Background: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/07/chinas-new-foreign-minister-qin-gang-holds-first-press-briefing.html
What is the rational course for US foreign policy regarding e.g. the Taiwan problem? What is China's? What is Taiwan's? Are the US, China, and Taiwan currently acting in rational ways in regards to this geopolitical issue? If not, why? If every actor was acting rationally, would this result in the possibility of cooperation to solve the problem peacefully? Or does at least one actor's rational course of action necessarily put them on a 'collision course' with the others? Or, worse, for this situation, is it possible that it is in every actors' most rational course of action to desire the same peaceful resolution/treaty, but some type of tragic coordination problem renders this impossible?
To avoid this being a culture war topic, let's avoid talking about what type of resolution would be best in the sense of most moral, just, etc. Let's only discuss what would be the most rational course of action for every party involved, whatever that may mean.
Of course there have been many attempts to solve geopolitics in the past (see: the various schools of international relations theory). Even still, I'd hope that this wouldn't prevent us from having a discussion of our own about this. Most schools of IR theory attempt to explain why nations do what they do, and some schools ascribe this to possibly non-rational reasons e.g. social constructivism which says that sometimes culture of a nation might explain that nation's actions, and of course often times cultures can hold irrational beliefs or encourage irrational actions. Other schools e.g. realism attempt to explain international relations by stating that nations are rational actors at least as wealth/power-maximizers, but this is obviously contentions, and even if true it could be said that nations that always act as wealth/power-maximizers are not acting rationally, etc.
I'll start the discussion by giving an example of what I consider to be an extreme version of an irrational geopolitical actor, and one for whose actual historical actions have well-understood explanations other than rational behavior: the Empire of Japan after the Meiji restoration. At a certain point it became clear to many Japanese elites that their country was on an undesirable path, one that put them on a collision course with the United States. This war was correctly predicted by many Japanese leaders to be an un-winnable war, if not at least a highly undesirable one. With this in mind, it would probably have been 'most rational' for Japan to abandon their colonial possessions in Manchuria and Korea in the interwar period in order to avoid war with the US, rather than starting a new and more ambitious war with China to try and expand their empire to acquire the natural resources required to prop up those colonies, instead. However, due to ideological sentiment, any Japanese leader against the expansion of empire was essentially selected against by a series of ultranationalist assassins, leaving only irrationally hawkish leaders to direct their country in terms of foreign policy. Thus, Japan irrationally went to war in China, which eventually brought them into war with the US which was disastrous for them.
And, I will provide examples of what I consider to be rational geopolitical actors, as well: both the US and the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis. The Soviet Union initially began to emplace nukes in cuba for a variety of reasons, but for one because they correctly determined that they were at a disadvantage in terms of MAD and putting nukes in cuba could bring more core American territory into range, in order to better ensure their deterrence against a US first strike. Ensuring national security against that of e.g. nuclear destruction, for example, seems to me like a rational goal. The US felt rationally quite threatened by the development, and as well felt their global political situation was threatened unless the responded properly, and so there was a crisis. The US considered doing nothing, which is a rational thing to at least consider, but correctly concluded that a better outcome for their own self-interest could be reached by brinksmanship. The US (namely, Kennedy) also rationally decided against a full scale invasion of cuba despite the unanimous advice of the joint chiefs, probably correct in his assumption that an escalation such as that would have been beyond the pale, and would probably be matched by a soviet invasion of at least west berlin, etc, which would necessitate further escalation, and so reasoned again that a better resolution could be reached through diplomacy. Eventually, the crisis was resolved through a decently clever compromise, with the nuclear disarmament of cuba in exchange for the secret nuclear disarmament of turkey -- a resolution which involved both actors properly considering the others' positions and being willing to make concessions in order to accommodate for the other's circumstances, rather than being driven by ideology, pride, etc. at least in and of themselves. Khrushchev is considered to have lost face from this outcome, and it perhaps seriously contributed to his eventual ousting two years later, but considering the alternative was potentially nuclear armageddon, (i.e. a situation which would have greatly harmed the Soviet Union) it seems notably rational to have leaders at the helm of your nation willing to lose face/sacrifice their own personal career in order to achieve better outcomes for the nation as a whole such as not having it destroyed by nuclear bombs. If any actor can be said to be irrational in this situation, it might be the United States considering that there is an argument to be made that nukes in cuba wouldn't have seriously worsened the soviet nuclear threat and that Kennedy/US was more beheld to the irrational whims of the US public, and that they should have been the ones to rationally decide to take the PR hit by 'losing' the crisis in order to avert even the risk of extremely negative outcomes posed by engaging in brinksmanship. However, I think both the US and the USSR acted rationally enough on balance, at least to demonstrate enough individual examples of rational international relations behavior over the course of the historical anecdote, for the example of them as 'rational' to be sufficient.
