Episode 204: China

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Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. This week we're going to talk about a topic that is not only a major news story today, it has been a major news story throughout the last 50 years of American history, but particularly the last decade. And it's the story about the rise of China. Not simply the rise of the Chinese economy, but the rise of China as a military power, and the ways in which that rise has changed American calculations about security, stability, and democracy in Asia, and the ways in which recent events have perhaps shaken some of our historical assumptions about the relationship between the United States, China, Taiwan, and the region. We're joined by two scholars who are really experts, not simply on this issue, but have been thinking about the broader strategic environment in Asia for many years, and both of whom have also done groundbreaking scholarly work and policy advising around these issues. We're really fortunate to have them with us, and they have written a brand new book that I've just read and want to recommend to all of our listeners, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China. The authors and our guests today are Hal Brands and Michael Beckley. Hal and Mike, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having us, Jeremi.

Thanks so much for having us, Jeremi.

Hal Brands is the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He writes frequently for Bloomberg Opinion and for many other publications, often with Mike, often with other authors, often just himself. He's written a number of important books that I've been fortunate enough to read, some I've even imposed on my students, The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great Power Rivalry Today. Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order, he co-wrote that with Charlie Edel, who we've also had on the podcast, and American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump. Those are just three of his recent books that I particularly like. Michael Beckley is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Hal is also a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. I should have said that. Previously, Mike was an International Security Fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and he worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Rand Corporation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He continues to advise the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Defense. And Mike's first book, which is an excellent book, I highly recommend, Unrivaled, Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower, that was written in 2018. And Mike and Hal have followed that up, as I said, with this new book, hot off the presses, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China. Before we turn to our conversation with Hal and Mike about China, Taiwan, and U.S. policy, we have, of course, Mr. Zachary's scene-setting poem. What's your poem title today, Zachary? ("Probably.") Let's hear it.

In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, Who wakes up in cold sweats and worries silently. The sky will fall and no one here will notice it at all. In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, Who stares themself in the face, pieces in the wrong place, And sees in the mirror's trace a blurry line of missing lace. In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, Who sees the ocean from the pier, who watches fishes swim below. Couldn't we be freer like the tuna in the undertow? In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, Who writes poetry and imagines winter scenes, Who hears and sees and sniffs adventure in the breeze. But his poetry is in his head, the winter scene he dreams in bed. And I can say what I can hear and seek adventure without fear. In China there is probably someone who thinks like me, And all I can say is probably someday there will be peace.

What's your poem about, Zachary?

My poem is really about the similarities, the societal similarities that can be lost when it comes to superpower rivalry, but also the cold realities that still define that world and the ways in which even though we may be more similar and have more in common than we think that these rivalries will continue.

Right, the geopolitics still create barriers to cooperation. (Yes, inevitably.) Well, and that's exactly front and center where Hal and Mike's book lands. Hal, maybe we can start with you. I was very taken early on in the book and in your other writings, you and Mike, you talk about the "Chinese dream." And I think it's a way of trying to understand Chinese strategic aims, the way Chinese leadership thinks about its place in the world. How should we understand what you mean by this concept of the "Chinese dream?"

It's a good question and I think it gets at one of the empirical or methodological difficulties in writing about China. Chinese intentions are often not as inscrutable as we think, but it is true that revisionist powers in general tend to have an incentive not to fully advertise what they intend to achieve over time. And the Chinese system doesn't have anything quite as explicit as the national security strategy or some of the strategic documents that the United States publishes, even though there are defense white papers and meaningful speeches and things of that sort. And so you have to piece it together a little bit from what is said and what is done and occasionally from what is not said.

And the way that we make sense of it in the book is that we should think about Chinese intentions, or Chinese aims, in four ways or as encompassing four different things. And the first one is just kind of what every authoritarian regime wants, which is to stay in power. If Xi Jinping were overthrown, if the CCP lost its grip on power, that would probably have fatal consequences for Chinese leaders. And so it's not surprising that basically every decision that the Chinese Communist Party makes is filtered through the prism of what will this do for the party's legitimacy and power. But that doesn't mean that China has purely domestically focused or limited ambitions.

