transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:04] China is one of the 21st century's most consequential nations. It has never been more important to understand how the country is governed and what its leaders and its people actually want and believe. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpecks China's evolving political system and the trajectory of China's domestic and foreign policy. I'm your host, Henrietta Levin, Senior Fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. This is Pekingology. I am very pleased to be joined today by Dr. Eyck Freymann. Eyck is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford and author of the very new book Defending Taiwan, A Strategy to Prevent War with China. The book offers a strikingly comprehensive perspective on China's thinking about Taiwan and how the United States with its allies can effectively deter worst-case cross-strait scenarios. As we get closer to 2027, the year by which President Xi has instructed the PLA to have the capability of pursuing what Beijing calls reunification by force. And as we get closer to Xi's legacy setting fourth term, which will also begin in 2027, it seems like a good time to dig into the limitlessly complex issue of deterrence across the Taiwan Strait. And I am thrilled that we have Eyck here to help us do that. Eyck, it is great to see you.
Speaker 2:
[01:40] Great to see you as well. Thank you so much for having me on.
Speaker 1:
[01:43] So we like to start all of our episodes with a personal question. So how did you originally become interested in China and Taiwan? And how did you become the person who writes quite a few books now about cross-strait deterrence?
Speaker 2:
[01:58] Well, I got into China when I was an undergrad. I didn't really know what to do with myself, so I took a gap year. And the year originally was intended to start in Europe, involve a trans-Siberian railway journey to Beijing. But then Putin invaded Crimea and I flew to Beijing instead. I did a homestay with a friend of a friend. And, you know, I loved my time in China. I loved the language, which I was trying to teach myself, and the richness of the civilization, the history. I was awed by the scale of the economic transformation and the good humor and optimism and warm, welcoming attitude of the people. But I also came away with an eerie appreciation for China's ambition, for its sense of historical insecurity. I came away with an awareness that history is a very contested, sensitive thing in China that is hugely important to the legitimacy of the regime. I came away with this sort of abiding fascination for Leninist propaganda, something that has been sort of in a lot of my academic work since. And I came away with a sense that what I was learning in my classes in college wasn't really according with the China that I was seeing. That this was a country with essentially revisionist ambitions that believed that the future was unfolding before it and that anyone that stood in its way, including the United States, would have to get out of the way. I came indirectly to the issue of Taiwan. My first book was about China's foreign investment campaign, the Belt and Road. I sort of went on the trails of that, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Greece. In my graduate studies, I did my PhD about Greenland actually. And I came to the Taiwan issue because, to be very honest with you, people told me I should go because they had amazing food.
Speaker 1:
[03:43] The food is pretty good.
Speaker 2:
[03:44] The more I learned about Taiwan, not only did the more attached that I feel to the place, but the more I felt that the popular conversation in the United States in the same way that it hadn't been getting China right wasn't getting Taiwan right either. And that we were thinking of this as a military problem when it was really about a whole lot more. And one of the things that I like to do in all my work is collaborate with smart people who have expertise in functional areas that I don't have. And so I began this set of collaborations with people who know more than me about the military, about aspects of relevant economic history, about aspects of the tech, to try to educate myself and realized in time that putting the pieces together might actually be a useful contribution. So run that clock forward for several years and here we are.
Speaker 1:
[04:30] Here we are. Well, diving into the book itself, I'm hoping we can start with Beijing's perspective. So what do you see as President Xi's real bottom line objectives when it comes to Taiwan?
Speaker 2:
[04:45] I think China's long-term aspirations for Taiwan are highly consistent between Xi Jinping and his predecessors. China has a one China principle. It says there's only one China in the world, that Taiwan is part of China and that the only legitimate government is the CCP regime based in Beijing. End of story. Xi Jinping differs from his predecessors in that he has more ambition to be the one to bring Taiwan home, and that he has more tools at his disposal, that he's developed over the last 13 years in power to accomplish the goal. But there's a whole lot more continuity than distinction between Xi Jinping and his predecessors.
