Keeping it real with China
Accepting the competition is a lot harder than simply demonizing
Tim Walz has spent a LOT of time in China, even working there as a teacher for a stint. All that exposure gives him a lot of common sense on China, even as it marks him for all manner of oppositional slander and insinuations that imply that his decades of interacting with China is to somehow mark him as a traitor to US interests.
You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, buddy! Or should I say commie!
I have spent a decent amount of time in China (maybe half a year in total), and I was a visiting strategist for a Chinese international security think tank for three years.
In today’s climate, these two facts would make it almost impossible for me to get my security clearance back — if only for the perception that my willingness to engage the Chinese now marks me as some sort of fool or worse because our bilateral relationship has gone sour under Xi.
America, always the impatient toddler, is never able to transition from one activity (engagement) to another (de-risking) without throwing some sort of tantrum. We can’t just course correct; we must denounce all that came before as a “lie” and “betrayal” perpetrated by “them.”
We are who we are.
The strategic immaturity of such a knee-jerk reaction, along with the current wave of war-boosterism among academics and China hawks, is — of course — dangerous in its own right. These people are making all sort of assumptions about the inevitability and utility of a kinetic war with China over Taiwan.
It’s also very self-serving, as I learned during my early days as a would-be Kremlinologist at Harvard’s Russian Research Center, where I worked as research assistant to the director Adam Ulam, who, over time, became a great friend and mentor.
What I learned is this: when you’re the guy selling moderation, nobody wants you for an interview or a story. Why? If moderation is actually in the air, then the media goes to those who can take advantage of that reality — like business people. So, no real good space for hardliners in good times, which is why, somewhat cynically, hardliners crave bad times and will instinctively work to seed those impressions as much as possible in the media ecosystem. Their personal rationale is easy enough to decipher: the scary it becomes, the more important I become.
My point being that moderation does not sell while more extreme analysis does. Thus, if you want to be big-time, you go more extreme and Cassandra-like: every year it’s becoming more dangerous, every forward projection is scarier … this is the moment of maximum danger!
Like I say in America’s New Map:
America must manage more than one global security crisis at a time without resorting to Cold War defense paradigms. Foreign policy “realists” deem such thinking naïve, sticking with their balance-of-power models. They will always find firm validation in any Russian move against former vassal states, just as any China-Taiwan scenario is reflexively cast as a world-system breaker. Like a broken face clock, these pessimists are correct twice each day.
When trying to balance climate change with the fate of the global middle class, such “realism” can feel like reshuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. While it is tempting to fight one doomsday argument with another, understanding globalization’s trajectory yields more accurate strategies.
When all you have is a hammer, all you see are nails. The United States needs a bigger tool kit for globalization’s next phase. As far as much of the world is concerned, America’s narrow national offering—far too reliant on military aid—is rapidly losing its appeal. See our hemispheric “War on Drugs” for the worst examples.
Defense is all about saying no (We can’t let you do that), while security is more about saying yes (We can make that happen). Right now, America is all about telling the world no, while China is all about saying yes to that ascendant global middle class. In a bit of strategic misdirection, Beijing has Washington so concerned about Taiwan’s military defense that we fail to appreciate just how successfully China sells its model of middle-class security around the world—including our so-called backyard of Latin America. The prime example: national flagship telecom company Huawei’s marketing of its Safe City solutions, a comprehensive and pervasive urban surveillance system already installed in dozens of countries but particularly those pairing non-liberal governments with expanding middle-class populations. China’s public sales pitch is crime prevention, when in truth Beijing is selling its expertise in suppressing middle-class aspirations for political freedom.
Clearly, my thinking marks me as “soft on China,” right?
Let me be clear yet again: Taiwan is NOT the lynchpin of world order. China taking it by force would be very destabilizing in a security sense but that destabilization would pass (thanks to subsequent military balancing by all those nations and neighbors deeply unsettled by the act), with the bigger impact being the massive “de-risking” that would haunt the regime throughout the global economy (okay, mostly just in the West, but that’s impactful enough to ruin China’s trajectory).
Both paths would be extremely expensive for all involved and would NOT somehow restore American “supremacy” or “strength.” In other words, there is no “win” there, even if a failed Chinese invasion leads to regime change in Beijing, because the competition would still be there and that competition, as I lay it out across the Global South and the majority middle class … that’s what really matters this century. That’s what the 22nd century history books about today are going to focus on.
Again … obviously, I am ready to “give Taiwan away!”
In any Taiwan fight, the immediate risks of escalation to strategic warfare between the US and China would be the primary concern, but, as we’ve seen with Ukraine, the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction seems as compelling as ever (despite all the brave talk on Russian TV), so we’d probably be looking at a very similar package in terms of who’s directly fighting and dying (Chinese and Taiwanese in large numbers).
How long could such a conflict go on? Sad to say, we can again look to Ukraine or even Israel in Gaza — as in, the only way Beijing would get Taiwan is to demolish Taiwan. Some “win” that would be.
More to the point: once engaged, the Xi regime would not be able to back down. It would be initially buoyed by a surge of popular patriotism, but that would wane as the larger implications (especially the darkest ones about China’s internal future) became apparent.
Why? Because at that point, all that Xi would have accomplished would be to re-slot China into the wrong global camp — effectively reversing everything that led to China’s stunning rise starting with Deng and extending through other generational leaderships. It would be a back-to-the-future outcome in the worst, most undeniable way.
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