I think a second goal would be making China whole again, so to speak, basically getting back the pieces of China, whether those are Taiwan or Hong Kong or parts of disputed border regions with India that in the CCP's narrative were wrested away from China when it was weak and divided and must now come back to China for China's national rejuvenation to be complete. Some of those territorial claims are actually pretty extensive. They include, for instance, basically all of the South China Sea. And so it can be hard to distinguish that second goal from a third goal, which is carving out a sphere of influence in Asia, basically a domain in which Chinese interests are privileged and other great powers, particularly the United States, are kicked to the margin. Xi once referred to this as Asia for Asians, which is, it appears to be something of a geopolitical euphemism for a region in which China is supreme because the United States has been evicted geopolitically from the region.

And then the fourth goal and the most ambitious one is to make China the most powerful country in the world. That's probably a longer term objective. To the extent that the CCP talks about it, something that it talks about happening on something like a 15 to 30-year time frame from now. But it's become more and more explicit and harder and harder to miss in a lot of the things that the CCP says and in many of the things that it does as well.

So, Professor Beckley, it sounds like China, while portraying itself as the anti-imperialist power, is in many ways molding its sphere of influence on a sort of traditional imperialism.

Yeah, I think Chinese leaders, almost across the board, view China's role in the world as being naturally one of greatness. And China, it's important to remember, is a revanchist power. According to the CCP's narrative, there are lost Chinese territories that one way or another have to be reabsorbed, as Hal has pointed out. And this current situation where the United States is currently the dominant power in China has to grow as a regional power and play by the rules that it didn't have a hand in writing, they see as a giant historical anomaly that they want to set straight. And I think, in addition to all the points that Hal raised, I think it's important to note just how frequently Chinese analysts and leaders look to the United States as the main threat to that "Chinese dream." I mean, part of this is just the obvious fact that the United States prevents the reincorporation of Taiwan, that the U.S. Navy is in the South China Sea, but I think it also reflects historical legacies that color how Chinese analysts and leaders view the United States. There is definitely a dominant sort of strategic culture that tends to portray Eastern culture as harmonious and Pacific and Western culture as inherently militaristic. I think there's a holdover from the Marxist teaching that many of the leaders were raised on that views capitalist powers as inherently imperialist and just using China for its resources and sucking it dry.

And then there's the offensive realist. I mean, John Mearsheimer is incredibly popular on Chinese syllabi. Every school that I've seen in China always has The Tragedy of Great Power Politics on it. And so there's this strong assumption that a country as powerful as the United States will definitely try to hold China down and then they can find all types of evidence for that. So just the key role that the United States plays, I think it's incredible how often it comes up when you start reading through Chinese strategic writings.

And Mike, if I could follow up on that, because I think it leads right into another key part of your book. You and Hal argue here, and I think it's a really important argument I haven't seen others articulate as clearly, that the Chinese are not just a rising power, you call them a "risen power," which is to say they have increased their potential, they've increased their power, but they've now plateaued and are facing headwinds and sources of decline. And that in this position of having risen and now at their position of maximum opportunity, this makes them particularly belligerent because of their fear of decline. Did I get that right? And can you elaborate on that?

That's absolutely right. A key point of the book is that double digit growth rates and a rapid rise is not the norm for any country and certainly not for China. In fact, most of Chinese history is very much the opposite. It's strife and poverty. I mean, really from the first Opium War in 1839 until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, China's getting ripped apart by imperialist powers and internal conflicts that are among the worst civil wars in recorded history. Even after China unifies under communist rule in 1949, it almost immediately becomes the main enemy of the United States through the Korean War. And then when China's alliance with the Soviet Union falls apart in 1960, China is the main enemy of both Cold War superpowers. And so it's not until you get to the 1970s that China is not isolated, surrounded, and impoverished. And so in the book, we try to show that China's exceptional rise since the 1970s was the result of exceptional circumstances that we think are all starting to turn into liabilities that will drag China down.

I mean, since the 1970s, you've had US engagement and that was the start also of the period of hyper globalization. So China suddenly has these opportunities to really become the workshop of the world and export its goods all over the place. You have a Chinese government after the death of Mao in 1976 that says, we don't wanna do another cultural revolution, let's try reform and opening. And so they commit to a sort of smarter form of autocracy that's more technocratic and rewards good governance, especially economically. You have the greatest demographic dividend in history with something like 10 to 15 workers per retiree in China's population in the 90s and 2000s. Most countries don't get anywhere close to 5 to 1. And then you just had relative self-sufficiency in resources and easy access to those raw materials made growth very cheap.