With this in mind, how should we describe the geopolitical courses of China, the US, and Taiwan regarding the problem of Taiwanese sovereignty? Are any, or perhaps multiple of the involved actors making decisions meaningfully similar to imperial Japan on the leadup to war with the US i.e. irrationally? If so, why? Or are any or perhaps multiple of the involved actors acting more like the US/USSR during the cuban missile crisis, i.e. acting rationally -- but perhaps still on a collision course, even possibly on a collision course with other rational actors?
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Notes -
The rational thing for all parties is the status quo. America and The West got the much better part of the “One China” diplomacy. They get to treat Taiwan as a separate countries in every way except name and big name state visits. China gets to save face.
I imagine there are some Cold Warriors that see China as harboring secret plans of worldwide Communist revolution, but I don’t see any evidence that this is true. China is Communist in name only at this point and most of its military conflicts since the revolution have been with other Communist states.
With that idea that it’s either stop China’s growth or the world falls to the commies, it makes sense to become belligerent. But that idea is mistaken.
In the age of nuclear weapons it is not feasible to beat China so badly in military conflict that their economy is set back for generations. The nukes would fly before that happens.
A proxy war in Taiwan is not going to erase all the progress in the mainland.
This probably won’t even happen since it relies on China taking the bait. They’ve shown no interest in initiating conflict. Perhaps you could false flag your way in to a hot war, but with how freely information flows these days this is a big gamble.
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I think a rational decision in any realm of geopolitics is one in which your side gets more from the actions it takes than it loses.
From the perspective of the USA and the West in general, the big issue isn’t Taiwan as Taiwan, but acces to the chip industry it houses. Other than that, it’s not important as a political entity. If Taiwan didn’t house the chip industry, it’s just another small country in Asia, perhaps a free market powerhouse economy (like Hong Kong was) but not special enough to warrant blood and treasure to safeguard it. As far as geography, I think defending it would be almost impossible. It’s too close to China to keep navy ships close enough to Taiwan to plausibly protect it from China without being close enough to China to be provocative. Which brings up another problem— you’d have to either fully commit to going to war over Taiwan before the invasion starts or you’re going to be too slow to respond to do anything about it.
From the perspective of Taiwan, it’s only really got two options. First, be valuable enough to the West that the West is willing to commit to war for their freedom, or slowly negotiate a peaceful resolution ceding control back to China. As an island, even if it’s plausible to hold off an invasion proper for a time, the ability of China to keep supplies from reaching Taiwan would mean this simply delays the conquest and prolongs suffering. So, more than likely the best option for a free Taiwan is in keeping the chips being made exclusively in Taiwan. Allowing manufacturing of Taiwanese chips outside of Taiwan erodes the only strategic advantage they have — being a supplier of chips the West cannot do without and doesn’t want China to have.
From the pov of China, there are two reasons to want Taiwan. First, it’s really close to the mainland and friendly with Western countries, making it a potential problem for Chinese trade and territorial ambitions. It would be like Cuba was to the Americans in the Cold War — a place that could easily be used as a forward base if their rivals wanted to invade or attack (Taiwan is closer than Cuba). The chip manufacturing is also important to China as it could then control even more global commerce via chips that are used in almost everything from pcs to washing machines and even military equipment. Third, it’s a public relations tool to reunite all Chinese people under CCP control as a happy family. The Chinese have always considered Taiwan a province of China. Making that real would be a major feather in the cap.
what’s interesting here is that the Taiwanese and the West are somewhat at odds over the chips. It is in Taiwan’s interest to keep everything in Taiwan because that’s the thing that’s going to make the West care enough to risk lives and treasure fighting against China — and it’s probably going to be a much steeper cost than anything we’ve done in the last 30 years. China has a modern military, modern equipment, and millions of soldiers. This isn’t Iraq. And if they do go to war, there’s another problem in that a lot of our goods, from clothing to manufactured products are made in China. Which means that a lot of consumer goods will be embargoed if we do go to war. This loss might make it difficult to fight the war and will almost certainly erode support for the war. For the West, getting manufacturing of those chips outside of Taiwan eliminates a problem of having to go to war with the country that makes most of the world’s manufactured goods.
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Rational world politics would be recognizing that one should either shit or get off the pot. World Systems theory as an approach to history tells us that, historically, China will become the single most economically important and powerful country in the world if it is united. It is big, well organized, filled with people, this outcome is an inevitability over millennia. Therefore, we have two choices: use force to maintain a divided China, or accommodate a China that is powerful as a partner in global economic governance. There is no third option, you cannot maintain a weak, united China by any means over the long term.
China in the Late Qing to Deng period is the only time when it was not the center of the world economy, when global trade did not center around obtaining Chinese goods and moving them West. The ascent of a unified, modern China as the center of the world economy is a return to historical norms, not a new aberration. American policymakers will bring up China eclipsing the US as the world's largest economy as nightmares, despite the fact that given the population difference that would only make the average Chinese citizen 1/4 as rich as the average American. From the Chinese perspective, such an American policy of maintaining a 1st place in GDP rankings requires that Chinese citizens be in poverty relative to Americans, and further is dethroning the middle kingdom from its historical role, is denying China its basic dignity earned over centuries.
