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The professional bureaucracies of both the US and Chinese national security states encourage mistrust, jingoistic attitudes, pessimistic assumptions, and hawkish policies. This is a growing source of war risk, and the only near-term fix is a security dilemma sensibility.
Let me explain.
Some time ago, Kenneth Booth and Nicholas Wheeler wrote of a “security dilemma sensibility” that policymakers could (and should) cultivate in order to better manage the interactive processes that can lead to crisis and war, even between two actors who have only defensive intentions.
They described a security dilemma sensibility as:
an actor’s intention and capacity to perceive the motives behind, and to show responsiveness towards, the potential complexity of the military intentions of others…the ability to understand the role that fear might play in their attitudes and behaviour, including, crucially, the role that one’s own actions may play in provoking that fear.
I first came across their book while finishing my PhD, which I did on the side while working in Obama’s Pentagon. Like (hopefully) everyone who studies international relations, I’d learned about the security dilemma as an undergrad. It made sense that non-aggressive countries could inadvertently make themselves less secure by taking measures that would be misperceived by others as threatening, leading to counter-measures also perceived as threatening.
But a security dilemma sensibility really resonated with me as a practical extension of the original concept. And so I found myself trying to bring this sensibility to bear over and again—on the “Korea desk” in the midst of two North Korean attacks on South Korea; among a small group of policy nerds trying to make the “pivot to Asia” real; as a one-time defense strategist contemplating “emerging technologies”; and as a public critic warning about the ways the Trump-Kim nuclear crisis of 2017 could (and nearly did) go sideways.
My role in these things was inarguably negligible; with the exception of the North Korean nuclear crisis, none of the policy paths taken reflect my counsel. Nevertheless, the security dilemma sensibility strongly colored how I made sense of these wide-ranging problem sets.
I was reminded of all this while reading a piece in Foreign Affairs by Tong Zhao, whose research on China-related strategic questions is among the most insightful in the business. In the essay, Zhao argues:
The dynamics among China’s political leadership, its policy elite, and the broader public have generated an internal feedback loop that is not entirely within Xi’s comprehension or control. This could result in China’s being fully mobilized for war even without Xi deciding to attack Taiwan.
Recognizing the presence of policy feedback loops is important—they describe how we can imagine security dilemmas escalating into conflict spirals. And it’s not surprising that feedback loops would be present in a rivalry that is intensifying right in front of us.
The valence of a relationship constrains available policy choices and how those choices are perceived, making rivalries self-reinforcing and stubbornly path dependent.
In China, as in the United States, the opinion-makers are virtually all hawks. Everyone is outbidding everyone else. Above all, nobody wants to be seen as “weak” or naïve about the enemy. And all the while, the national security states of both sides are doing everything that politicians allow to optimize themselves for war.
Fueling this is ethnonationalism—in Washington as in Beijing. Reactionary politicians feed implicitly racialized nationalist policies to publics whom they refuse to feed political democracy or economic security. As Yuen Yuen Ang saw in 2022:
The only people who are winning [Sino-US competition] are the ardent radicals, the extremists, and the autocrats on both sides. It’s so easy to be nationalists…You just need to scream and say extreme things and get people roused.
Neither Chinese nor US officials exercise sufficient control of the violent forces they’re manipulating for political, strategic, and personal gain.
We can’t afford to overlook the root sources of Sino-US confrontation, which include a nightmarish melange of exceptionalist nationalism on both sides, shifting patterns of capital accumulation under the previous economic order, and an unwillingness by either side to take a relational view of the other.
But being clear-eyed about the root causes of security problems doesn’t buy you out of taking seriously potential proximate causes of war, like feedback loops.
Now, I worry about whether China and the United States actually have defensive intentions. Xi Jinping’s jingoism has infected China’s governing regime, and the People’s Liberation Army is definitely taking seriously Xi’s priority to “be ready by 2027 to invade Taiwan.” And while it’s impolitic to point it out in Washington, there is good reason to think that the United States could be a revisionist actor too.
But even though it can be difficult to know whether to code states as having defensive or aggressive intentions, it is not hard to find policy elites within states who are unquestionably aggressive or unquestionably defensive.