But now all of those tailwinds that propelled China's rise are becoming headwinds. China's plowed through its resources. Half of its water and arable land, its oil are gone. It's the largest importer of food and energy. It's running out of people. That 10 to one ratio of workers to retirees is gonna collapse to two to one by the late 2030s. The government obviously is sliding back towards this sort of brutal dictatorship and a Maoist cult of personality that is gonna sacrifice future economic growth just to centralize power in Xi Jinping's hands. And then most importantly, the world is just starting to become belatedly a less welcoming environment. The United States used to engage China. Now I would argue it's essentially engaged in neo-containment of China. And many other major economies are following suit to varying degrees. China now faces thousands of new trade and investment barriers today that it didn't even as recently as 10 years ago. So from hyper-globalization to this sort of Cold War II scenario. These things are already dragging down China's growth and we think that they're actually gonna get worse in the years ahead.

But Professor Brands, I think we've also seen China reach out to other parts of the world, in particular developing countries, to try and increase its grip, which could be seen as an aspect of this imperialism, but does seem to show at least that there is a space for China, if not in the traditional centers of power, in new centers of power.

I think that's right. And I think one way of conceptualizing that is to view it as essentially a counter-containment strategy. And so Mike laid out all the ways in which countries, particularly the world's advanced democracies, have become more and more skeptical of Chinese intentions and more and more willing to do things to limit the reach of Chinese power, even when they're not willing to say explicitly that that's what they're doing.

It's interesting that Mike's absolutely right, that we're pursuing a form of containment vis-a-vis China, but we absolutely won't call it that and most other countries won't call it that either. And so the question for Beijing becomes, and this is something that the Chinese have been thinking about for a long time, what are areas where China can expand its influence, where it's less likely to run up against entrenched resistance from the United States and other countries? And the developing world looks like a pretty good place to do that from Beijing's perspective for a variety of reasons. One reason is that democratic governance tends to be less firmly entrenched in the developing world than it is in the developed world.

And so you have governments that may be more autocratic, they may simply be more corrupt, but they're easier targets in some ways for the expansion of Chinese influence. But even where that's not the case, there is a real desire for relations with China because China has things that the developing world needs, whether that's trade or it could be surveillance technology, it could be a variety of things. And so one of the areas where we think you'll see a particular Chinese push in the coming years is to try essentially to create an economic and technological sphere of influence that encompasses much of the developing world.

And to give you one example of this, you only have to go back about three years, maybe even a little less than that, to remember that there was a time when it appeared that much of the advanced democratic world might actually fall into part of a Chinese technological sphere of influence by allowing Huawei or other Chinese companies like ZTE to build out important parts of their 5G telecommunications network. That danger has been averted now for the most part because most governments in Europe, for instance, realized with an assist from COVID that they did not wanna be technologically dependent on a company that is enthralled to the CCP. But that argument has proven less persuasive in the developing world. Price may be the all important consideration for countries in Southeast Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa that are making choices about the future of their telecommunications networks. And so the fact that the CCP subsidizes companies like Huawei to such a high degree allows them to essentially come in with lower prices than firms in the developed world can. And so you may end up with a situation where China finds that its technological influence is easier to spread in the developing world than in the advanced democracies.

So Hal, just following up on those excellent points, your book, you and Mike argue that again, China's reached a stage as Mike described, where it has had this extraordinary rise, but now it's fearful of its own decline and its own problems internally. And so that encourages a more aggressive behavior and you draw analogies to late 19th century Germany, to Wilhelmine Germany and to Japan in the early 20th century in that part of the book. Why do you think that argument makes more sense than the argument that had been put forth by people like Kurt Campbell, who is now Joe Biden's key advisor on these issues, the argument he had made years ago about China becoming a more responsible stakeholder as it becomes more dependent upon just what you're talking about, Hal, upon international connections, that globalization will in a sense, almost Gulliver-like tie the Chinese into so many parts of the international system that they won't want to destabilize this system because they themselves are now a part of it? Why do you not find that persuasive? Why should we see the revisionist aggression as more of the accurate description for today?

Well, I think the basic problem with the responsible stakeholder thesis, which was first explicitly articulated by Bob Zoellick back in 2005, and in some ways provided the intellectual architecture for a lot of US policy toward China during the post-Cold War era. The challenge is that there's just less and less evidence to support it all the time. And so if the responsible stakeholder thesis bore out, we should expect to see a China that becomes more satisfied and more reconciled to the existing international system and all the things that go with it as it became richer, more powerful, more integrated into the system. Because the logic of the idea was that once China saw all of the things it could achieve simply by inserting itself economically into the existing order, it would lose any incentive to overturn or challenge that order.

