Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Totally Unhinged Establishment Thinking on Taiwan

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Asia-Pacific, China, East Asia, foreign policy establishment, Indo-Pacific, investment, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, semiconductors, Seth Cropsey, Taiwan, tech, The Wall Street Journal, Trade

Because semiconductors are already central to America’s security and prosperity and will only become more important with each passing day, wouldn’t it be great if the United States wasn’t so dependent on Taiwan for supplies – especially of cutting-edge chips – given that the island is located just 100 miles from China?

According to Seth Cropsey, one of America’s most respected military experts and a former national security official, the answer is “No” – because if the United States became much more self-sufficient in semiconductor manufacturing, it wouldn’t have to care so much about…Taiwan.

His January 26 Wall Street Journal article is a wonderful example of a syndrome I’ve long written about (most recently here in the Taiwan context) – the tendency of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and too many U.S. leaders who have listened to its members’ advice, to use foreign policy measures to solve problems much better dealt with through domestic policy moves whenever possible.

The advantages of using domestic policy should be screamingly obvious. As I’ve also previously pointed out (most recently at length here), American policymakers will almost always have much more control over developments within our borders than without. And when it comes to Taiwan-like situations, rebuilding the nation’s capacity to manufacture semiconductors per se carries absolutely no risk of war with a nuclear-armed China.

What’s particularly bizarre about this Cropsey op-ed is that he completely overlooks two eminently reasonable arguments for concentrating tightly on Taiwan’s security, at least for the time being. The first is one I strongly agree with – regaining the semiconductor prowess the United States needs will take many years. So until then, it’s imperative – and in fact in my opinion vital – that America take whatever steps are needed to prevent China from taking over Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province that it’s vowed to reabsorb by force if necessary. After all, it should be easy to see how Beijing either could win access to Taiwan’s crucial, world-leading production technology, or deny the United States (and the rest of the world) access to the huge volumes of chips that Taiwan’s factories turn out.

The second argument absent from his column – and which I don’t agree with – is that irrespective of the semiconductors, if China gained control over Taiwan, it would take a huge step toward becoming the kingpin of East Asia, perhaps the world’s most economically dynamic regions, and limit or cut off U.S. access to crucial markets and sea lanes.

I disagree for two reasons. First, leaving the semiconductors out of the picture, the chronic and huge trade deficits run up by the United States with the region show that doing business with East Asia has been a longtime major net loser for America’s domestic economy. Second, and also putting semiconductors aside, East Asia has relied for so long on amassing trade surpluses, especially with the United States, to achieve adequate growth that its countries (including China) simply can’t afford such decoupling.

As I just made clear, opponents of my position can cite valid concerns. But Cropsey never mentions them. Instead, he’s simply worried that the Biden administration’s focus on rebuilding America’s own semiconductor manufacturing mean that Washington “looks to be playing for time—not time to rearm and prepare for a fight, but to reduce Taiwan’s importance to the U.S.” and that this would harm U.S. interests because “An America that no longer needs Taiwanese semiconductors [would be able to]abandon its old friend.”

I admire Taiwan’s economic, technological, and political achievements as much as anyone. But even overlooking the enormous extent to which Taiwan’s massive investments in China’s technology industries (just like America’s) have shortsightedly helped create and magnify the very threat the island faces, the idea that honoring a friendship only for its own sake is remotely as important as minimizing the odds of a nuclear war is just loony. And nothing exempifies the nature of too much American foreign policy discussion for decades as well as a major newspaper’s belief that such arguments deserve to be taken seriously.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: China’s Not Getting Biden’s (Vague) Message

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Asia-Pacific, Biden, Biden administration, China, Indo-Pacific, Japan, national interests, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, Taiwan, Taiwan Strait, Vladimir Putin, Xi JInPing

Everyone old enough to read this post is way more than old enough to remember all the optimism that emanated from the last summit between President Biden and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping – because it took place just under two months ago.

In particular, as the White House stated, Mr. Biden

“reiterated that [the bilateral] competition should not veer into conflict and underscored that the United States and China must manage the competition responsibly and maintain open lines of communication. The two leaders discussed the importance of developing principles that would advance these goals and tasked their teams to discuss them further. “

In other words, Xi said that he bought in to this idea of a responsibly managed Great Power competition. And this conclusion quickly became the conventiona wisdom about the summit. As The New York Times argued, despite

“the deeply divergent views behind their disagreements, including over the future of Taiwan, military rivalry, technology restrictions and China’s mass detentions of its citizens….with the stakes so high, both Mr. Biden’s and Mr. Xi’s language represented a choice not to gamble on unrestricted conflict but to bet that personal diplomacy and more than a decade of contacts could stave off worsening disputes.”