The trouble is that even individuals harboring non-aggressive, security-seeking motivations are trapped in systems whose pressures and incentives are much bigger than them.
This is true at the nuclear level. We can reasonably say neither country has the desire to launch a first strike, yet the nature of today’s technologies and Sino-US nuclear postures have locked the two countries in a structural security dilemma. As recent research shows:
The shift in the conventional balance of force in the region and the U.S. development of lower-yield nuclear weapons has led to greater fears in China of U.S. limited nuclear use in a conflict. Chinese strategists increasingly believe that U.S. nonnuclear strategic capabilities threaten China’s nuclear forces.
This is also why feedback loops are an important phenomenon to grasp. The point of Zhao’s warning is that we ought to be trying to “understand how certain efforts to deter Beijing can inadvertently exacerbate the security challenge.” It’s a matter of urgency that US policy thinks through how to disrupt—rather than blissfully ignore—feedback loop dynamics within the Chinese system.
How? By cultivating a security dilemma sensibility.
Our policies need to do more than give us psychological comfort and optimize for a war that nobody can win. They need to self-consciously prioritize preventing war.
So for every new basing access agreement we announce, for every new tariff or economic restriction we unveil, for every new military exercise or arms sale we conduct, we must ask: How does this make us more secure? How does this feed into China’s distorted view of our intentions?
Similarly, when China makes moves we don’t like, we must ask: To what extent are they responding to what we are doing?
I know that many a policy wonk worships at the altar of Thomas Schelling and therefore tends to view life as an endless series of rational games where you as an individual are just constantly trying to get the best of everyone.
But that’s exhausting and unsustainable, and probably self-defeating. It impedes adopting a security dilemma sensibility. And ironically, even Schelling stressed the importance of reassurance and the idea that adversaries needed to believe not just your threats but that they can get on peaceably if they don’t challenge your resolve.
This is cross-posted at Security in Context’s blog, as well as Van’s newsletter.
Since marginalized communities tend to suffer disproportionately when governments make contemptible policy choices, it stands to reason that those communities might develop a heightened sensitivity about the merits of new policies. At the very least they have reason to cultivate a perspective and preferences that differ from people with resources (money, power, societal standing) to buffer them from the consequences of poor policy stewardship.
That perspective has a kernel of wise counsel.
There’s an abundance of evidence that policies ranging from de-industrialization since the 1970s to the “drug war” of the 1980s and 1990s to the pandemic response today dramatically harmed Black communities more than white or affluent ones. Same goes for the distribution of pain that comes with structural poverty and economic recessions.
But I’m thinking about foreign policy. Specifically, I have a hunch that Black Americans have a comparatively good bullshit detector about statecraft.
Why? Not because of anything innate or “biological,” but because of their historical experience in the United States and their overrepresentation in structural (and literal) violence as a consequence of US policy choices. Greater personal stakes means greater attentiveness to costs and risks, and therefore better judgment.
The caveat is that African Americans are far from monolithic, and that sometimes extends to how they view US foreign policy. The US decision to enter World War I was exceedingly controversial and regrettable, but even prominent Black intellectuals of the time saw the war as a chance to secure their place in American society by supporting it.
Black opinion about World War II—a war that offered some social mobility for African Americans—was more uniformly favorable. Even though it was a war of empire against empire, it was not only that, and the greater evil was clear enough to most.
In Vietnam, Black opinion was almost entirely critical of the war. Not only because Black Americans were being disproportionately drafted, court-martialed, and subsequently killed. And not only because, as Martin Luther King, Jr. decried, Congress used the cost of the Vietnam War as an excuse to cut anti-poverty programs that helped Black America.
But also because their quarrel was not with those seeking freedom abroad (the Vietnamese) but rather those denying their freedom at home (the Cold Warriors). As Muhammad Ali said in refusing to be drafted:
My enemy is the white people, not the Viet Cong or Chinese or Japanese. You’re my opposer when I want freedom. You’re my opposer when I want justice. You’re my opposer when I want equality.
And of course, Black Americans were mostly opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, even though, perversely, that war and the larger War on Terror construct gave Black Americans the chance at societal inclusion, so long as they became patriotic “terror warriors.” I was active duty Air Force during the early War on Terror years, and the only sustained critiques I was exposed to came from hip-hop.