But what we've seen, and this is a trend that goes back really to 2008, 2009, and the aftermath of the global financial crisis, is a China that has become much, much more assertive over time. We saw that beginning in the South China Sea at the outset of the Obama presidency in a way that has really continued. We've seen it very markedly with respect to Taiwan, particularly in recent years. And of course, this is something that's been in the news recently with Speaker Pelosi's visit and a fairly bellicose Chinese response. And we've seen it globally in things like the Wolf Warrior diplomacy and China's increasing use of economic sanctions to punish countries that displease it diplomatically or otherwise.

And so there is just less and less evidence as time goes on to suggest that China is reconciling itself to the existing state of things. And in fact, Chinese leaders have been quite explicit in saying that they are not reconciling themselves to the existing state of things. You can find Chinese officials saying that the US-led international order is a suit that no longer fits, that it basically has to be replaced or substantially modified in order for China to achieve its national objectives. And so the revisionist nature of Chinese foreign policy becomes clearer and clearer every day. And that's going to push China in a more disruptive direction as its power peaks.

Mike, do you see the current situation in Taiwan as highlighting that point? I mean, your book came out just as Speaker Pelosi visited Taiwan, just as we've seen this extraordinary increase, actually, in Chinese military exercises around Taiwan. How do you fit that into the story?

We see that as one of the most important manifestations of this peaking power trap. China is coming off of about a decade of a massive military buildup. It's been churning out warships at a rate that we haven't seen from another country since World War II. And it's been pumping up on ammunition and developing the ability to surge amphibious forces and potentially carry out a blockade of the island. On the other hand, this window of opportunity that China has because of its own military buildup and the sort of slow pace of U.S. and Taiwanese responses in terms of spreading out their forces, making them less vulnerable to a Chinese Pearl Harbor-style attack on U.S. bases on Okinawa and Taiwan. This window of opportunity may not stay open for very long because for one thing, the U.S. and Taiwan have ambitious plans to revamp their defenses to make them much more resilient by the 2030s.

And at the same time, a lot of those strategic headwinds I talked about earlier are gonna really start to kick in within a decade or so. And so China will be in a position where it could be economically stagnant, demographically collapsing. Xi Jinping will be in his 80s by the early 2030s. And so there's just a lot pointing at this period in the 2020s as being China's vital strategic window if it does in fact intend to use force to bring Taiwan into the fold. And for a little bit, this window will open slightly wider because the United States is about to go through a mass retirement of cruisers, guided missile submarines, bombers. Many of these things were built under the Reagan administration. So there's just this moment of sort of maximum vulnerability from the U.S. and Taiwanese side. And just given this, what from a Chinese perspective is a steady slide towards upping Taiwan's international status, upping the U.S. relationship with Taiwan, upping Japan's relationship with Taiwan. Even the Europeans are sending delegations there. They just are likely to feel that peaceful reunification is becoming less and less likely. And so they have to wonder, should we start flexing some of that military muscle that we spent several trillion dollars building up while we still can? And so for us, this is just a moment of maximum danger in the Taiwan Strait.

And Professor Beckley, how does the situation in Putin's Russia and the war in Ukraine fit into this sort of Chinese self-assessment of their position?

Yeah, I think there's the lessons that we would hope China would learn, and then there's the lessons I fear that China may have learned from that. I mean, obviously we would hope they would learn that conquest is really difficult and that the West is more united than maybe a lot of people previously thought prior to the invasion. But what I fear is that one, they've learned you've got to go big and brutal from the start. Putin's, one of his mistakes was to kind of stumble into Ukraine on multiple axes and have this really uncoordinated operation and give the Ukrainians time to pick apart those offensive forces. So China may say, look, if we're going to go, we got to go hard. That means hitting American bases to cripple their combat power early. That means pummeling Taiwan with an air and missile barrage. And then second, do not allow our target to be resupplied in the way that the Ukrainians are being resupplied. So that means sealing off any possibility of convoys coming in. I think that's part of the reason why China's been showing off that it can surround Taiwan on all sides, including on the East coast, where presumably the US would have tried to resupply Taiwan in a conflict. And then third is just to rattle the nuclear saber early and often because that seems to induce caution on the American side. So those could be the lessons that they learn. I think, you know, sober defense analysts have to just assume the worst about that and proceed accordingly. Obviously, maybe it's induced some caution, but just given the show of force that we've seen over the last couple of weeks, I just, it just seems like they are, you know, gonna conclude the worst from it.