And the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Congressionally-sponsored “independent” think tank, closely paraphased the President’s main claim: “Despite the differences between both countries, there appears to be a growing openness to the use of diplomacy to manage the relationship.”

Yet it’s already clear – from China – that these contentions aren’t aging so welll. Just consider what’s happened in the last month alone:

>In mid-December, China began stepping up naval and air drills near a chain of southern Japanese islands, including sending a carrier battle group that simulated an attack on this Japanese territory.

>Several days later, the Chinese teamed up with Russia’s Pacific fleet for a week of joint exercises that Moscow said [quoting Reuters here] “included practising how to capture an enemy submarine with depth charges and firing artillery at a warship.”

>On December 21, a Chinese fighter jet flew within 20 feet of a U.S. Air Force reconnaisance plane flying over the South China Sea.

>On Christmas Day, 47 Chinese military aircraft flew across the median line over the Taiwan Strait and into air space claimed by the island. Reportedly, the incursion was the largest in months.

>And on December 30, Xi and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, held a videoconference in which Xi promised “in the face of a difficult and far from straightforward international situation,” Beijing was ready “to increase strategic cooperation with Russia, provide each other with development opportunities, be global partners for the benefit of the peoples of our countries and in the interests of stability around the world.”

China predictably blamed U.S. provocations and Japan’s recently announced and dramatic military buildup for this dangerous sequence of events, but the more important point by far is this: The Biden administration continues its long-time habit (see, e.g., here) of speaking in terms of processes and procedures that can only reenforce the impression of America defining its interests in the Asia-Pacific region in dangerously vague ways, and China obviously keeps thinking of its objectives in much more specific, concrete ways. In other words, it’s time for much straighter talk from the United States.   

Following Up: Podcast Now On-Line of National Radio Interview on Pelosi Taiwan Visit and U.S. Stagflation Prospects

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Asia-Pacific, China, decoupling, Following Up, geopolitics, Indo-Pacific, inflation, manufacturing, Market Wrap with Moe Ansari, Nancy Pelosi, national security, Pelosi, recession, sanctions, semiconductors, stagflation, Taiwan, tech, Trade, trade deficit

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast is now on-line of my interview last night on the nationally syndicated “Market Wrap with Moe Ansari.” Click here for a timely conversation on two headline issues:  how U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial visit to Taiwan could hit U.S.-China economic relations and America’s access to Taiwan’s world-class semiconductor manufacturing prowess; and why what’s in store for the U.S. economy could be even worse than the recession that’s now widely forecast.

And keep on checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Following Up: Podcast Now On-Line of National Radio Interview on the Biden-Xi Jinping Phone Call

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Asia-Pacific, Biden, CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor, China, Following Up, Gordon Chang, Indo-Pacific, innovation, national security, semiconductors, Taiwan, tech, Xi JInPing

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast is now on-line of my interview last night on the nationally syndicated “CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor.”

Click here for a timely discussion, with co-host Gordon G. Chang, of what President Biden should have said today in his telephone conversation with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, and whether or not the United States can avoid going to war with the People’s Republic to keep Taiwan’s world-leading semiconductor manufacturing prowess out of Beijing’s hands.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Still ISO a Coherent Biden China Strategy

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Antony J. Blinken, Asia-Pacific, Biden, Biden administration, China, climate change, Cold War, decoupling, Indo-Pacific, Jimmy Carter, national interests, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, rules-based global order, Soviet Union, strategic ambiguity, Taiwan

In June, 1978, then President Jimmy Carter laid out in a speech the tenets that were going to guide his strategy toward the Soviet Union at a time when East-West tensions were mounting. His clear aim during this key juncture of the Cold War was telling Moscow what kinds of actions it could take to make sure that superpower rivalry was “stable” and even “constructive,” and what kinds would be sure to place it on a “dangerous and politically disastrous” path.

Unfortunately, the speech was widely considered to be such a confusing word salad that rumors quickly spread claiming that what Carter read were drafts from the hawkish and dovish groups of his advisors that he simply stapled together. This rumor turned out to be untrue (at least according to this study of Carter’s foreign policy), but the fuzziness of Carter’s bottom line surely helped ensure that U.S.-Soviet relations continued worsening for most of the remainder of his one-term presidency, largely because the Soviet Union became more aggressive – especially when it invaded Afghanistan.

I bring up this historical episode because Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken just gave a speech laying out the tenets of the Biden administration’s strategy toward China. It, too, seeks to ensure that today’s superpower relationship becomes more stable rather than move ever closer to conflict, but it looks just as incoherent as Carter’s address – and just as likely to produce the outcome it’s trying to prevent.

