recession, the reversal of the so called third wave of democratization that began in the early eighties and carried through Latin America, parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe.

So in in some sense in some sense that Chinese have sort of they’re they’re kind of catching a bit of a wave. I mean, hell in one of his earlier book on the U. S. And the Unipolar moment talked about how the U. S.

Kind of capitalized on the third wave of democratization. Chinese are kind of surfing on democracy recession. Now how how do we break out of that? How do we, you know, keep them from doing that?

Well, I think

one of the points we try to stress in the book is that because of the very issues we’ve talked about, think you know, thinking about aggressive democracy promotion strategies is probably the wrong way to think about the challenge that we face right now. It’s it’s more in the vein of democracy protection, protecting democracy where it exists now and and waiting for another turn of the wheel until conditions become more favorable and perhaps it can advance again. And there are a variety of defensive measures that are associated with that. I mean, everything from revealing autocratic disinformation more aggressively to trying to pass on the holes in democratic information ecosystems that make penetration by the Russians or the Chinese more more difficult, but there’s also frankly going to be a more offensive component to this battle to shape the political future of the world. And and so it’s not that the United States and its allies should be trying to overthrow the government of China.

I think that’s probably pretty difficult to do and would be dangerous even if you could achieve it. But we do need to recognize that there’s a political warfare battle ongoing right now and that, you know, unilateral disarmament is probably not the way to win it. And so there are a variety of of ways of thinking about this. One has to do with the point that Mike made earlier, which is you can do sort of political cost in position on the Chinese simply by pointing out the worst features of their own system. And and the way in which they fall short of the ideals that they they claim to represent.

And so that could be, you know, sanctioning officials involved in repression in Hong Kong or Xinjiang. It could be you know, magnifying and disseminating news about the massive corruption that pervades the Chinese system. It could even involve some harder edged measures. And so I think one of the more interesting proposals that has been made is essentially one of finding ways of feeding adversarial inputs into China’s political and social control systems, which rely on a combination of AI, facial recognition, and big data.

Again, not with

the idea that this is going to bring down the regime, but simply that it raises the cost and increase the difficulty of political repression within China as a way of evening out the playing field a little bit. There’s gonna be a need for more creative and more forward leaning strategies along these lines unless the United States wants to find itself constantly playing defense.

I mean, so

in that sense, the campaign against Huawei, for instance, falls into this general category. I mean, you know, our UK colleagues were for a moment there, you know, looked like they were willing to let Huawei in. And and, thankfully, one of the more salutary accomplishments of the Trump administration was to

help help

roll that back. And, you know, I

pointed out that

in the context of Finland and Sweden joining NATO, the fact that Ericsson and Nokia are head cornered in Finland and Sweden. They will now be part of formally part of the Western Alliance probably is not just helpful in the Nato, Russia context, but also because of the role they play in international telecommunications networking, useful in the context of trying to block Chinese 5G domination as well, which is something you talk about in the book, as well as international organizations where they’re trying to set standards and things like that for these kinds of technologies. It’s all part of

I think

what you’re you’re talking about. Can you talk both of you about what we can learn from the cold war? You have a chapter in the book

about what we

can learn from the cold war for this competition. Several people have argued including

how our

friend Mel Lefler, that

cold war

is an inappropriate analogy to use when thinking about the US, China competition, but still your earlier book that we talked about in the earlier podcast tries to learn some lessons from Gold War. You try to do that in this book as well and talk about specifically the lessons for thinking about competition with China.

I’ll I’ll take

a crack at it. I mean, it probably won’t come as any surprise to you Eric that I I was the one who insisted on having Cold War lessons in in this book. For some reason, all of my analogies are Cold War. Analogies these days. But the I think the the broader point is, we kinda have to stop thinking about the cold war as something that was suey generous, you know, completely unique in the history of Great Power Runway because it wasn’t.