It's so fascinating and horrifying, I have to say, listening to the two of you and reading your book, because, and I think this is your intention in part, right? Those of us who are historians, it echoes World War I in so many ways, the notion of windows of opportunity, peak power, a sense of a moment when the enemy is more vulnerable than other moments, the desire to go hard, go fast, a sort of early blitzkrieg way of thinking of things. How, in light of this bleak scenario, you and Mike are clearly not determinists. You clearly, as good historians, believe there are choices and contingencies. And the last couple of chapters of your book are about what the United States should do, you see, and I'm guessing, as a Cold War historian like myself, Hal, this is really something you've spent a lot of time thinking about, you see lessons from the Cold War for the United States. What are some of the top lessons that American citizens and policymakers should take from the Cold War for thinking about these issues today?

I'm glad you asked that, because I think one of the misconceptions that sometimes emerges from reading the stuff we write is that we think that war with China is inevitable, and that is absolutely not what we are saying here. I think our hope in writing the book is to inform people that the choices that the United States makes will have a powerful impact on the choices that China makes in the coming years. And so what we need to be thinking about doing is making a set of choices that will reduce the windows of opportunity that China may see militarily and otherwise later in this decade, so that even a more risk-acceptant Xi Jinping will be deterred from making choices that could lead to a war that would just be utterly catastrophic. We want to deter a war, right, rather than fight one.

And it's interesting to look back at the Cold War, because there are some parallels between the situation that the United States faces now and the situation that it faced during the early Cold War. I think most American officials during the early Cold War believed that the U.S. system would prove stronger than the Soviet system over time, but there were moments when the geopolitical balance appeared extremely precarious, either because Western Europe was in danger of outright economic collapse in 1947, 1948, in a way that might've opened the door to Soviet hegemony in Europe, or during the Korean War, when it appeared that the United States was facing a window of military vulnerability that it had to close very quickly. And so there are a handful of lessons that we take away from this, but I think one of the things that becomes really apparent from looking at the history of the early Cold War is not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. And so a lot of the legendary policies that the United States pursued during this period, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, things of that nature, were not initiatives that were planned for months or years beforehand. They were things that were basically slapped together in moments of crisis, because the alternative to moving quickly and decisively looked far, far worse. George Kennan's policy planning staff came up with the outline of the Marshall Plan in about three weeks in May, 1947. NATO actually was a European initiative that the United States decided to sign onto. And the sense of the time was that the United States had to be willing to take risks. It had to be willing to work with new partners, including enemies that it had just defeated, like Japan and West Germany. And it had to be able to move quickly to close windows of vulnerability before they became too dangerous. And that's a similar lesson the United States needs to take away in thinking about the China challenge today.

It's interesting, if you look at the Taiwan Strait, for instance, the problem isn't that Taiwan is indefensible. It actually is a natural fortress. It would be quite possible to defend Taiwan if the United States and Taipei make the right choices. The problem is that we have not moved fast enough to address some of the vulnerabilities that have opened up, and so one of the things that we do in the book is try to explain in some detail how the United States, Taiwan, and other democratic countries actually could mount a pretty credible defense of that island, and thereby hopefully deter China from attacking by using capabilities that mostly exist today, and so we don't need to wait for perfect exquisite military capabilities to become available next decade. We just need to move faster with the things that we have or can quickly develop in order to make an invasion or an assault on Taiwan look prohibitively costly for Beijing.

And you give some very concrete suggestions in the book, which I encourage listeners to look at, and also you quote Dean Acheson quite often, and I think it's always, always beneficial to quote Dean Acheson, in particular on the importance of showing strength sometimes to prevent worse outcomes from from occurring. Mike, on this line of thinking, though, I wanted to ask you, how do we prevent ourselves from over committing in the other direction? One of the criticisms that Hal and myself and others and you have made about American Cold War policymaking is, although we did good work in many places and other places we sometimes overcommitted, went into wars we shouldn't have been in, and there were often domestic costs as well, and so you know the very period Hal is referring to in the late 40s is also the rise of McCarthyism in the United States, and I know, and I'm sure you and Hal know this better than I do, you know, for many Chinese Americans talk of more explicit American containment policy toward China raises worries about anti-Chinese sentiment within the United States, which we saw a lot of evidence of during the pandemic. How do we prevent ourselves from over committing in the other direction?

