Three things from the pod this week with Hal Brands and Michael Beckley:
China has already peaked, and is in decline — a moment when powers are at their most dangerous.
Unfazed by Putin’s losses in Ukraine, Xi likely sees his window of opportunity to take Taiwan within the next few years.
The United States still doesn’t take the Chinese threat seriously enough. Nor does Taiwan.
Super timely and absolutely fascinating: Hal Brands and Mike Beckley, two AEI colleagues, have a frightening and important book out on the coming conflict with China. (It’s called Danger Zone | The Coming Conflict with China. And yes, they’re total free riders on Top Gun Maverick. 😃) Notwithstanding the sexy title, this is dead serious analysis, looking at the state of Chinese power (past its peak), the Xi mentality (undeterred), and what would need to be done to defend Taiwan (more than either the Taiwanese or the U.S. is doing right now).
In the last decade-plus, the United States government has talked about the importance of “pivoting” to Asia, forgetting the Middle East, and recalibrating American defense with a view to great power conflict. But most of that talk is just… talk. As Brands and Beckley make clear, little has been done to either harden the Taiwanese target or to make clear to the Chinese that Washington views the threat with some urgency.
Don’t take it from us, take it from them… highlights from one of our favorite recent podcasts below. Read below, listen, subscribe, review, and share with your pals.
And don’t hesitate to share your comments — we’re always grateful.
HIGHLIGHTS
Bottom line up front?
Hal: It's probably not right to think about China as a rising power. It's better to think of China as a risen power, whose power is in some ways peaking right now.
The basic argument we make in the book is that China's days of easiest, most explosive economic growth are behind it. The days when it could most easily expand its international influence are behind it, because it has annoyed a growing coalition of countries, mostly advanced democracies around the world. And so Xi Jinping and the folks around him are going to find it harder and harder to achieve the geopolitical objectives they have set out, whether that's reclaiming Taiwan or becoming the dominant power in Asia and eventually the world, peacefully.
But didn’t China’s economic rise make it more averse to risk?
Hal: So I think it's important to bear in mind that China's economic miracle didn't just happen. It happened at the confluence of a handful of really important factors that just positioned China incredibly well for rapid growth. You had the demographic dividend. China's population was prime for productivity because you had a huge population of working age individuals with relatively few little kids or elderly parents to take care of. You had a political leadership that was committed to economic and reform and open, basically moving away from the command economy and liberalizing the Chinese economy in selective but important ways. You had an autocracy that still remained very thuggish, but became somewhat more responsive and meritocratic and basically attuned to economic incentives in the way that Chinese leaders ruled. You had a welcoming world, you had a world, particularly the United States and other major democracies that thought that China's economic rise was a good thing and helped it integrate into the world economy, gave it access to western markets, invested in Chinese industries, and basically fueled its dramatic growth. You had a country that was almost self-sufficient in important resources.
And so when you put all those things together, that was just a recipe for explosive growth. The problem is that all of those things have turned around over the past couple of decades.
Why do you argue China is a danger?
Hal: Because at some level, peaking states act aggressively out of insecurity. Out of a fear that the future will be worse than the present is and so they've got to go quickly to achieve what they want. But that doesn't mean that you can just sit back and be paralyzed from strengthening your own defenses. Because the United States has a no kidding, near term, problem vis a vis China. Which is that, if from 2030 onward China may well be in long term decline, vis a vis the United States, from now until 2030, China's going to have a really attractive window of military opportunity to overturn the balance of power in the Western Pacific but possibly by invading or otherwise coercing Taiwan. And so if the United States assumes a posture of saying, "We just can't make China any more insecure than it already is," we're going to be in a terrible place by the latter half of this decade.
So what should we do?
Hal: It's kind of a twofold prescription. On the one hand, yes, of course you should try to avoid gratuitously provoking China or doing things that don't strengthen you, but that annoy the Chinese and cause them to lash out. But you can't simply be backed into a stance where you're saying, "We're not going to strengthen our military posture in the Western Pacific. We're not going to sell more and better arms to the Taiwanese. We're not going to do more and deeper planning with our allies." Because those are the sorts of things that are going to be required to make a land grab on Taiwan look unattractive, even to a more risk acceptant China.
Is it even possible to defend Taiwan?
Mike: So I think our position is, defending Taiwan is doable, deterring the Chinese assault on Taiwan is doable. But the United States and Taiwan have been dragging their feet implementing a strategy that frankly defense experts came up with more than a decade ago and is completely viable using existing technologies. The whole idea of turning Taiwan into a prickly porcupine where it stocks up on anti-ship and anti-air missiles and drones and mines that can basically fend off an invasion or pick apart a blockade force that gets too close to their coastline.
The United States spreading out and hardening it's base infrastructure so that China doesn't have the option of a Pearl Harbor style strike. All of the American eggs are concentrated in just a couple of baskets right now on Okinawa. And this builds on just a few natural advantages that United States and Taiwan have.
And if China plans a blockade?
Mike: I mean, no blockade that I know of in the past 200 years has allowed one country to fully conquer another. And amphibious invasions are the hardest mission in warfare. There's very few successful cases and they are pretty much all against over matched forces. So this would be the most complex military operation ever. And for the Chinese who haven't fought a war since 1979, starting off on the double black diamond of military operations is probably not going to be easy for them.
There's also just the geographic reality that the Taiwan Strait is perilous, and some times of the year it's the windiest spot in the world. You have typhoons and 20 foot waves there. Taiwan itself is a natural fortress with 90% of its coastline either cliffs or mud flats. And then there's just the technological factors weighing against China.