But I’ll start with a problem that was only barely detectable in Carter’s speech but that’s bound to undermine Mr. Biden’s efforts to deal with China successfully: a failure to identify American interests precisely and concretely. To be sure, the Carter speech wasted a great deal of verbiage on Soviet activity that never held any potential to endanger U.S. security or prosperity – especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Eventually, however, the President specified that “We and our allies must and will be able to meet any forseeable challenge to our security from either strategic nuclear forces or from conventional forces.”

These kinds of specific objectives were at best secondary themes of Blinken’s. Instead, his emphasis from the get-go was on defending and reforming “the rules-based international order – the system of laws, agreements, principles, and institutions that the world came together to build after two world wars to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.”

Not only can this definition of U.S. interests way too easily turn into a formula for wasting America’s considerable but ultimately finite resources on an infinite number of international troubles having nothing to do with the nation’s safety or well-being. But good luck motivating the American population and its military to fight or even sacrifice for an objective this gauzy.

At the same time, the kind of ambivalence so broadly conveyed by Carter toward the Soviet Union permeates the picture drawn by Blinken of China. For example, the Secretary argued that China

>”is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.  Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress over the past 75 years”:

>rather than using its power to reinforce and revitalize the laws, the agreements, the principles, the institutions that enabled its success so that other countries can benefit from them, too…is undermining them.  Under President Xi, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad”:

> “has announced its ambition to create a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and to become the world’s leading power”;

> is “advancing unlawful maritime claims in the South China Sea, undermining peace and security, freedom of navigation, and commerce….”

> “wants to put itself at the center of global innovation and manufacturing, increase other countries’ technological dependence, and then use that dependence to impose its foreign policy preferences.  And Beijing is going to great lengths to win this contest – for example, taking advantage of the openness of our economies to spy, to hack, to steal technology and know-how to advance its military innovation and entrench its surveillance state”;  and

> is “trying to cut off Taiwan’s relations with countries around the world and blocking it from participating in international organizations.  And Beijing has engaged in increasingly provocative rhetoric and activity, like flying PLA aircraft near Taiwan on an almost daily basis.”

In all, according to Blinken, “The scale and the scope of the challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China will test American diplomacy like nothing we’ve seen before.”

So given these malign aims and actions, how could Blinken also insist that

> “We don’t seek to block China from its role as a major power, nor to stop China…from growing their economy….”;

> “We know that many countries – including the United States – have vital economic or people-to-people ties with China that they want to preserve.  This is not about forcing countries to choose.  It’s about giving them a choice….”;

> ”The United States does not want to sever China’s economy from ours or from the global economy – though Beijing, despite its rhetoric, is pursuing asymmetric decoupling, seeking to make China less dependent on the world and the world more dependent on China.”; and that

> “as the world’s economy recovers from the devastation of the pandemic, global macroeconomic coordination between the United States and China is key – through the G20, the IMF, other venues, and of course, bilaterally.”

That last point, and a companion Biden administration argument about climate change, seem compelling – at least superficially. But think about it for a moment: Why would anyone holding the view of China’s hostile actions and intentions laid out by Blinken expect any meaningful cooperation from Beijing on anything?

Even on climate – that supposedly quintessential threat that respects no bordes – it logically follows that the kind of Chinese leadership depicted by Blinken will be working overtime to ensure that China minimizes any sacrifices it makes to prevent dangerous warming, and maximize those required of everyone else. Consequently, the most effective way to spur China to do its share and therefore boost the odds that the climate problem actually gets solved is to deny Beijing the economic power to stay off the hook.

There’s a big (and in my view, legitimate) debate currently underway over whether the United States should continue its longstanding policy of “strategic ambiguity” regarding defending Taiwan from China, or explicitly pledge to do so, as President Biden may or may not have done a week ago (and not for the first time). But there shouldn’t be any debate over whether America’s underlying strategy toward the People’s Republic should be as completely ambiguous – not to mention as nebulous – as the approach just articulated by Blinken.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Could U.S. Protectorates in Asia Finally Become Real Allies?