I think on the domestic factor, just making sure that you're separating the Chinese Communist Party from the Chinese people, and that our main problem is with some of the policies that the CCP is pursuing, not China necessarily as a nation. In terms of the, you know, we also try to derive lessons from history of what not to do, and you know, the United States imposed a massive oil embargo on Japan in 1941 and that pushed Tokyo to attack Pearl Harbor to try to survive, and today the United States could have a comprehensive tech embargo on China to try to trash its economy. It could enact across-the-board trade sanctions against it. It could even take some provocative pages from the Cold War playbook and start a huge covert action program to stir up Tibetan resistance, we hear resistance, foment internal violence, and sow chaos in Chinese society. And I think any of those measures would risk catalyzing the exact kind of conflict that we're trying to avoid.

So we try to argue that a danger zone strategy, you're trying to prevent war from breaking out, not catalyze it, and so you have to balance strength and caution, and so first of all, it's you have to prioritize that you should really just be focusing on key areas where if China scores a near-term success, it could radically upend the long-term trends that we currently see as favorable overall to the United States, so prioritizing a defense of Taiwan, making sure that China is not able to carve out this sort of authoritarian tech empire across the global south, but if China wants to spend lavishly on white elephant infrastructure projects across the world through Belt and Road, I think those are things the United States doesn't necessarily have to oppose everywhere and at all times. And there's also limits that the United States can draw in terms of engaging in political warfare with the CCP and potentially destabilizing the regime in ways that would make it extremely desperate in the short run, and then I think you just have to have an eyes wide open approach to diplomacy, you know, if you can build the strength and then negotiate from that position of strength, then you can do things like have you really work on crisis management and confidence building mechanisms, military to military exchanges, hotlines, all the classic kind of ways to buffer geopolitical competition. I think can be done as long as you're coming at it from a position of strength that doesn't give your rival this potential window to do a smash and grab operation over something like Taiwan in the short term.

I really appreciate it in the book how both of you talk about the importance of maintaining diplomatic connections, because I do think one of the lessons of the Cold War is that even in the worst moments of US-Soviet rivalry, talking was important. Diplomatic connections mattered, and the moments when we had least connection were often some of the most dangerous. And I think it's a point you emphasize, and I want to emphasize too, that as one is acting perhaps to strengthen Taiwan's defense, that doesn't mean you stop talking to the Chinese. In fact, it means you talk to the Chinese while you're doing that, and hope that you can make diplomatic progress at that moment. You both make the point in your book that if at some point the Chinese were willing to agree, as the United States did with Cuba, for example, in 1962 to a non-invasion pledge, that might be something the United States would want to talk about as a compromise agreement. I'm correct on this, right, that you, you both see diplomacy as a key part of the story, even as this relationship might become more militarized, yes?

Absolutely, and I think one of the lessons of the Cold War is that diplomacy isn't silly peacenik stuff, it's actually quite useful from a competitive perspective, as well. It's a way of keeping your allies on side. It's a way of convincing your own domestic public that you are actually trying to exhaust all avenues short of confrontation for getting what you want. It's a way of maintaining contact with the other side, so that you know when a breakthrough may be possible. And so, as Mike said, you've got to have your eyes wide open about it, and we shouldn't think that simply talking to the CCP is going to lead them to change how they think about their interests, but the strategic arguments for doing so, I think, are very compelling.

And so I guess that brings us to the last question. We always like to close on an optimistic note. One of our purposes each week is to show that history opens options for thinking about policy and society and democracy, and that history offers us a reason to be optimistic, not the pessimistic image that historians sometimes have. I take from your book a very optimistic point at the end that the issues of surrounding China and Taiwan that we've talked about today are actually issues where there's a lot of agreement in Washington across party lines. Your book is not about Democrats versus Republicans. I know that that was intentional in the way you put it together, and I think it's also accurate. Maybe, Mike, I'll start with you, then we'll go to you, Hal. Where do you see the possibilities for this issue, maybe being one of those places where we can finally return to what might seem like more normal bipartisan discussions about strategy and foreign policy in the United States? How do you see that happening?