I mean, it had unique characteristics, but it is part of this longer run of great power competition over the stretch of history. And so it can teach us things about the nature of great power rivalry, about the nature of strategies that are needed to succeed in great power rivalry. And so that is the vein in which we look at it here, not arguing that it’s exactly the same, but that it has some useful lessons. And in particular, if you look back at the beginning of the Cold War,

I think

there are some really interesting similarities between the strategic position of the United States and the Soviet Union and the strategic position of the United States and China. Today, we’re even in the late nineteen forties, you know, American strategists, whether George Cannon or Harry Truman, had a fair amount of confidence that time would be on America’s side in the long run, but there were danger zones that there were moments of severe vulnerability that the west had to cross just to to get to the long run, whether that was the threat of just a a collapse of Western Europe and the international system were at large in the late nineteen forties or the the military danger zone that emerged most notably following the North Korean invasion of South Korea and then China’s intervention in the war in late nineteen fifty. And so the United States had to put together a variety of strategies just to help it get through the immediate crisis and get to a longer competition in which it’s it’s deeper inherent strengths could help it prevail. And so there are there are a handful of lessons I think that emerge from this period, but the one that I’ll just mention is that you kinda have to be willing to use rough and ready solutions and coalitions rather than waiting for perfect solutions and coalitions to materialize.

And and so in the late nineteen forties, American policy makers very much believe that there was an ideological nature to the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, and yet they were willing to work with autocrats, even communists, like Tito and Yugoslavia to help check Soviet power in in the here and now. We were willing to pull together coalitions that the featured the countries that had just terrised the entire world of West Germany and Japan because that was what was necessary to create a solid balance of power and to create a shield behind which the free world could develop in in the early cold war. And a lot of the famous policies that we now look back on is is triumphs of American strategy and they were were actually sort of jury rigged solutions to immediate crises. The Truman doctrine was not something that was planned out month and month in advance. It was a policy that was put together over the space of about two weeks after the British told us that they were effectively withdrawing from the Eastern Mediterranean.

The same goes with the Marshall plan. The same goes with the creation of the North Atlantic. Treaty organization. And so there there was a willingness to basically move fast, to try new things, and to not make the perfect, the enemy of the good, and all of those characteristics will be very important today, albeit in a different context.

I I yeah. So I obviously agree with with Hal and his his recent book, the Twilightstruggle really goes into depth about all the ways the lessons that can be gleaned for the cold war, and I agree with all of those. And so I I’ll just content myself to maybe say a few of the things that I think are different, namely that in the cold war, the order that the United States built to wage that war was really one that could emphasize economic openness among its allies and partners to kinda build this resilient capitalist set of networks. But today, China has found ways to infiltrate that order and to prosper very well to basically use to milk free markets for mercantilist gain. And so the cold war certainly provides a lot of grand strategic guidance, but because we’re still sort of living in the legacy of institutions that were built to fight and win the cold war, which ended thirty years ago, I think another lesson that needs to be learned is now we need to revamp that system to take account of the unique aspects of the Chinese threat.

And frankly, I think that’s what the United States and its allies are sort of doing by emphasizing democracy. So they say, look, China has has adopted big parts of capitalism, but one thing they are definitely not is democratic. And we wanna basically create an order that it makes the world safe for democracy that emphasizes democratic values and standards and principles and to recraft international institutions in a way that are conducive to that. That seems to me to be the way to go, but obviously the efforts right now are fledgling and really need a shot in the arm. So if we’re

in this

danger zone, I wanna ask both of you to talk a little bit. We’ve already talked about it to some degree, but kind of maybe in a little more systematic way. What do we do to get out of this danger zone and get as you put it in the book to the other side, not that as you note in the book getting to the other side means that the problem is over, you’re still gonna have a lot of issues to manage. But How do we get through this particular period of to borrow a phrase from Paul Nazi of maximum danger? And then to close out our discussion, I’m gonna ask both of you to kind of grade out the Biden administration on how you think they’ve done in this area, you know, what have been the successes and what remains to be done and what if any of failures have

you seen? I

I think the the most important lesson is to prevent China from scoring near term victories that will radically upend the long term trends, which we argue are basically in the United States’ favor. So that includes most notably a smash and grab operation over Taiwan. If if China can somehow consolidate its control over Taiwan, that would radically change the balance of power in East Asia. If China can carve out this emerging empire that it’s trying forged through the global south and used that not only to become the world’s data broker, but to capture market share and ultimately become a dominant technological power in things like artificial intelligence intelligence, synthetic biology, that could also change the trajectories that we sketch out earlier in the book if China can develop these digital authoritarian technologies that could upend the balance of power between democracy and autocracy just as a way of life. Internationally.