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Afghanistan, alliances, allies, Asia, Asia-Pacific, AUKUS, Australia, Biden, China, credibility, Donald Trump, extended deterrence, globalism, Indo-Pacific, Japan, nuclear umbrella, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, semiconductors, South Korea, submarines, Taiwan, transactionalism, United Kingdom, vital interests

Lots of stuff going on lately in security affairs in the Asia-Pacific region (which foreign policy congoscenti have been calling the Indo-Pacific region, reflecting India’s new prominence). And I’m not just talking about the new agreement (which goes by the awkward acronym “AUKUS”) by which Australia will acquire nuclear-powered submarines provided by the United States and the United Kingdom (acing out the furious French in the process), and gain access to lots of advanced militarily-relevant American technology, like artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

I’m also talking about long overdue signs that key U.S. allies in the region are starting to take the threat they face from growing Chinese aggressiveness as seriously as the United States has been taking it. The interesting policy questions are (1) why they seem finally to be waking up and (2) what if anything the United States can or should do to convince Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in particular to assume more of the burden of defending themselves, thereby enabling America to take a less risky, less costly role in the region.

For the time being, unfortunately, the United States is going to have to stay deeply involved in the defense of these countries, and to keep accepting a degree of nuclear risk that I’ve long described as unacceptable, and still consider unnerving. I’ve changed my mind, however, because the globalist and free trade-happy U.S. foreign policy establishment and the tech companies that write so many of its members’ paychecks boneheadedly let South Korea and especially Taiwan seize global leadership in the manufacture of the world’s most advanced and powerful semiconductors.

These devices are simply too valuable to the American economy as a whole and to its continuing military superiority to take the chance that the relevant Taiwanese and South Korean facilities and knowhow fall into Chinese hands. As for Japan, it continues to produce many of the materials and equipment on which cutting-edge semiconductor production relies, so it’s got to be kept safe from the likeliest threat it faces from China – which is some form of blackmail. (See this recent Biden administration report, and especially pp. 45 ff.)

As a result, until the United States gets its semiconductor act back together, the American nuclear umbrella needs to remain over Japan and South Korea – which means that America could well be sucked into a nuclear war with China and especially North Korea if hostilities break out. And such “extended deterrence” may need to be extended to Taiwan (which Washington is not yet as tightly committed to defend).

That’s why it’s not good that not only the Australians will be getting nuclear-powered (but not – so far – nuclear-armed) submarines. Because of their superior capabilities, these which will add quantitatively and qualitatively to the forces China would need to think about when contemplating, say, moves to increase its sway over the regional sealanes through which so much of the world’s trade flows.

It’s also good that South Korea has decided to build (so far non-nuclear) ballistic missiles that can be launched from its own submarines (in response to North Korea’s progress toward the same capabilities). Deserving of applause as well are Japanese and Taiwanese plans to boost defense spending – and acquire some impressive weapons along the way. Japanese officials are even talking seriously about what steps Tokyo can and should take to help defense Taiwan if the stuff hits the fan with China – although nothing like a clear decision had been made.

Defense spending levels in all three countries are still measly, especially considering what dangerous neighborhoods they live in. And it’s not as if time is necessarily on their side. But something new seems astir, and I’m not convinced that China’s worsened behavior is entirely responsible. Some credit undoubtedly goes to the Trump administration. Since his initial White House campaign, the campaign, the former President insistently asked why Americans should risk their own security for that of allied freeloaders, and foot so much of the bill. And throughout his presidency, he kept so much pressure on that the Asia allies clearly worried that the Uncle Sucker days were over, and that Trump’s complaints reflected much and possibly most American public opinion. (See, e.g., here.)

President Biden deserves some credit here, too – but I would argue in part in spite of himself. Mr. Biden of course is a card-carrying globalist who for the entirety of his long career in public life has agreed wholeheartedly with the need to maintain strong U.S. alliance relationships. Hence it was no surprise that during the 2020 campaign and immediately after his inauguration, he took great pains to assure U.S. allies that the United States would “be back” after years of Trump-ian neglect. And indeed, earlier this year, Mr. Biden showed every sign of coddling continued Asian defense free-riding.

But ironically, the biggest Biden spur to more Asian defense burden-sharing might be his botched withrawal from Afghanistan. In other words, whereas the Asians (and other allies) were worried mainly that Trump would cut them loose because he was unwilling to protect them if they didn’t change their deadbeat ways, it’s entirely possible that they fear Mr. Biden won’t be able to ride to their rescue – at least not in any effective way.

I know that there’s little evidence of such mistrust in official Asian rhetoric so far. And of course, one of the President’s main stated reasons for leaving Afghanistan in the first place was to free up more American energies and resources to focus on China. But some unofficial Asian voices seem less sure, and it would be surprising to see any governments pushing the panic button in almost any circumstances. And could it be a total coincidence that the aforementioned spate of Asian defense decisions came in the wake of the Afghanistan pullout?