Current American policy is looking for a third choice, one that does not try directly to undermine China and divide it, nor does it seek to accept China as an equal partner. Only the most aggressive China hawks talk about bringing down the Chinese Communist party, and none of those have any real plans to do so; to my knowledge no one at all proposes dissecting China into Manuchurian, Tibetan, Sichuan, etc republics. Yet policymakers insist on crowing about China being an enemy, a rival. "Be Nice, Until You Can Coordinate Meanness." If we do not intend to
A serious, rational, path requires that "the West" decide to either confront China directly with the goal of destroying China as a unified state, or accommodate China as an equal partner. Even the most hawkish Taiwan defense plans do not do the former, while even the most dovish trade plans do not really envision the latter. Defeating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as envisioned in the wargames cited by Dase will not permanently castrate the Chinese threat or lead to a divided China that can be kept weak; it would just set up round 2 in a few decades. Expecting China not to claim Taiwan while enriching the Chinese through trade will not happen. A path must be chosen and stuck to, I fear that neither side is capable of such serious rational choice.
I appreciate the wisdom of your comment for the most part, but these assertions in particular seem like the largest flaw.
True, always in world history before late Qing was China in large part the economic center of the world. However, it is just as true that never before during that span of world history did something like the USA even exist. The conditions of the world are different than they were before, in a major relevant way: 330 million people live in a powerful, technologically advanced, industrial, resource rich nation across the ocean from China. I think this idea of 'returning to the historical norm' loses credibility as something so inevitable when you consider how irrevocably different the world is with the USA existing in its current form across the Pacific from China rather than e.g. geopolitically irrelevant Native American tribes (or really, just unexplored ocean).
And this is to mention nothing of India. I think you overstate just exactly how central China was to the historical world economy, not that it wasn't central in a major way. But my understanding is that India shared a significant portion of that economic centrality throughout history, as well. It seems to me that a 'return to the historical norm' would be an economically multipolar world split with China and India as focal points both in their own right, not China alone.
I would distinguish India in that "India" is kind of a tough concept, where China is a pretty direct one. India historically is more like "Christendom:" a cultural, religious, and semi-ethnic zone inhabited by numerous nations of similar people. Occasionally the important parts of Christendom/India have been united by political entities, but most of their history has been of a variety of warring powers, foreign conquerors, and division. This collection of maps of Indian empires is illustrative, other than the brief period under the Mauryans, no native empire united all of India, or even all the important bits, only foreign conquerors like the English and the Mughals did so. The parallel with Rome is illustrative for westerners, a great empire united culturally, split apart into warring political states. Even today, it is rather silly to historically split off Pakistan and Bangladesh as separate nations, those are "Indian" heartlands historically.
China, by contrast, is closer to "England" as a concept: typically the important parts have been united and ruled by a single political entity, with parts of the hinterland added/subtracted as dynasties waxed and waned. Look at this map today which shows population density in China, and these which show historical Chinese dynasties. Everything to the East of the population line on the modern map has a unified history of dynastic rule dating back over one thousand years. The Han dynasty, around the era of Rome, already controlled and united what were essentially all the important parts of China today! Certainly the Yuan, Ming, Qing, and CCP dynasties all controlled essentially the entirety of modern China. The history of the important, populated, productive bits of China is one of unity, broken by occasional disunity. "The empire long divided..." and all that. China controls all of its historical heartland and cultural territory other than Taiwan.
That all being said...
This is very true! I do not advocate that the United States wave the white flag and kow-tow to our Han overlords (though judging from local elections, we are likely to be saluting a mix of largely Han/Brahmin elected officials in the USA soon enough). Rather, a multipolar world is probably what we envision when we have a united American empire, the EU uniting the European portions of the Roman Empire, etc. But Atlanticist policy makers still want to maintain an essentially unipolar world! One where the colonial values of the British-American-UN-GloboHomo apparatus can be inflicted on the populace anywhere from Lviv to Taipei to Timbuktu on a moments notice. We need to adjust to the idea that China gets a say. I don't think that American think tanks and government leaders have adjusted to that idea yet.
To clarify before anything else: I want to avoid making a value judgement about what is 'good' or 'just' or 'moral.' For example, I don't have any particular leaning as to whether a multipolar world where, as you've put it, China gets a say, or a unipolar one dominated by American colonial interests, is better or more just than the other. Instead, I'm merely trying to think about what's actually most likely to come to pass.
That's what I took away from your comments regarding 'return to the historical norm;' that you were implying that a world with a major pole centered around Beijing is the likely future, considering it has been such a frequent theme of history, at least before quite recently. This, e.g. that the future will contain a world where China is the suzerain of at least most of East Asia (if by historical example it is we are reasoning) is what in particular I'm not convinced is true. Again, perhaps it would be more fair... but I what I want to try and figure out right now is how likely it is, really.