Speaker 1:
[05:23] You mentioned in the book while we're talking about Xi's goals, that he has incorporated reunification, what Beijing calls reunification, into his vision of national rejuvenation, which China is supposed to have achieved by 2049, the centenary of the founding of the PRC. But there are a million other things that China is also supposed to have achieved under this rubric of national rejuvenation, bearing on economic growth, environmental protection, international influence, like a really long list. And China likes to emphasize that Taiwan is the reddest of red lines, the most important issue. But ultimately, how would you expect Xi and the party to weigh their political objectives regarding Taiwan against these other elements of national rejuvenation since a war, a conflict over Taiwan would obviously run counter to those other priorities?
Speaker 2:
[06:22] Thank you for starting there, Henrietta, because that's the key argument of the book. And I think it's a frequent misunderstanding about Xi Jinping's preferences. The scope and the scale of Xi Jinping's political ambition are absolutely staggering. They cover pretty much every domain of human endeavor, from technology to economic development, to cultural flourishing, to the reform of international institutions. Xi Jinping wants China to win every gold medal in the Olympics, and every silver medal, and every bronze. And Taiwan is the keystone in the arch of this project, because it's the unfinished business of the Civil War, because Taiwan's very existence, as a thriving, peaceful, technologically advanced, westernized, democratic place with rule of law, right across the water from the PRC, stands as a living, breathing counter example, as proof that the Chinese people are in fact ready for democracy, and that a thriving Chinese democracy can exist peacefully and integrate successfully with the modern western world. So the question is how Taiwan's unification, or as Xi Jinping would put it, reunification, remember Taiwan has never been unified in the past with the PRC, should be sequenced with the other goals that comprise rejuvenation. And there are scenarios in which Xi Jinping believes or persuades himself that Taiwan is at risk of slipping away. That may be because Taiwan elects a quote unquote separatist, he might declare independence, because the United States formalizes a military alliance with Taiwan, because various factors lead China's power to peak and decline. I don't happen to believe that Xi Jinping thinks that way. Based on every open source account that I have read, every species ever given, he's an optimist. He thinks the forces of history are pushing inexorably forward towards national rejuvenation, which means there is sometime sensitivity. He'd like to achieve it during his lifetime. He'll be 96 in 2049. But day by day, month by month, year by year, he can afford to be patient. I think therefore the key to deterring him is to persuade him that patience serves his purposes, that patience is the surest way to achieve his goals. And it's advantageous here that the party has been playing a rhetorical game with describing the status quo to its own people for the past 75 years. The party claims that Taiwan is separated from China, but it's not fully separated. And the status quo, while uncomfortable, is not unacceptable. It's far less unacceptable than if Taiwan were actually formally to declare independence. And in the party's accounting of events, Taiwan is in a tunnel and it can't move backwards, and there's really only one way forward, which is towards formal integration. So what Xi Jinping would like to do is for Taiwan to accept some version of Hong Kong style One Country, Two Systems. And they've played with various formulations of this. There's one called One Country, Two Systems Taiwan Plan. And the idea here is that Taiwan is being offered a deal which doesn't require submitting totally to CCP micro control. They just need to sign a piece of paper that agrees in principle to their symbolic reunification. And then the quote unquote reintegration, whatever you want to call it, can be developed more slowly over time. But of course, as we learned from Hong Kong, as the people of Taiwan have seen in Hong Kong, those are weasel words. Once you sign such a piece of paper, once you agree to such a principle, your autonomy can be salami sliced away.
Speaker 1:
[10:15] I don't want to go down too deep a Hong Kong rabbit hole, but I think it is interesting in reflecting on how she thinks about trade-offs related to Taiwan, that at the same time that the party was putting forward these ideas of one country, two systems for Taiwan, it was effectively ending Hong Kong's autonomy under an analogous system, which seems to have kind of an obvious deterrent effect on Taiwanese decision-makers who might otherwise look at the one country, two systems option as a viable path. It's like, how does that look to you?