I seriously doubt it.  And as a result, if Mr. Biden wants to turn America’s Asian protectorates into genuine allies, he should continue his own strategy of stepping up exports of advanced weapons to them (and to many of their neighbors, depending on each one’s solidarity), signaling his willingness to go even further (as with this excellent decision) and employ some of the Trump-ian “transactionalism” that’s had so many globalists clutching their pearls for so long. 

But instead of threatening American withdrawals if they don’t pony up more defense-wise, the President should promise them more hardware if they do.  Casually floating the idea of OKing the acqusition of nuclear weapons by various allies wouldn’t hurt, either.

And he should stop pretending that none of this activity is directed against China. Not only does such rhetoric signal credibility-shaking skittishness. It contradicts yet another example of transactionalism that should become part of the Biden strategy: Making clear to China that staying on its current belligerent course will be a great way to guarantee that it’s ringed with ever more neighbors that are armed to the teeth.        

Glad I Didn’t Say That! Biden’s Losing North Korea Bet

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Antony J. Blinken, Asia-Pacific, Biden, CCP Virus, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Indo-Pacific, Kim Jong Un, North Korea, nuclear weapons, sanctions, Wuhan virus

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken “suggested China was also concerned about North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. ‘China has a real interest in helping to deal with this,’ [he] said. ‘So we look to Beijing to play a role in advancing what is in, I think, everyone’s interest.’”

– The New York Times, March 18, 2021

 

“North Korean trade with China is springing back to life, easing pressure on Kim Jong Un whose economy has been battered by sanctions and border closures owing to the coronavirus pandemic.”

– Financial Times, May 26, 2021

 

(Sources: “North Korean Threat Forces Biden Into Balancing Act With China,” by Lara Jakes and Choe Sang-Hun, The New York Times, March 18, 2021, North Korean Threat Forces Biden Into Balancing Act With China – The New York Times (nytimes.com) and “Chinese trade provides boost to North Korea’s battered economy,” by Edward White, Financial Times, May 26, 2021, Chinese trade provides boost to North Korea’s battered economy | Financial Times (ft.com))

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Unanswerable Question Driving Biden’s China Policy

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Antony J. Blinken, Asia-Pacific, China, foreign policy, globalism, Indo-Pacific, liberal global order, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, rules-based global order, strategy, Taiwan, Xi JInPing

Two of the first maxims of strategy in world affairs (and probably in some other realms, too) are that (a) intentions and capabilities are fundamentally different and that (b) the former are much harder to gauge than the latter. These rules of the road in turn lead promptly to a key lesson: The greater the extent to which plans are based on intentions, the likelier they are to produce failure.  

The difference between measuring intentions and capabilities and the resulting policy implications matters crucially these days. For the evidence keeps mounting that the Biden administration is relying more on gauging China’s intentions in formulating its approach to the People’s Republic (PRC) and less on the much sounder foundations of assessing Beijing’s wherewithal and, most important, how this capacity’s dangers to specific U.S. interests are evolving – including over Taiwan, the newest and scariest bilateral flashpoint.  . 

The reason for focusing on capabilities is no great mystery. Figuring out how strong or weak a country’s military and economy are entails dealing with matters that are readily measurable to begin with. Although dictatorships like China’s in particular often go to great lengths to present misleading economic data, and misinformation about the state of their armed forces, the PRC’s competitiveness can be judged pretty dependably by tracking its interactions with other economies – e.g., its export performance, its attractiveness as a magnet for foreign investment. And U.S. intelligence is good enough to determine roughly how many soldiers and weapons, and the quality of the latter, that China could bring to bear in various contingencies.

Even more obvious – and important – is the case for deciding on U.S. interests. For whatever a potential adversary’s overall capabilities, why should Americans care about those that can’t plausibly affect whatever goals and missions that the United States decides it values?

Identifying what China’s leaders want is a qualitatively different and more formidable challenge. Good intelligence can provide some valuable information, as can face-to-face dealings with Beijing’s representatives. But ultimately, measuring intentions is an exercise in mind-reading, and it’s rendered all the tougher because of the secretiveness of China’s political system and the cultural gaps dividing East Asian countries like China’s and their western counterparts like the United States.

Which is exactly why the Biden administration’s strategy toward the PRC is so troubling. A heavy emphasis on intentions is clear from at least two of its features.

The first is its obsession with playing word games to define how it wants the relationship with China to develop, which in turn faithfully reflects the globalist position that achieving various types of relationships with allies, adversaries, and countries in between should be a high foreign policy priority. As I’ve written previously, that’s a great way to substitute form for substance, and to rationalize failure to achieve or preserve particular valued objectives in the here and now for the sake of payoffs stemming from a sense of mutual obligation that could be entirely unilateral and imaginary, over a time frame that tends to keep lengthening. Think of it this way – it’s easy to avoid rocking the boat if you don’t care who owns or controls the vessel.