So at the risk of oversimplifying, the Black community would have counseled in favor of World War II, against Vietnam, and against both Iraq and the War on Terror. Sounds like good judgment to me.
And yet the idea that the public—in whole or in part—is fit to judge foreign policy is alien to Washington.
By tradition, foreign policy is both an elite and elitist activity. The business of national security and diplomacy involves short reaction times, state secrets, bourgeoise social networks, and growing planetary complexity—all of which lends itself to elitism and technocracy. Foreign policy practitioners have long since taken a Lippmann-esque turn away from any conception of participatory democracy in foreign policy in favor an elite stewardship model that disavows the existence of a public mind or public will.
When I worked as a foreign policy practitioner, I recall having a haughty, dismissive attitude toward the public—much like my peers and superiors. I’ve since struggled with the problematic of how to do foreign policy in a way that makes it more participatory beyond just greater diversity in the diplomatic corps.
As the United States retools its economy and military to combat Russia, contain China, and prolong US global primacy, we find ourselves in another moment when US foreign policy is structuring the reality that the rest of us have to live within. One of several aspects that troubles me about all this “great-power competition” stuff is that it has proceeded entirely as a Washington-elite project. It has not answered to the public—to say nothing of the Black community—in any meaningful way.
In that context, I recorded an episode of my podcast with Christopher Shell at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was a wide-ranging discussion anchored in survey results of Black Americans’ views of the military, Ukraine policy, Taiwan, and US interventionism abroad. His findings told an interesting story that reveals gaps between Black American opinion and the overall thrust of US policy.
Black Americans have an overwhelmingly favorable view of the US military, but:
There’s much more than that in the data, and class position affects a lot of these views—the least economically secure tend to be opposed to war, which should not be surprising given what wars usually mean for those who are already hard up or oppressed.
Policy practitioners should be keenly attentive to what Black Americans think generally. It’s not just a matter of fidelity to an ideal of participatory democracy; there could be strategic merit to centering their perspective in the conduct of policies ostensibly done in their name. It might be a way of avoiding more Vietnams and Iraqs, or worse.
This is cross-posted at Van’s newsletter.
The government of Guam has appointed a Commission on Decolonization, but U.S. control means that all of the island’s options, including the status quo, have substantial downsides.
What follows is my general philosophy on China issues, by way of answering the hardest of hard defense framing questions regarding China. After my most recent piece in Foreign Affairs, I got a note from a semi-prominent friend in Washington’s foreign policy community basically praising it but also posing some tough questions about China policy. In my view they’re the wrong questions. But we’ve known each other a long time, and my response, I think, might be useful for others to consider. So I’ve anonymized bits but otherwise include the entire note below.
Hey [anonymized],
[some anonymized stuff]
I know that generally speaking we have very different projects going these days, so was pleasantly surprised by this generous note. I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear both that you too can see the discourse getting disturbingly slanted and that you find my Foreign Affairs arguments largely on target. My ego thanks you :).
I agree too with your general point—vibrant debate seems like a missing check on shitty foreign policy decisions, and the inability for substantive debate to even occur ensures we keep drawing bad lots (not sure debate solves things, but its absence creates hella problems).
It’s probably clear enough by now that I think competition is the wrong—or at least a conceptually muddled and self-harming—way to deal with China, so I suppose that doesn’t need belaboring. I certainly get that the drive to one-up, counter, check, and now contain the Big Bad responds to some valid concerns.
But I guess one of the problems I see is that I think only some of the concerns are valid while most are inflated or unfounded.
Even where valid concerns exist, I have a hard time seeing how the policy toolkit that gets deployed in the name of competition actually addresses them. Washington has a China-fetish problem, and if my personal experience is any indicator, it owes partly to the fact that China (and now Ukraine) allows deflection from having to face incongruities and contradictions in the DC worldview.
Not that China and Ukraine are issues unworthy of attention and response; only that they facilitate deflection. Perhaps too meta for an email but I increasingly see liberal internationalism as an ideology that externalizes—rather than confronts—our problems as Americans, which has much to do with why I’m so invested in conjuring up alternative policy vistas.