Do you yourself really have any reason to think a continued Chinese rise is particularly likely, other than because of China's historical global centrality? Again, I'm not solely convinced of the likelihood of a Chinese-centric world (or at least one with a major pole emerging from Beijing) by way of the fact that historically this was often true, because again historically it was also true that the US didn't even exist, and yet, the US does exist. With this in mind, what's your main reason to believe that for example China will eventually continue to rise to such a strength that it can feasibly challenge the US over something like Taiwan, or (perhaps because that is too narrow of scope) anything beyond that, such as the Philipines, South Korea, South Asia, etc. ?
I think that many of the counter-arguments to China bullishness are relatively strong. For example it seems that a significant portion of China's growth has occurred in the exact way that leaves it vulnerable to the middle income trap -- do you think that they will navigate this problem, or that the middle income trap isn't real, or that I'm wrong with the premise, or what? What about the supposed demographic decline? Do you think the birth rate problem is overstated, or somehow fixable, etc.? What about the lack of allies -- i.e. it seems for the most part that given the choice between CCP suzerainty and US-American-UN-GloboHomo colonial apparatus, most Asian nations would actually choose American Globohomo status quo rather than Chinese authority, even including e.g. Vietnam and South Korea, two historical Chinese vassals.
These in general seem like strong arguments as to why, even without directly being decisively smashed/disassembled by the West, the Chinese rise might peter out at around the [Extremely major regional power]/[Second-degree global power] level, e.g. without constituting a major pole of a multipolar world order in their own right. But I very much want to hear what you have to say -- if you think that the GDP/capita of China really can reach even half that of the US, or greater, as I think would be required for them to 'erect' such a pole -- what do you see as the route there? Again, currently they're so reliant on their manufacturing economy that seems exactly like it would be middle-income-trapped -- are they going to shift numbers of people on the scale of hundreds of millions to employment in higher-paying services-economy jobs? For what, 'inward consumption' as Xi Jinping has put it? Is there even really theoretical economic demand within China, or worldwide for that matter, for even e.g. 300 million Chinese services-economy jobs in the first place?
My reply is primarily the opposite of our guy /u/Lepidus , I think China will ultimately have some degree of success because I have studied, worked and lived with too many students from the PRC who were smart and hardworking and talented and creative, and ultimately I don't think you can keep good people down. At scale, as long as China can educate and empower some portion of the massive population of intelligent youths that it produces, China will make good. The smartest 20% of China is the size of the United States, that kind of size and scale can't be kept down by even a mildly incompetent government, it takes late-Qing or Mao level incompetence to keep that country weak.
My initial post might read as though I think China will inevitably dominate, I don't think that is true, but I do think China will achieve some success.
*I'm not a hard-HBD guy here, but if you are you can insert this into the argument pretty seamlessly, or not and just go by scale, it doesn't really matter either way.
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(This was supposed to be more interesting but fuck it, I've forgotten what I had to say. Probably something about how you can win games by denying the other party the chance to develop past a certain stage for long enough. Conrad Bastable has probably said it better, in any case).
The latest wargames assuming the beginning of hostilities in 2026 (oh how time flies) show USA and allies beating China bloody, the attempt to annex the island failing miserably. I recommend reading the report, it's pretty good.
It goes without saying that American wargames are biased against the side the US is cheering for: this was the case in Iraq, in Ukraine, and here it will be the case too. (American experts do not earn their bread in the copium business, they're MIC shills if anything, although one can come up with a more charitable take). So the Chinese loss is a credible prediction. The report does not account for novel technologies, but for the sake of argument let's assume the Chinese will maintain the same qualitative gap.
For more holistic analyses concerning global economic impact and such, I direct you to RAND.
Most people in the sphere, Zeihan being a notable exception, seem to believe (or at least that's what they claim) that in the scale of a few more years – by 2030 and beyond – the odds will grow to be more favorable to China. So it stands to reason to provoke a war as soon as possible. It's rational.
Reasons the Chinese are urging against brinkmanship are twofold. First, they want to postpone the war for already-mentioned reasons. Second, they are genuinely worse at understanding the stakes. Everything the Chinese have succeeded at, they have succeeded through trade and industry. It is inconceivable to them that a nation excelling in commerce even more than they do would rather go for a destructive exchange to maintain its primacy. They wouldn't have done so.
Moreover, they think it just for that nation to accept its (purported) decline. That's the natural way of the world, so why struggle in a futile effort to delay the inevitable?
Very charitably, the Chinese share Jordan Peterson's idea of winning:
The West has Ender Wiggin's idea:
It's a cliché, but the big difference between «Western» and «Eastern», or more archaically Occidental and Oriental, or more properly Abrahamic and Dharmic+Confucian cultures is the paradigm of linear time versus cyclical time. Cyclical universe is a theory informed by observing patterns of the natural world: the change of the times of day and phases of the moon and seasons of the year, children succeeding their parents to bequeath their legacy to the next generation, dynasties establishing their mandate, flourishing and falling into ruin, the great wheel turning and turning.