So these so we argue that you have to focus. You have to prioritize ruthlessly that you can’t resist Chinese advances everywhere and you have to pick the areas that could really alter these long term trends so that you can get to the long game and then bring to bear all of those advantages that the United States has.

And just to

add one one point here, I mean, the tricky situation that we find ourselves in now is

that we

have to move quickly in a variety of areas to, for instance, shore up a balance of power in the Western Pacific that I think is threatening to invite Chinese aggression. But you have to do so in a way that doesn’t provoke the very aggression that you’re trying to avoid. This is always a challenge in dealing with an insecure and potentially aggressive power. Countries can be both insecure and aggressive at the same time. And so this is certainly the case with China

today. And so just

to to give one sort of concrete manifestation of this, I think we need to be much more in the vein of speak softly and race like hell to improve our capabilities and our allies’ capabilities and lessen the vein of shout loudly and go slow on defense reforms and defense investments. I’m gonna jump ahead. I just can’t restrain myself. This is where we’ve fallen short, I I think so far. And and so this is one of the reasons I’m actually somewhat ambivalent about speaker Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan.

It’s not at all clear to me how this actually helps Taiwan defend itself. It’s not clear to me how this helps us resist Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific. What it does do is drive home for China the fact that more and more countries are becoming more and more willing to treat Taiwan as an independent country in all but name, which is certainly what it looks like when you have the speaker of the house make an official visit to Taiwan. And so we have to we have to avoid getting ourselves in a situation where we are giving China lots of reason to think that it should move sooner rather than later without actually shoring up the capabilities we would use to deter and defeat that sort of

attack? Yeah.

I mean, I think there’s been a certain amount of discussion and I participated in it myself and some things I’ve written about strategic ambiguity with regard to the defense of Taiwan. But in

reality, you

know, whatever you think of the declaratory policy of strategic ambiguity. The much more important thing is to make sure that Taiwan has the kind

of

capabilities it needs to defend itself and also that it’s doing everything, not just having capabilities supplied to it, but also that it itself is making more of an effort to, you know, really shore up its defenses. There’s been a very, very long period of time. You talk about this actually in the book in which Taiwan has neglected its own defenses. And notwithstanding the Hector it was getting from some of us in the Department of Defense and elsewhere. But they do seem to be trying to remedy that.

But obviously, you know, the United States has a important role to play here as well in terms of the provision of capabilities. What about the the Biden administration? How would you kind of grade them out? I mean, they began, I thought reasonably well, with a meeting with the Secretary of State and National security adviser in Alaska, where I thought secretary Lincoln

and Jake Sullivan,

the national security adviser, kind of kind of gave as good as they as they got in the sense that they were treated, I would say, to a kind of exchange of unpleasantries at the outset by the their Chinese interlocutors and they kind of pushed back pretty hard, making it clear they weren’t going to put up with that kind of rhetorical bullying. But they also had precooked, you know, some sanctions with the EU, right, before that, which went right into effect after that meeting in Alaska having to do with Hong Kong. And so I I thought they got off to a pretty good start, but how would you guys assess how they’re doing? Well, I I hate to

be the the

academics sitting on the sidelines throwing stones at the people that are actually in the arena doing the hard work of crafting American foreign policy. And I I actually think in some ways it it might be little early to tell because I think the administration has put in place the beginnings of what could be a viable alternative order that provides a great strategy to get tough with China. I mean, you have economically this sort of loose economic block forming around that’s anchored by the g seven that controls more than half the world’s wealth where they’re developing new trade and investment standards that implicitly, either pressure China or exclude it outright. They’re you know, and then militarily, they have the idea that defense analysts have been talking about for a long time, which is trying to stand up, strategic porcupines around China, so that conquest becomes a no go. But the problem is it’s just really hard to get those things implemented.