On your question about China’s military build-up, you’re not wrong to see it as kind of orthogonal to the Foreign Affairs piece. And I get that for the Beltway, handling the military questions is the Sinatra test (or maybe a hoop test, actually), if you will, for an alternative foreign policy paradigm—if your policy agenda has a sellable theory for how to account for and respond to PLA (People’s Liberation Army) modernization, then it’s unquestionably the better alternative to the status quo.
That’s a high bar, of course. To engage on your terrain directly, I’ll try to respond to each of your questions explicitly.
I believe this is an imprecise way to view the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait. The correlation of forces shifted unfavorably back when we were still in the Pentagon and we’ve been living with that ever since. Like, when was the last time we could claim to assert air superiority around Taiwan?
The PLA’s naval boom is a real thing, and to that extent you can say things are shifting, but its significance is marginal compared to the integrated air defenses (IADs) and deep-strike/long-range standoff problems that predate naval expansion.
I don’t see how we can establish sea control or sea denial while bracketing off both nuclear escalation and air superiority, and air superiority is something we gave up when we decided the scenario should be inside the ring range of China’s IADs (and Taiwan contingencies will always be inside Chinese IAD range).
All of that is a detailed way of saying that the most dramatic shift in the balance of power in specifically the Taiwan Strait happened some time ago.
The reason that matters is because we’ve been living with an unfavorable correlation of forces in that specific place and it’s been ok because the calculation of the balance is a separate analytical question from the meaning of the balance at any given point. It’s distinct from China’s revisionism or willingness to use force, is only an input into (not a determinant of) questions of deterrence, and how stabilizing or destabilizing it is depends entirely on how we respond to it.
Responding with a qualitative arms race achieves nothing.
I imagine you know all this, and I suppose you could say I’m still skirting the question, “So what is to be done about the shifted/shifting balance of power?” My answer to that is that we must show a degree of both creativity and restraint in military force structure and regional force posture that we’ve been unwilling to even consider.
How does that cash out? Many ways, the most obvious being to shelve the trillion-dollar nuclear modernization project, gaming out a “forward balancing” strategy, or embracing buckpassing to regional allies, including Taiwan, while drawing up more limited-aims contingency scenarios that don’t require striking the Chinese mainland. We’re already proliferating conventional weapons to allies—no reason to pay the steep price of US primacy while doing that.
And to be clear, what I’m describing is just the military level—to make even these alternatives work requires a larger project of statecraft aimed at changing the relational context of Sino-US rivalry, which was the thrust of my post-primacy Foreign Affairs take.
I don’t actually believe that you can take the narrow analytical question of the Taiwan Strait balance apart from the larger ecology of great-power relations and regional order—these things affect each other in major ways.
More broadly, any answer to “What is to be done?” in response to your question must be based on a theory of why the PLA is modernizing. Most/all prescriptions in DC lack a theory of PLA modernization, which makes them inherently unpersuasive and dangerous.
Like, intellectually people know the Wikipedia realities about China’s bureaucratic production of doctrine and forces, but there’s nothing in that or the US force structure response to PLA modernization that resolves the fundamental problems that follow from the already-shifted balance of power in the Taiwan Strait.
And look, the PLA’s gonna do what PLA’s gonna do—I’m not under any illusion that if we disembowel ourselves militarily that they will follow suit.
But we have a large margin of advantage outside of Taiwan, and it seems rather obvious that they’re indexing their modernization goals against our ever-modernizing military capabilities from our position of ongoing global advantage.
I mean, does anyone think PLA modernization has nothing to do with its primary competitor’s absurdist levels of military capabilities and defense spending? Acknowledging that some of what they do responds to what we do is crucial (and part of what I’m trying to get at in Pacific Power Paradox).
It means that we have to spend more effort weighing the tradeoffs between war optimization and war avoidance. The prevailing discourse is almost entirely the former without recognizing how it undermines the latter.
Finally, while this is a very reasonable question, it’s worth reiterating that we retain a favorable balance of power almost everywhere in the world except the Taiwan Strait (we can quibble about the East and South China Seas but they’re lesser included cases).