The Biden administration, however, has taken relationship fetishizing to a whole new level. How else could one reasonably characterize all the time and effort it’s devoted to terming U.S. dealings with Beijing as a “competition,” or an “extreme competition,” or “a steep competition,” or a “stiff competition” (see here for the last two) or a relationship that will be, in Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s words, “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, adversarial when it must be.”

Why do the Biden-ites think anyone cares or should care? In particular, why do they think China cares or should care? Do they have any evidence of much thinking in Beijing along these lines? Or that any Chinese definition of a desirable relationship relationship would be remotely acceptable to the United States?

If anything, the President’s declaration that Chinese dictator Xi Jinping “is deadly earnest on [China] becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others, autocrats, think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century” can only mean he thinks that win-win ties are the last things on Beijing’s mind. Unless Mr. Biden believes that Xi is just interested in purely verbal bragging rights?

The second feature of Biden foreign policy that reveals a potentially dangerous emphasis on intentions is the refusal of the President and his top aides to define U.S. interests with any specificity – or even to speak concretely about the very idea of purely U.S. interests.

Their rhetoric is peppered with phrases like Mr. Biden’s claim that during his first phone call with Xi, “I made absolutely clear that I will defend American interests across the board.” But you’ll search in vain for meaningful elaborations beyond “I also told President Xi that we’ll maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific, just as we do with NATO in Europe — not to start a conflict, but to prevent one” – which of course refers to American commitments that have been in place for decades, not to anything new, much less that reflects concerns heightened for any reason.

What you will find – ad nauseam – are statements like Blinken’s declaration that the United States is “committed to leading with diplomacy to advance the interests of the United States and to strengthen the rules-based international order. “That system is not an abstraction. It helps countries resolve differences peacefully, coordinate multilateral efforts effectively, and participate in global commerce with the assurance that everyone is following the same rules. The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winners take all, and that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us.”

Blinken of course might be entirely right on the merits. But it was more than a little interesting that the Chinese response to his remarks – which took place at that confrontational bilateral March meeting in Anchorage, Alaska – emphasized that the rules-based order is nothing more than a system selfishly “advocated by a small number of countries”; that “The United States itself does not represent international public opinion, and neither does the Western world;” and no doubt most important, “the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.”

In other words, as the Chinese see it, whatever Washington’s view of “right,” what matters is that it lacks the might to create or maintain it over China’s objections – which evidently are legion.

None of this is to say that specifying concrete interests is a guarantee of foreign policy success. But how else can that goal be achieved without setting out objectives considered vital to the nation’s security and prosperity, communicating them abroad in no uncertain terms, and ensuring that enough power is available to prevail when they’re threatened whether Americans guess correctly about potential adversaries’ intentions or not?

And these questions have moved to the forefront lately because Sino-American tensions are rising steadily over Taiwan – the world’s new leader in semiconductor manufacturing technology, which near neighbor China views as a renegade province. Worries are understandably rising that Washington and Beijing might stumble into a conflict that neither truly seeks. If the Biden administration could straighten out its own thinking about Taiwan and other U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific region, the odds of such an unnecessary catastrophe could at least be considerably reduced.    

 

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Grave Doubts Still Justified About Japan’s Reliability Against China

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alliances, allies, Asia-Pacific, Biden, burden sharing, China, deterrence, globalism, Indo-Pacific, Japan, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, semiconductors, South Korea, Taiwan, Yoshihide Suga

The more I read about last week’s summit in Washington, D.C. between President Biden and Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, the more I’m reminded of that expression ”putting lipstick on a pig.” For far from the unalloyed success described by the Biden administration and so many of the press accounts (see, e.g., here and here) the results of the meeting can easily be seen as just the latest sign that, from the U.S. standpoint, the so-called alliance between the two countries still can’t be counted on to pass what must be the acid test of such relationships – and at a time when Tokyo’s support looks more important than ever.

The reason Japan’s contribution counts can be summed up in one word: Taiwan. As known by RealityChek readers and many others, the island has emerged in recent years as the world’s leader in the knowhow needed to produce the world’s most advanced semiconductors. These devices of course are not only the electronic brains of all those wonderful high tech devices we all enjoy using – and need. Microchips also control most of the highest tech weapons in America’s military arsenal, and the ever more capable versions that will be turned out by factories (or “fabs”) on Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, in South Korea, will power the cutting edge weapons that will determine victory and defeat on the increasingly electronic battlefields of the future.