The West used to believe in this as well, from Greeks to the Norse. But it's a shallow and comforting vision, the default intuition all cultures arrive at when they begin to ponder the nature of things. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that Time is an arrow, not a circle; both the fundamental bits and the highest-order processes perform an irreversible computation. Entropy rises, the species evolves; the Paradise is forever lost, but the Rapture is drawing ever closer – and it matters whether you end up on the side of the damned or together with the saints.
Americans, despite protestations, have a certain Grand Idea. Few and unimportant people have put it into words, but it can be sensed in the air and the water supply. This idea depends very much on the Chinese not having acquired a number of technological tools in this decade, before those tools are properly leveraged by Americans. It looks like this requirement is best satisfied in the condition of Taiwan maintaining it sovereignty or, at least, its high-tech industry not surviving the Chinese attempt at annexation. So this is how it will go.
Really? There's a gap in US Navy procurement that has the number of operational ships dropping, without replacements coming online soon enough, the "Terrible 20s". The US would be happy to punt the war to the 30s, so that SSN(X), DDG(X) and the AUKUS submarines could be fielded. The CSIS paper also calls out our current stocks of antiship missiles:
Having another decade to build more of those would be nice!
I'm not sure Chinese demographics support waiting, either. Their population is already dropping, and the narrow age band of "military aged males" being what they are, their fighting population will fall even faster still. China might be in a "use it or lose it" moment regarding their armed forces. I'd expect them to make their move in the next four years.
But does it have to be an armed invasion? A sea blockade would achieve important war goals, (denying semiconductors to the first world) while avoiding their costs. (A Ukraine-style rally in global opinion to defend a small nation against its larger neighbor) The PRC could easily allow food relief through and block everything else, choking out Taiwan economically over decades. The US's blockade of Cuba is a salient example!
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You seem dismissive of your own comment, but the last three paragraphs here seem incredibly profound to me. Thanks for your interesting reply.
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One things I've noticed, at least in America, is that "rational" has become shorthand for "agrees with me" in mainstream discourse. I don't know if the CCP has the same issue. Anyone here who understands the CCP better than I do care to chime in?
I think what's going on there is one of two things:
People think that whatever they do about an issue is rational - if they didn't, they wouldn't do it! - and this has predictable knock-on effects.
People declare their opponents to be "irrational" as straight-up propaganda/lies; they are on simulacrum level 2 or possibly higher.
I can't see from the link whether this was English-language, but certainly most English-language CPC releases have little respect for truth.
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You have left out one of the key players here: Japan. Japan's position in East Asia is guaranteed by its alliance with the United States and they have far more to lose from a Chinese occupation of Taiwan, which would put hostile forces within a hundred miles of their southern territories. In the same way that one could imagine a country like Poland leveraging the NATO alliance to drag the US into a conflict by putting their soldiers in a position to "get attacked by Russia," the Japanese could very well do the same if they felt that American military assistance was not otherwise forthcoming, leading to Chinese bombing of US bases in Japan, among other targets.
Moreover, on questions of sovereignty and nationalism I see little reason to think of actors as being rational, at least at the level of the populations whose sentiments force leaders towards particular decisions. Is Quebec or Catalan or Scottish separatism rational? Is the EU having 24 official languages into which they must translate all of their documents rational? There are peoples around the world who would bear unspeakable horrors, the deaths of their relatives, the destruction of the industrial capacity of their nations, and the severing of trade links between themselves and the outside world for generations if it meant they were allowed to continue speaking a language or practicing a religion that the rest of us couldn't distinguish from that of their neighbors even if we tried.
Of course, not every player will be equally invested in the outcome, and some may have the luxury of acting more rationally than others, as the US does when it comes to problems halfway around the world where fewer of its core interests or its sovereignty are threatened. As for how to actually proceed, I'm sorry to say I don't have much of a clue.
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Japan went into Manchuria and China in part because they wanted the resources necessary to fend off the US and Soviet Union. From the Japanese perspective, these great powers were extremely threatening. If they leave and Manchuria falls to the Soviet Union, then they'll just keep pushing into Korea and China. Then Japan has no coal or iron and is basically defenseless before a gigantic Eurasian hegemon. If they gave up Korea, someone else would take it and use it against them. The US navy was also very large and obviously a major concern for an island nation.
Furthermore, why should the Americans be so concerned about what's going on in Asia, from the Japanese perspective? It's on the other side of the world. The US has an entire hemisphere and vast resources, isn't that enough? The only reason to be concerned is if the US wanted Japan to stay weak, preventing them from attaining those resources. They didn't think the US cared about whatever horrible things they were doing to non-whites, which is probably right given how happy the US was to incinerate North Korea later on. The conclusion they came to was that the US wanted them weak, in such a position that they could be crushed whenever they wanted. If you think the police want you dead, you may as well take your chances in a gunfight.