Well, I do think one silver lining of geopolitical competition is it tends to promote unity domestically, you know. I think it's no surprise that polarization goes off the charts basically after the end of the Cold War, when we can suddenly turn on each other. So one would hope that if there is this bipartisan agreement among Democrats and Republicans to get tough with China, that it can promote cooperation on on other issues, and I also think it extends to to allies, you know, another silver lining of Russia's recent offensive and China's belligerent behavior is it's forced Western allies to get back together and to really start talking about democracy a lot more than they used to, using that as a focal point of building and revamping an international order that makes the world safe for democracy, that means everything from creating new trade and investment regimes that basically prioritize democratic forms of governance and standards in those, it means more defense cooperation among like-minded democracies to uphold the law of the sea, and so what, what you would hope is that you could have this period of tension, but one that doesn't boil over to catastrophic conflict, and at the same time the fire of that geopolitical competition can actually be channeled in productive directions, everything from international institution building, comedy within countries, as well as a huge increase in research and development spending on all kinds of great technologies that will make life so much better for all of us over the long run, so one would hope that this could be channeled in productive directions, and that's sort of where we leave at the end, saying, look, this, here's some ways that you could actually make that more likely.

(Hal, your thoughts?) Yeah, well, the book I wrote before this was about lessons of the Cold War, and one of the most hopeful lessons of the Cold War is that geopolitical rivalry gives you an incentive to do things you ought to do anyway to improve your own society, and so the United States, for all of the nasty things it did to itself during the Cold War, also did some really constructive things, it invested massively in its own future by funding the world's best university education system, by developing big infrastructure projects like the interstate highway system, and through a variety of other means. The Cold War, in this case, and this is a contested argument, but one that I think it's true. Actually, helped the United States become a better version of itself, even though the progress was uneven. I hope very much that we will see the competition with China as an opportunity to do something similar today. I think there has been some initial progress in that direction with the passage of chips just recently, which Mike referred to, of course, there have also been some ugly aspects of the turn toward competition, including a surge in anti-Asian violence and a variety of other things, and so sort of the angels and demons always compete with each other, but we have been successful in the past of using competition as a way to strengthen ourselves internally, and that's the precedent we ought to try to emulate today.

And I think Zachary, that's a perfect place to turn to you to close us out here, as as a young person who I know thinks and talks about these issues quite a lot. Do you see issues surrounding China, and I don't just mean strategic issues, broader issues, economic issues, issues related to the COVID. Do you see those issues as some of the issues that are dividing us now, or do you see them as actually, as Hal and Mike are saying, as a potential area where we could come together and find agreement?

I think it is a potential area where we can come together and find some sort of agreement. I think the problem is often we see these geopolitical conflicts as inevitable, and we refuse to see the options that we actually have, the decisions that are are still yet to be made, and I do think that there is hope that this conflict can be avoided, and I don't think that we're going to have the same sort of entrenched social competition that we saw during the Cold War, namely because I think the United States, or at least parts of it, are much more connected to the Chinese people than we were to the Soviet people or to the Russian people.

Right? And our economies are certainly much more.. this is this is a point John Gaddis made a long time ago, that one of the unique features of the Cold War is that the United States and the Soviet Union actually had very few economic and trade interconnections, that's of course not the case for the US and China right now. I think your point, Zachary, is very well taken, and it echoes what both Mike and Hal said here on the podcast, and say in their wonderful book, which is that we study history, and their book is filled with useful historical analysis. We study history because it shows us that human beings have choices, they're difficult choices to make, and I think our discussion today is about the difficult choices the United States, as a democracy, has to make in order to avoid war, in order to avoid conflict, and hopefully build a more stable international system, where perhaps there's more space, as Mike just said, for a discussion about democracy, as well. I think this book and this discussion open up so many avenues, really, for thinking about current conditions in a useful way, in a way that's not simply about name calling and a kind of determinist assumption about war. And so I really, really appreciate the conversation. I highly recommend the book to all of our listeners. Again, it's called Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, written by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, filled with contemporary information, but of course, the part that's always most valuable: historical knowledge and research that's useful in understanding the present. Mike and Hal, thank you so much for joining us today.

(Thanks, Jeremi) Thanks, Jeremi. Thanks, Zach, too really appreciate it.

And Zachary, thank you for your poem. And thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harris Codini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time. Bye.