If Taiwan was located, say, in the Caribbean, its semiconductor manufacturing leadership mightn’t be such an urgent problem. But it’s sitting in the South China Sea a scant 100 miles from China, which has not only become a powerful rival to U.S. interests in Asia and all over the world, but keeps sounding increasingly determined to take control of the island – which it regards as an outlaw province.

Once upon a time (when Taiwan wasn’t nearly so important), the United States could be sure of deterring a Chinese invasion or military operations aimed at resting major concessions from Taiwan’s government, or of actually defeating such Chinese actions. Now, though, as RealityChek reported years ago, the U.S. nuclear edge needed for high confidence deterrence is gone, and it’s widely agreed that the non-nuclear military gap has narrowed considerably as well – especially for a conflict in China’s backyard.

Which is where Japan (and other U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific – now more often called the Indo-Pacific region) come in. It would greatly increase the odds of both U.S. deterrence, and victory if need be, if Washington could count on Tokyo to fight alongside America’s military if a war over Taiwan heaven forbid broke out. This is the acid test I was talking about up top. Any military planning for war needs to know for sure what assets it can absolutely rely on when the shooting starts and what assets are only “maybes.” And the results of the Biden-Suga summit left way too many maybes.

It’s true that Japan has added significantly to its military strength in recent years – though such a wealthy country can afford to spend much more. It’s also true that Japan has agreed to take on more responsibilities for preserving security in that Indo-Pacific region. Moreover, the joint declaration issued by the two governments after the summit specifically mentioned “the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and [encouraging] the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues.” Similar recent statements by Japanese officials during Mr. Biden’s term are widely considered breakthroughs in terms of Tokyo’s recognition of the situation’s gravity.

Suga actually added in remarks to reporters following the summit that “We agreed to oppose any attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion in the East and South China Seas [where Taiwan is located], and intimidation of others in the region.” So that sounds like a somewhat more assertive description of Japanese intentions on Taiwan.

But “oppose” could mean all sorts of things – a stern diplomatic note, a few sanctions. Maybe a very stern note. Or lots of sanctions. Neither Suga nor any other Japanese leader has said “If China attacks Taiwan, we’re sending in our troops, too.” In other words, uncertainty over Japan still leaves American war planners with a big problem.

And much more is involved here than my own personal skepticism. As noted here, even if Japan ultimately agrees only to provide logistical and other forms of non-combat support to U.S. forces fighting over Taiwan, itse home islands would run major risks. For due to China’s “ability to launch missiles to virtually anywhere in Japan,” Beijing could target “bases that the U.S. military would rely on for executing operations” and inflict major casualties on Japan.

Further, Tokyo’s distinct reluctance to voice full-throated condemnations of Chinese human rights violations and even atrocities for fear of disrupting lucrative economic ties raises even stronger doubts as to Japan’s willingness to participate in a full-fledged war with its leading trade partner. Indeed, in a post-summit event, Suga repeated another recent mainstay of Japanese diplomatic rhetoric:  “[W]e must work to establish a stable and constructive relationship with China.”

Given these considerations, it should be apparent that words alone simply can’t resolve legitimate doubts about Japan’s real intentions or likely responses to outright Chinse aggression anywhere in the region except for its own territory. 

I’m a foreign policy realist – someone who emphasizes the inevitably central role played by unsentimental, frankly selfish, judgments about concrete interests in all countries’ formulation of their foreign and defense policies. So I’m the last person to complain about Japan’s continuing caution and hedging as such. I can think of many compelling reasons for Japan to become more gung ho – e.g., does Tokyo really want to see China’s thug totalitarian government as the kingpin of its own neighborhood?. But this is a judgement for the Japanese people and their leaders to make.

Japan’s fence-sitting obviously also represents a challenge for American diplomacy, and President Biden has made improving cooperation with allies a centerpiece of his foreign policy. But major skepticism is justified as to whether he and his aides can turn Japan into a military ally worthy of the name, since their globalist emphases on alliances can too easily turn into prizing smooth ties for their own sake, as opposed to firm insistence on greater burden- and cost-sharing that’s bound to ruffle feathers at least in the short term. In fact, signs of such alliance fetishizing have already appeared in administration agreement to ease pressures on both Japan and South Korea for paying the costs of hosting U.S. forces clearly essential to these own countries’ defense.