And that’s ultimately where I think administration should be graded. It’s easy to, you know, write some defense strategies, but it’s much harder to actually do the hard work of getting allied buy in as well as public buy in. And one area of major concern is just with the defense budget because so much of this is gonna require a quick injection of substantial funds to procure all of the weapon systems that we need to put around the Taiwan straight right now to shore up the military balance there. And that’s an area where, you know, the defense budget is declining once you adjust for inflation, which is remarkable given that we have a war going on. In Europe could have a crisis in the Middle East if Iran gets breakout capacity with its nuclear arsenal and could have a crisis in East Asia if this Taiwan situation

escalates. Although

to be fair, the Congress has appropriated or authorized, I should say, both last year and this year, significantly

more for defense than the administrations asked for. Yeah. I think I think you’re starting to see more urgency around these questions. And so I I I make two points about this. So one is that I I think the direction of travel has been pretty good under this administration.

It it is the urgency that in some cases has been

lacking.

I think there has been good progress in working with Japan and Australia and other regional allies to think about essential regional contingencies. I think there’s been good progress in terms of bringing together creative geopolitical groupings like August pushback against Chinese influence. I think there’s been good work on sort of nascent and informal semiconductor alliances and tech partnerships in the way that Mike talked about it. I think the the challenge is kind of like, well, what timeline is this stuff gonna make a difference? And that’s really where the defense issue becomes critical.

The the US has interesting defense investments and reforms underway meant to allow it to maintain a military edge in the western Pacific, Taiwan has a very promising defense strategy that it is kind of adopting at the moment to to turn the island into a port defined. The problem is that both of these approaches look like they’re meant to bear fruit in the early 2030s. And if you think that we’ve got a decade, then that’s great. If you think that we have three to five years, perhaps at most, that that’s more problematic. And I think you’re starting to see among US officials a growing realization that this is not a twenty thirty five problem.

This may not even be a twenty twenty five problem. And and so a couple of years ago, there wasn’t a lot of public discussion about the prospect of a Chinese move on Taiwan during the 2020s, then at the beginning of twenty twenty one, the commander of Endo Paycom said maybe it’s a twenty twenty seven problem. More recently, you had the director of National Intelligence of real hands say that the threat to Taiwan was going to be acute throughout this decade. Now most recently, just a couple of days ago, there is sort of off the record commenting to the New York Times about the potential for a Chinese move on Taiwan within the next eighteen months. Everybody’s timeline is getting more compressed as the danger is ratchet up in the Taiwan Strait.

And so the question is not simply, do we have the right policies, it’s will we get there quickly enough in implementing them? You know, how

you were saying that

you were somewhat ambivalent about Speaker Pelosi’s trip. It

does seem

that that that there was some leaking in the Biden administration to preclude her from going. And I just wonder whether it might not have been better if she’d just shown up and had her meetings and then left without all of the hand ringing that went on in the United States before the fact because we had seven Republican and Democrat, I think, where the Democrats in that Codell, I can’t remember. But we had seven United States senators there last fall. I think it was Codell Cornyn. And it came, it went, you know, people like us who care about these issues, you know, made note of it, but it didn’t elicit the kind of huge who would it would it have been better in your view if everyone had just

kind

of kept their powder dry and let this play out without all of the public drama?

I I think so. I think that the drama, the will she or won’t she prior to the trip didn’t help. I mean, it it raised the profile of the trip. It it gave the Chinese more time to prepare and figure out exactly how they wanted to respond and and how high they wanted to turn up. The coercion dial.

And and so if if Pelosi was going to go, I think it would have been better just just to go and just just to arrive there and and just to

to do

it. I I think that once the news leaked, the administration was kind of in a tough spot on this because to explicitly tell her or I guess ask her would be the better way of putting it not to go, well, one, she might have gone anyways. And and two, once you do that, and you get all of the negative effects of being seen to cave to Chinese pressure. At the same time, the way that the trip got so much advance publicity also raised the cost of that trip happening from Beijing’s perspective. And so we ended up in a little bit of a worst of all worlds scenario on this one for precisely the reasons you mentioned.

We’ve been talking with Michael Beckley and Halbrands, the authors of danger zone, the coming conflict with

China, published by w w Norton, and publication date, guys, I think is August sixteenth. That’s right. So you you can preorder it now from Amazon or your local book seller, but it’s been great having both of you on. It’s been a great conversation, and I want to thank you for taking the time to join us on Chilutive Polo. Thanks for

having us, Eric.