I mean, we're in an era of long range precision guided munitions. It's just a lot easier today to blow stuff up than to take and conquer and hold onto territory. And so the United States and Taiwan has built in asymmetric advantages that they could exploit, yet they still continue to rely on big, exposed bases, large multi roll platforms that may not make it off the ground if China just unloads with an air and missile bombardment at the start of a war.
So it’s not even a question of holding off the PLA until the Marines arrive?
Mike: We're trying to join the chorus of people saying, "Look, this is a completely doable and trackable problem to take care of, but it requires political will that so far has been lagging in order to actually change the military structure and posture in the region."
I think step one is to backtrack from what we have been doing, which is talk very loudly while not investing in the big sticks. So things like symbolic visits and just talking about upgrading Taiwan's status in various ways that don't actually improve its ability to defend itself against China, or to enhance US military power in the region are exactly what you shouldn't do to keep things quiet.
So… winnable? Right?
Mike: I guess I'm partially optimistic and partially very pessimistic. I'm optimistic in the sense that, getting tough with China is one of the few bipartisan issues there are today. You have very high level officials in both the Pentagon and the intelligence community warning about a much shorter timeline potentially for a war over Taiwan. And you at least have the services trying to at least talk about ways that they could sink ships in the Western Pacific in addition to fight land wars.
And I think also Russia did a backhanded favor in the sense of just reminding everyone that, when a brutal dictator says a country doesn't exist and they're going to crush them, that we should take those statements literally. And so I think that has helped light a fire under some buts that needed to be lit up.
On the other hand…?
Mike: On the other hand, there's obviously still huge roadblocks on the American side. It's not just the political factors you mentioned. I mean, there's also just entrenched bureaucratic obstacles where you have, Mackenzie Eaglen has written about this, you have combatant commanders that want these large multi-role platforms to do lots of peace time missions that are ill suited for a high intensity war in Taiwan.
And on the Taiwanese side, I mean, yes, they've come up with a new strategy, but implementing that is just really hard. Because if you're a Taiwanese politician, how are you going to sell to the Taiwanese people that your military strategy is to basically hunker down, get into a defensive crouch, let the Chinese just pummel you and then fight a guerilla war against the potential amphibious invasion? That's just a much harder sell than, "Hey, let's buy some more F16s and take the fight for the enemy.”
What’s the major sticking point in defending Taiwan?
Hal: I think the fundamental question is whether we and our friends in the region are going to start treating this issue like the emergency that we say that it is. It's worse than you think because we can't do the World War II style industrial mobilization right now. We don't have the industrial base for it. We don't have the skilled labor force for it. We don't have the machine tools for it. And so one of my real concerns is that even if we get serious about the first three weeks of a conflict with China, we've given almost no thought to what happens after that and how we sustain a high intensity fight in the Western Pacific if God forbid, we have to fight it.
Isn’t Xi going to hesitate after seeing what a disaster the Russian military is in Ukraine?
Hal: There's definitely corruption in the Chinese military. It's a lingering problem, but I don't know that that convinces Xi that he can't pull it off, because I'm sure that Xi Jinping thinks that the Chinese military is better than the Russian military. These two countries don't actually love each other that much, and it's not entirely clear what lessons he's drawing from Ukraine. And so maybe Xi Jinping is really impressed with the West and Ukraine's performance and it makes him think that conquest is hard and he shouldn't invade Taiwan. Or maybe it just makes him think that Putin's mistake was not invading decisively and wrapping this thing up in four days before the Ukrainians could resist and the world could rally on their behalf. Maybe he thinks that Putin is right, that the United States would intervene in Ukraine if Russia didn't have all these great nuclear weapons, and so China will be able to deter U.S. intervention. We just don't know. And so it would be imprudent to assume that he will be deterred by what he's seen.
But isn’t the PLA better than the Russian military?
Mike: I worry he feels his job is done because when he first came to office, his disdain for the PLA was how he basically felt that it was bloated and inefficient and highly corrupt. And so he went on to punish or purge more than 13,000 PLA officers partially to get rid of political rivals, but also because he thought this is one way to professionalize the force very quickly to accomplish his very ambitious aims. Now, I think this is probably counterproductive. The political science literature is pretty clear that when a dictator comes in, it just clears house in the military, everyone just starts focusing on being and demonstrating loyalty rather than actually engaging in any kind of initiative or innovation. And the fact that Chinese military officers now have to spend 15 hours a week doing political work and studying Xi Jinping's thoughts, probably not great for their professionalism. But I could see Xi Jinping thinking, "Well, hey, I came in here. I brought the hammer down.
The force, at least on paper when they parade in front of me, looks great, and I have all of these hawkish generals telling me that it's a fundamentally new and revamped force and is ready to go." That's what I just worry about, that when you have a dictatorship that becomes an echo chamber, that the guy at the top, both for his own psychological reasons as well as just the bias information that he starts to receive after he's killed the messenger so many times can cause them to miscalculate. I know dictators don't miscalculate, as you guys said, but there's at least possibility.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China‘Danger Zone’ author warns of growing tension between China and the U.S. (NPR, August 24, 2022)
The End of China’s Rise (Foreign Affairs, Michael Buckley and Hal Brands, October 1, 2021)
Rivals within Reason? (Foreign Affairs, July 20, 2022)
China Hasn’t Reached the Peak of Its Power (Foreign Affairs, Derek Scissors and Oriana Skylar Mastro, August 22, 2022)
Brands twitter thread on Russia’s battlefield situation in Ukraine (Twitter, September 10, 2022)