The Japanese made an effort for peace but there were issues with misunderstandings as to the meaning of decrypted Japanese diplomatic cables and hawkish US officials organizing their own sanctions policies behind the president's back. (see https://doi.org/10.2307/3638003 and https://doi.org/10.2307/3638003). Both sides grew unnecessarily suspicious and unyielding. Japan isn't the only one with rogue state actors and internal factions. It was a clusterfuck.
Why did they tell anyone about Soviet missiles on Cuba in the first place? Why does it matter? Both sides were developing ICBMs, basing missiles in Cuba had little strategic impact. The US could've just ignored it and moved on with the Cold War. It's not obvious like blockading Berlin, nobody needs to know. The Soviets decided to transfer a hundred tactical nukes to Cuban control after the crisis ended, in November. It was only that Castro was too much of a weirdo, so they changed their minds. But crucially, nobody threw a massive tantrum over this (probably because the US didn't spot it) and so it wasn't a problem.
The US created this crisis in the first place, they bear total responsibility. Why were they flying U2 spy planes over other people's airspace right in the middle of a major crisis? One got shot down, which caused serious tension! Why were they dropping dummy depth charges on Soviet submarines, resulting in the whole Arkhipov situation? The US mobilized all its bombers, dispersing them in such a way as it looked like they were preparing to strike. The US's behavior was incredibly irresponsible.
In terms of rationality for the West, I propose benign neglect where major interests aren't threatened. Kennan called for something similar back in the 1990s. His attitude towards China was also prescient, it was a foolish decision to carve out our own manufacturing capacity and send it to Chongqing.
https://twitter.com/St1Station/status/1629510108945301507
In short, we should only fight wars or take major actions if there are important issues at stake, such as Taiwan. Taiwan is an important base for controlling Asian trade and energy flows. It has semiconductors we need, that we're increasingly trying to deny to China. We shouldn't mess around in the Middle East unless oil supplies are threatened. We shouldn't have adopted the NATO expansion policy that Kennan so intensely opposed back in the 1990s and poisoned Russia against us.
We should make our stance actually clear on Taiwan. Either sign a formal, binding alliance or discard them. I favor the former option but the current strategy of 'hint hint nudge nudge we really feel strongly about Taiwan's security but we're not going to say whether we'll do anything about it (oh ignore Biden's clear statements that we'll defend Taiwan)' is risky. This is a matter of great power war, it is extremely serious and deserves clarity and precision. The Taiwanese are already free-riding in terms of defence expenditures, an alliance costs us little on that front. If China thinks we're bluffing, then that will embolden them. And given how the US navy is actually shrinking in ship count (and only 9% of carrier-borne F-35Cs are actually fully mission capable), it might well look like we're bluffing.
We shouldn't have suppressed Taiwan's nuclear program back in the 1980s either, that error has worsened this current crisis. If they already had nukes, the island would be perfectly defensible. Too late now.
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I guess it boils down to three things: how strong china is, how much they want taiwan, and how legitimate their claim is. They’re pretty good on all three. I think they should be given a long-term path to peaceful reunification, or at least we make clear to the taiwanese that they won’t be defended at all costs, if they want to fight it’s just going to be arms shipments and sanctions like ukraine.
If it turns out to just be the first line in an endless list of demands like crimea or sudetenland, we can always put our foot down later. We’ll be able to say at least we gave peace a chance. It’s not like china wants to murder all the taiwanese.
Despite greater war-making capacity, they’ve been geopolitically peaceful in the last decades when compared to russia or meiji japan. So from my POV a taiwan invasion seems a thin reason for WW3, but then again, I’m neither japanese, australian nor american.
On appeasement. What did the allies really lose by conceding the sudetenland? Daladier immediately intensified the rearming after the conference, and the british weren’t far behind. Who knows where neutral countries and especially popular opinion in the US would be if France had come charging in czechoslovokia to stop the ethnic germans there from joining germany. The situation was much cleaner, with far less room for ambiguity, when Hitler invaded the rest of tschekoslovakia and attacked poland less than a year later.
To shoot for a cooperate-cooperate outcome, you have to occasionally throw in forgiveness, cooperate when the other defected. Only repeated defections merit retalitation. The USSR imo was far more of a defector than china, see military share of gdp. Imagine the waste if we had been hardline non-appeasers, and fought WWIII over a small island a few years before the entire thing came crumbling down.
So before you decide not to appease, two questions have to be answered affirmatively, A) is your enemy an inveterate defector? and B) will he gain more by extorting you repeatedly than you gain by playing for time? . And my answers are "A) I don't know, B) probably not" for china and "yes, yes" for russia.
Taiwan gives the PLAN un-interdictable access to the Pacific Ocean via its East coast; it breaks the First Island Chain. That puts Korea and Japan in an ugly position because of their massive-food-importer status, and makes the submarine leg of the Chinese nuclear triad much more effective (Tanner Greer has an analysis here, although I'm not quite as pessimistic).
