Turning the Tide on China Takes

Washington is In Over Its Head on China

Thank goodness, it seems the tide may finally be turning on the flaming hot China takes of recent months, with a slew of new articles arguing that we’re letting our fears of China lead us down a dangerous path. Jessica Chen Weiss has another excellent piece in Foreign Affairs arguing that the growing concern in Washington about a war with China over Taiwan could end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. As she puts it:

“Fears that China will soon invade Taiwan are overblown. There is little evidence that Chinese leaders see a closing window for action. Such fears appear to be driven more by Washington’s assessments of its own military vulnerabilities than by Beijing’s risk-reward calculus. Historically, Chinese leaders have not started wars to divert attention from domestic challenges, and they continue to favor using measures short of conflict to achieve their objectives. If anything, problems at home have moderated Chinese foreign policy, and Chinese popular opinion has tended to reward government bluster and displays of resolve that do not lead to open conflict.”

Or as Dan Drezner describes her article just a touch more succinctly:

“Jessica Chen Weiss advises us all to calm the hell down.”

For those in and around Washington, D.C., the increasingly urgent talk about a potential war with China has become a fact of daily life. U.S. military leaders seem to be tripping over themselves to suggest that the Chinese timeline for an invasion of Taiwan might have accelerated: first it was 2027, then 2026. A vaguely-Strangelovian memo from Air Force Gen. Minihan then predicted a 2025 conflict and exhorted his troops to prepare by firing “a clip into a 7-meter target with the full understanding that unrepentant lethality matters most.”¹

“Unrepentant lethality matters the most, Mandrake.”

Crazy generals aside,² there are other reasons to be concerned that America’s China policy is moving in the wrong direction. The most notable of these is the new congressional select committee on China, which appears to be less focused on policy debates and more on denouncing anyone it suspects of sympathy for Beijing. As Fareed Zakaria pointed out, given the hearing’s McCarthyite overtones, viewers of the hearings might as well have been “transported back to the 1950s.” Jude Blanchette, a China scholar at CSIS, likewise described the hearings as “an absolute and total embarrassment,” akin to a “moral panic.”

Then there was the genuine panic created by the balloon incident a few weeks back, in which an apparently off-course Chinese spy balloon floated over the US, prompting a week of panicked overreaction that saw the US air force decimate a variety of civilian weather balloon projects with obscenely overpriced missiles.

99 Red Balloons

Each of these incidents signal just how dramatically the Washington consensus has changed in the last few years, from engagement (or at least “congagement”) to full-blown containment and military build-up. So a spate of commentary suggesting that perhaps the Washington approach to China has swung too far and too fast is overdue. It also bears pointing out that none of the folks writing these articles are what one might traditionally describe as “doves” on foreign policy – most back a serious and rigorous policy to deal with the implications of China’s rise.

You could say the same about me: as I noted over on Twitter this morning, one of the main reasons that I have spent my career advocating for policies including U.S. strategic retrenchment from the Middle East, ending the disastrous war on terror, and increasing burden-sharing among capable allies in Europe is because I’m more concerned about the threat of a rising China than I am about brush wars in the Middle East and Africa. That places me more in the camp of someone like Steve Walt, who takes a more traditional realist balancing to the world than a full-blown ‘restrainer’ in the mold of Barry Posen.³

In the last year, however, the D.C. consensus has blown right past my concerns about China into full-blown war panic. Indeed, it’s notable that you hear even fairly hawkish China specialists express concerns about some of the rhetoric and proposed policies that are entering the policy mix. Just look at the Taiwan Policy Act, which passed the Senate despite some pretty inflammatory provisions surrounding Taiwanese sovereignty that threaten to imperil the long-standing One China policy. Or the idea that Chinese companies investing in U.S. agricultural land is a serious security threat.  

So we've moved at whiplash-inducing speed from a US foreign policy that was probably too lax on China – and far too focused on the Middle East – towards one that openly embraces economic and military containment, in a period of less than five years.⁴ Media and foreign policy commentators now openly suggest that we’re headed for war with China.

Except that, as Weiss notes in her piece, fears of inevitable future war all too often have a way of turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. The security dilemma – sometimes referred to as the spiral model – emerges when one state believes that the steps another state is taking to ensure its own defense are in fact threatening. In the worst cases, such misperceptions can result in a downward spiral to great power war.

It’s all downhill from here.

Thus two things can be equally true:

1. China poses by far the biggest threat to US interests and security in coming decades.

2. A forward-leaning strategy of military containment might end up making things worse.

It should go without saying that we don’t want a major war with China. The costs would be immense, even if it didn’t go nuclear, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that the United States would win the conflict.

At the same time, there are some seriously difficult debates in China policy, one of the most challenging of which is the idea of whether to defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion. There are a variety of well-thought out realist-inflected arguments on the topic, ranging from those who emphasize military-strategic arguments (Caitlin Talmadge and Brendon Green’s assessment that the loss of Taiwan would undermine the US military’s freedom of maneuver throughout the pacific), to those who emphasize the risks of bandwagoning (Elbridge Colby’s work on a ‘counter-hegemonic coalition’ in Asia), and finally to those who argue that incentivizing and support Taiwanese deterrence and self-defense is the best approach (Mike Mazarr and Patrick Porter being among those who argue this camp).

“Hear Me Out, Guys: The United States Shouldn’t Defend Taiwan. We should enable Taiwan to defend itself.”

I tend towards Mazarr and Porter’s approach myself, but the important point is that all of these are viable strategic paths; none of them benefit from a Washington panic about China.  So that's why I'm so pleased to see the pushback of recent articles coming from different quarters. We need to find a reasonable and responsible China policy, not rush from complacence straight into war scares and moral panic.

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1. This is a particularly strange comment when one remembers that Gen. Minihan is head of Air Mobility Command, a division that manages military transport and refueling logistics. It’s a hugely important branch of the military, but emphasizing their shooting skills is a bit like ordering every FedEx delivery driver to prepare for hand-to-hand combat as they deliver packages.

2. Seriously. Read the whole memo. The officer in question promises to be “tough, fair, and loving in my approach to secure victory.” General Ripper, eat your heart out.

3. Notwithstanding the fact that most of Washington describes both realists and restrainers as supporting a policy of ‘restraint,’ there are some fairly important differences.

4. For more on the Washington embrace of Great Power Competition, with China, you can see my article on the topic here.