And in this vein, this foot-dragging by Japan (and most other ostensibly staunch U.S. allies, too) raises a crucial question for Americans. Should they keep allowing their leaders to keep prodding and cajoling these countries in the hope that someday they might demonstrate plausible reliability?  Or should they conclude that the meager results of literally decades of prodding and cajoling mean that the success that’s so desperately needed should be written off as a pipe dream? As shown by rising tensions over Taiwan in particular, the clock is ticking – and quickly.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Biden’s Aides Show How Not to Deal with China

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Alaska, Antony J. Blinken, Asia-Pacific, Barack Obama, Biden, China, Donald Trump, global norms, globalism, Hong Kong, human rights, Indo-Pacific, international law, Jake Sullivan, liberal global order, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Reinhold Niebuhr, sanctions, Serenity Prayer, South China Sea, Taiwan, tariffs, tech, Trade, Uighurs, United Nations, Yang Jiechi

You knew (at least I did) that America’s top foreign policy officials were going to step in it when they led off their Alaska meeting yesterday with Chinese counterparts by describing U.S. policy toward the People’s Republic as first and foremost a globalist exercise in strengthening “the rules-based international order” rather than protecting and advancing Americas’ own specific national interests.

This emphasis on the part of Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan simultaneously made clear that they had no clue on how to communicate effectively to the Chinese or about China’s own aims, and – as was worrisomely true for the Obama administration in which both served – unwittingly conveyed to Beijing that they were more concerned about dreaming up utopian global arrangements than about dealing with the United States’ own most pressing concerns in the here and now.

It’s true that, in his opening remarks at the public portion of yesterday’s event that Blinken initially refered to advancing “the interests of the United States.” But his focus didn’t stay there for long. He immediately pivoted to contending:

“That system is not an abstraction. It helps countries resolve differences peacefully, coordinate multilateral efforts effectively and participate in global commerce with the assurance that everyone is following the same rules. The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winners take all, and that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us. Today, we’ll have an opportunity to discuss key priorities, both domestic and global, so that China can better understand our administration’s intentions and approach.”

Where, however, has been the evidence over…decades that China views the contemporary world as one in which peaceful resolution of differences is standard operating procedure, much less desirable? That multilateral efforts are worth coordinating effectively? That might shouldn’t make right and that China shouldn’t “take all” whenever it can?

Even more important, where is the evidence that China views what globalists like Blinken view as a system to be legitimate in the first place? Indeed, Yang Jiechi, who in real terms outranks China’s foreign minister as the country’s real foreign affairs czar, countered just a few minutes later by dismissing Blinken’s “so-called rules-based international order” as a selfish concoction of “a small number of countries.” He specifically attacked it for enabling the United States in particular to “excercise long-arm jurisdiction and suppression” and “overstretch the national security through the use of force or financial hegemony….”

Shortly afterwards, he added, “I don’t think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize…that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for the international order.”

Yang touted as a superior alternative “the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law.” But of course, even if you swallow this Chinese line (and you shouldn’t), it’s been precisely that system’s universality, and resulting need to pretend the existence of an equally universal consensus on acceptable behavior and good faith on the part of all members, that’s resulted in its general uselessness.

Meanwhile, surely striking Beijing as both cynical and utterly hollow were Blinken’s efforts to justify U.S. criticisms of China’s human rights abuses as threats to “the rules-based order that maintains global stability. That’s why they’re not merely internal matters and why we feel an obligation to raise these issues here today.”

After all, whatever any decent person thinks of Beijing’s contemptible crackdown in Hong Kong, arguably genocidal campaigns against the Uighur minority, and brutally totalitarian system generally, what genuinely serious person could believe that the United States, or other democracies, had any intention or capability of halting these practices?

What might have made an actually useful, and credible, impression on the Chinese from a U.S. standpoint would have been blunt declarations that (a) Beijing’s saber-rattling toward (global semiconductor manufacturing leader) Taiwan and sealanes-jeopardizing expansionism in the South China Sea, and cyber-attacks were major threats to American security and prosperity that the United States would keep responding to with all means necessary; and (b) that Washington would continue using a full-range of tariffs and sanctions against predatory Chinese economic practices as long as they continued harming U.S. businesses and their employees. That is, Blinken and Sullivan should have emphasized Chinese actions that hurt and endanger Americans – and against which in the economic sphere, Donald Trump’s policies showed Washington could make a significant difference.

It’s possible that in the private sessions, President Biden’s emissaries will dispense with the grandstanding and zero in on the basics. (Although that shift would raise the question of why this approach was deemed unsuitable for the public.) But the Biden-ites weirdly advertised in advance that China’s economic abuses and the technology development threat it poses wouldn’t be U.S. priorities at any stage of the Alaska meetings.

In the mid-20^th century, American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr popularized (although probably didn’t write) a devotion called the “Serenity Prayer” whose famous first lines read “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” I’m hoping someone puts copies into Blinken’s and Sullivan’s briefcases for their flight back from Alaska.