Also, according to Xiao Qian (7:02), some fraction of the DPP are going to be "punished". That's not something that can be undone later.
And I'm pretty sure it is, in fact, the first line in a long list; there's been some propaganda groundwork to claim Korea and the Ryukyu Islands, both of which used to be Chinese tributaries.
This reflects the current status quo, where china is completely hemmed in, and has no safe access to the world ocean. This is not a situation I expect a superpower to accept, even a peaceful one. It is, right now, a far uglier position than Japan's post-taiwan annexation, which would still have that access.
A lot of southeast asian countries used to be chinese tributaries, that does not make an intent to conquer.
But you said this:
Losing Taiwan makes it harder to put our foot down later; it means more American casualties in the event of WWIII. Thus, if the PRC is in fact an inveterate defector, it is better to fight now than to fight later.
I agree; that's why I noted the groundwork currently being laid for those two specific cases. Propaganda claiming Ryukyu is an obvious prelude to demanding/seizing the islands. Claiming Goguryeo as a Chinese state is an earlier step in the process; the next step from that is considering the part of Goguryeo that isn't part of the PRC an irredentist claim.
OK. But the problem is that wanting unfettered access to the ocean, random historic claims, and even conquering taiwan is far from a clear sign of inveterate defectorship.
It's not a 100% sign, no. But when you're talking about potentially order-of-magnitude difference in the death count on our end (from Chinese subs getting to close range, from us knocking out fewer of them, and simply because of the ongoing massive expansion of the PRC's arsenal), holding out for 100% is hardly what I'd describe as rational.
If you think this is enough of an argument, it would have been even easier to bomb them to shit a few decades ago. Be careful not to become the defector yourself, now.
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I'll also start by answering the question first: it seems to me like it might be most rational for the US to concede Taiwan to China. Overall, cooperation with China in a broad range of other areas such as economy seems ideal if possible, and excepting that, at least avoiding war or any significant possibility of it. In order to avoid being enemies and thus able to cooperate, at least one side ceding, or at least, accepting something other than their ideal outcome re: Taiwan seems necessary. Additionally, despite many arguments I've heard to the contrary, I haven't been convinced that Taiwan is of significant geopolitical importance to the US in the grand scheme of things, at least enough to justify large risks like nuclear war or even large opportunity costs like not being able to cooperate with China. The biggest obstacles for the US to simply concede Taiwan to China seem to me to be 1. doing so publicly would damage US credibility with its allies 2. control of semiconductor production and 3. ideology/public opinion/feelings. Of these, only 1. and 2. are really rational reasons to attempt to prevent Chinese absorption of Taiwan. It seems to me that if the US could construct conditions where Taiwan actually became willing to join China i.e. anything from encouraging cross strait relations to conducting psy-ops intended to influence Taiwanese public opinion towards reunification, then obstacles 1. and 3. could be abrogated. Obstacle 2. could be abrogated simply by constructing alternative equally-advanced semiconductor plants in places fully within US control. Thus, it seems to me that the most rational course of US action regarding Taiwan might be to construct alternative semiconductor plants, influence public opinion in Taiwan toward reunification, and then permit as much with China. At least, this seems rational in a situation where one expects China not to themselves be willing to cede Taiwan, or continue to be satisfied with the currently-acceptable status-quo for much longer, at least not without the US having to resort to unacceptably-risky brinksmanship or war, or even at the price of significant economic opportunity cost such as fully decoupling the two economies.
Have you heard about how big a deal the First Island Chain is strategically? I discuss it above.
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Only if by "rational" you mean "optimizing utility on the shortest timeframe possible". I don't think people failing the marshmallow test are considered irrational, but I think it's commonly understood they are less successful at achieving their goals in the long run, and lose competitively to people that pass the test. On the shortest timeframe, it always "rational" to surrender, because surrendering ensures short-term survival, while fighting is inherently risky. On the longer timeframe, always choosing surrender leads to being a lowest-rank individual, which provides poor access to resources and opportunities, and ultimately leads to extinction of the associated gene line.
Also, considering public opinion is not "irrational". The public opinion mechanisms (treating it expansively, not just as responding to the polls) is why people form societies and not just live in a landscape of wild roaming sub-Dunbar bands. Dismissing it means dismissing a key mechanism driving the whole societies. Even a totalitarian society has to account for the existence of public opinion (even though it exists in significantly different form than in a democracy) but it a democratic society, not accounting for it is plain silly.
If you just proven it's rational to let Taiwan be taken rather than go to war and break profitable economic ties - why China shouldn't be expected to be rational too and arrive to the same conclusion? Yet, you seem to expect the opposite to happen, and treat is as an obviously the only possible conclusion. Do you think China is inherently irrational, or somehow same things are rational for China but not for other countries?