So we enjoy a kind of unchallengeable military dominance relative to other powers basically everywhere except this one place—and that’s the one place we obsess about because it logically stands between us and the claim to unfettered global military dominance. We have to learn to live with not dominating, which is asking a lot given the culture we come from. I firmly believe that dominance is, in the final analysis, never sustainable and always counterproductive.
The left disagrees about this. I’m of the view that we should not be passive if China tries to take over Taiwan so long as Taiwan’s people resist Chinese encroachment. Never fully relent to an oppressor. But two things.
One, we have to hold an anti-oppression standard consistently, not just in Taiwan, which means we have some soul-searching to do when it comes to everything from Guam’s self-determination to Palestine to siding with neofascists abroad to how Black communities get policed and starved of capital in America. This shit is connected.
More than that, invoking any kind of principle in defense of Taiwan that’s not extended beyond Taiwan gives the lie to what we’re doing. Living by principles means not being hypocritical in how you operationalize them.
Two, circling back to Taiwan specifically, how to resist, where to push back, and how hard to push back if China tried to do the Hong Kong re-colonization move to Taiwan depends on context.
Right now, Wang Huning is coming up with an alternative theory for a post-“One Country, Two Systems” world, because China now recognizes that the Hong Kong model has been discredited. I don’t believe we can really think through what to do with defense policy on China apart from knowing how China’s new Taiwan policy will shake out.
But as a general commitment, unless we’re absolute monsters, we must take the path of least-harm for Taiwan, so if what we do leads to nuclear war, well, that would violate the least-harm principle since that would be pretty bad for Taiwan. And resistance need not always (or necessarily ever) take the form of conventional military operations or a five-phase military campaign.
Basically yes, but with caveats. What they do depends on what we do—international relations is relational, even if we insist on analyzing it as if it were not.
My view is that under a previous status quo (say, circa 2017), China was unlikely to take any military aggression against Taiwan so long as Taiwan didn’t formally declare independence. Under current rivalry conditions, which are increasingly bleak, it seems clear enough to me that China is actively deterred from invading Taiwan militarily, though I think our policies are actively incentivizing China toward more of a coercive signaling posture.
A blockade would be at the more extreme end of possible Chinese actions, but as you know from previous convos about US distant blockade options, that’s a hard posture for any great power to sustain and the juice needs to be worth the squeeze.
I think the view of people like M. Taylor Fravel need to be taken seriously here—China is deterred from overt aggression under the status quo, but if we do things that lead them to conclude that war is inevitable, there’s nothing we can do to dissuade or deter them.
That means the situation across the Strait is basically a security dilemma. And if that’s true, well, what’s the way out of a security dilemma? Lots of folks smarter than us have weighed in here.
The answer then becomes restraint. Carrots over sticks. Reassurances. A whole package of policies and signals meant to convey not a willingness to nuke the world but rather our conditionally benign intentions. Including showing that we prioritize war prevention over war preparation. But the thing is, do we have benign intentions?
Hard to say, depends on who’s steering policy…
I don’t think that’s a realistic scenario. And I don’t think we would ever have to stop agitating in support of Taiwan’s self-determination, even if China were to successfully occupy the place.
But if we make those giant assumptions anyway, this is where I think a lot of the geopoliticians are showing their asses. “If Taiwan falls, then Japan falls” is the most unreasonable, unfalsifiable assertion you could ever make prior to Taiwan “falling,” and with the highest stakes. It has traction because its simplicity flatters those looking for solutions to problems that don’t require looking at what we do, or how what we do affects what they do.
It’s the same bullshit formulation as domino theory, or as the claim of “swing states” and “pivot points” on the map. I tend to see those as seductive grifter claims that ignore the most important aspects of international relations. But YMMV.
Asia is full of states that will organically resist (and some are currently resisting!) anything resembling Chinese hegemonic ambitions. An Asia in which China “has” Taiwan (which, again, is a premise I protest) will not be more fractious than the Asia we’re making now in real-time.
I have an academic article (open access) that just came out trying to address this. It’s not anchored in defense policy, but you might find it of interest, or at least it will give you a better a sense of where I’m coming from.
I don’t know what you think about any of this—I know I’ve gone on for a long time—but these are not simple questions. And they were worthy of a serious though-through response. [some anonymized stuff]
Best,
Van
This is cross-posted at Van’s newsletter.
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