I have to say, arguments for conceding territories to rising powers/superpowers, for whatever reason, reminds me of the Biblical story of Esau selling his birthright for some lentil stew--and I don't consider myself particularly religious. Who's to say that a Taiwan concession would not indeed be a birthright sale? A seemingly harmless trade to avoid immediate calamity in the short term might well prove disastrous long-term.
Except that it isn't even "seemingly harmless" - we already know, both on historical examples and current analysis, that there will be huge downsides and costs. We're just postponing dealing with those costs until later - and somehow hope it'll be ok, because we want to avoid immediate costs. I'm not sure my definition of "rational" includes such behavior, unless we somehow are restricted to a very short time horizon - like we know for sure The Sweet Meteor Of Death is coming in five years, so we want at least live out these years calmly and happily.
Which btw reminds me that we're probably not doing ourselves a very good service electing 80-year old people to be our leaders...
If you think AI timelines are short and that a Taiwan war would increase P(Doom) (e.g. literal Skynets get deployed and normalised), then the argument mostly writes itself.
(I am not at all convinced that it would increase P(Doom); I would be very surprised if it had no effect, but one can definitely tell a story where it's decreased instead - e.g. it goes nuclear quickly and the US destroys China, thus mostly ending the great-power competition that makes Skynet systems attractive.)
We are vey far from skynets now, and there seems to be no desire from the military to grab it and run with it (if anything, US military is more occupied by getting woke than by anything else). Even if China somehow makes breakthrough and develops a skynet, not sure how it'd help them in taking Taiwan - they don't lack anything for it that would be helped by having a skynet. So I don't see how gifting Taiwan to China changes anything - if Chinese have the capability to develop a skynet (which I don't think they do), and would think it would be beneficial to them, then they would develop it anyway. I think unless you deny agency to every nation in the world besides the US - which some people who are automatically attribute all problems in the world to "US meddling" clearly do - there's no scenario in which "China + Taiwan" is less dangerous than just China. Especially given that controlling Taiwan means controlling large amount of electronic manufacturing - which, guess what, would be necessary for making a skynet. Unless, of course, the end goal of the scenario is crippling US AI capabilities, as the only nation capable of developing a skynet, and assuming no other nation would be able to do it.
The scenario I'm positing (which, again, I am highly sceptical of; I was steelmanning) looks something like "maybe we could have agreed to not make nukes if they'd been invented in peacetime, but they were invented in wartime, they were used because you can't negotiate arms control in the middle of a war, and then that set the precedent". There's evidence currently that drone swarms are very potent, and using AI to control the whole swarm (i.e. a Skynet) is an obvious further force multiplier. The questions are whether hammering out a "drone swarms are warcrimes" treaty is possible to begin with*, whether it's plausible it'd be followed in case of a later hot war (although preventing stockpiling in peacetime is itself good, just less good), and whether it's plausible a Taiwan war would go on conventionally long enough for drone swarms to be a big thing (as opposed to a quick peace, or escalation into a nuclear exchange which would end the war and greatly ease tensions).
*The historical record isn't very reassuring here, but on the other hand note that if we can't co-ordinate to ban actual Skynets then we're probably doomed anyway.
I think you overestimate the value of negotiating. Things like chemical weapons weren't largely phased out because they were effective but high-minded people managed to convince the generals not to use them. They were phased out because generals discovered dumping explosives on the enemy is much more efficient, and the fact that for some reason high-minded people hate them less for it is just a pleasant bonus. So if the generals find out AI-controlled drone swarms are effective, they start using it, and no negotiation will help any, because the defectors would just smash the opposition with their hordes of AI-controlled drones and laugh at all the signed treaties. Negotiations hold when the BATNA is bad. If you have a functioning army of AI-controlled drones, and your opponents don't, you BATNA doesn't look that bad.
The only alternative is that some superpower for some reason would threaten to smash anyone who uses the drones by other, no less effective, means and nobody would be able to withstand their might, but for some reason that superpower is reluctant to use AI-powered drones. That requires single pre-established superpower that has near-religious superstitions against the AI. It could happen that the US (or, if US keeps electing nonagenarians and obsessing about pronouns in the military, China) would take on itself such a role, but so far I don't see any signs of it happening. The US is not nearly powerful enough to pull off such things, and doesn't seem to want to be - half of the US wants to sit on their backyard and grill, and another half wants to destroy the Western civilization to atone for the sins of centuries past.
Giving up Taiwan would certainly prove once and for all that US is not that power. And would eliminate any reason to negotiate with the US - if we don't, what they'd do? Put a hashtag out on Twitter? Which would put the pressure on the US to develop their own drone swarms, because clearly all the bad guys aren't afraid of anything anymore and they are doing it, so we must too, or our grilling would be threatened, and that's unacceptable. Summarily, I don't see any scenario where US giving up does not raise the probability of any arms race. I can't think of any example where unilateral disarmament made the opponent more peaceful and less willing to develop and deploy new weaponry.
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