Speaker 2:
[10:51] I think it is hard to see Taiwan voluntarily signing up to give its autonomy away. But Taiwan could sign such an agreement under duress if it believed that the alternatives involved being bombarded, being invaded, being starved out, and that the outcome of that pain would be a loss of even more autonomy. There's many debates that divide the DPP, the current ruling party in Taiwan, from the KMT. But one of those debates is whether the Americans can be relied upon to come to the rescue. Fundamentally, in the KMT's view of the world, the Americans are not reliable. The cavalry isn't coming. And therefore, Taiwan has to negotiate with Beijing from a position of real weakness. And that means, as one senior KMT official told me, and I quote this in the book, you know, we don't want to marry you now. Please wait, but we promise we won't marry anyone else. And based on the pattern of facts, the US behavior in other regions, President Trump's comments about allies, I don't think that's, you know, in principle, not a crazy or irrational position to hold. You can also argue it the other way. But I don't think that even the most pro-dialogue, you know, quote unquote pro-Beijing members of the KMT are looking to sign away Taiwan's autonomy. They like Taiwan being a free, open society that can determine its own affairs in the world, that can run its own economy, but they believe that there are benefits to, you know, a more functional, constructive relationship with Beijing. And there is a possibility that these people and their attitudes are running the show in Taiwan after the next presidential election. The United States, you know, still has to navigate the fact that Taiwan's a democracy, the people of Taiwan get to choose. And if we want to support Taiwan's democracy, it means we need a policy and a deterrence framework that can function regardless of who Taiwan elects as president.
Speaker 1:
[12:55] We're going to get to that framework very shortly, but before we leave Beijing's perspective, I just wanted to ask you one more question. And that is exploring attention in which on the one hand, Beijing will always insist that the future of Taiwan and its relationship to the mainland is effectively a domestic question. But on the other hand, the PRC has invested a huge amount of energy into securing the endorsement of countries, governments around the world, especially in the global south, regarding its claims of sovereignty over Taiwan for the One China principle. And so why does Beijing care so much about Nigeria's position on what Beijing claims as a renegade province?
Speaker 2:
[13:45] I think it's of a piece with the CCP's congenital insecurity, that an international community of nations that has basically still got liberalism in its DNA, is going to be skeptical of aspects of how the CCP wants to run China. And for the CCP to feel truly secure on the world stage, they want the entire world, or as much of the world as possible, to reimagine some fundamental concepts on their terms. There's been some wonderful scholarship about Beijing's efforts to redefine the terms human rights and democracy in international fora, right? The PRC insists that in fact is a democracy, just a democracy with one party and no elections. And I think that's because they believe the international institutions of the post-war era, which were constructed without Communist China's participation and without really effective Soviet participation, are set up to exploit fissures and weaknesses in a Leninist system if it ever experiences internal tensions. I think Beijing learned that lesson from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Also it is about delegitimizing the possibility of an American-led coalition response to come to Taiwan's defense. The US current campaign against Iran is unprecedented, not only in that it's basically unilateral or being run just with Israel, but that President Trump isn't bothering to articulate a justification in international law or what have you for why he's doing what he's doing. If the United States wanted to go toe-to-toe with China and wanted to ask not only the American people but the people of US allies to suffer privation for a long period of time to confront China over Taiwan, it would matter whether or not that request was seen as politically, legally legitimate. If Taiwan can be excluded from international organizations, if the United States is making international law arguments that others don't accept, then that makes it easier in the crisis scenario or post-crisis scenario to drive wedges between the United States and its allies, which might still actually be more bound by these liberal institutional ideas. I think Beijing clearly sees this as the central prong of its strategy. I go into a lot of depth about this in the book. One of the, I think, most noxious examples is Beijing's attempt to retroactively reinterpret UN Resolution 2758. That was the UN resolution that transferred the quote unquote Chinese seat in the UN from Taipei to Beijing. And it was actually very carefully worded at the time not to take a position on the status of Taiwan. Beijing is trying to reinterpret that and get other countries to sign up for that reinterpretation as if to make clear that that is the UN rubber stamping PRC sovereignty over Taiwan. Why is that? I think Beijing anticipates that if there's any kind of Taiwan crisis, pretty quickly thereafter, there will be a UN General Assembly vote and that many countries which don't particularly care about the substance of this question will reason their way towards the opposition of the side that is offering them a better deal. And that if China can win a UN General Assembly vote decisively, it could really make the US look like a declining, irrational, violent hegemon lashing out. In other words, that the crisis over Taiwan wouldn't just result in China's reunification or whatever, it would also result in the grave delegitimization of American global leadership.
Speaker 1:
[17:30] It's a good reminder of the intrinsic connections or the inability to separate out China's regional ambitions, its cross-strait objectives, and then its vision of global Chinese leadership displacing American influence as well. It seems like you're telling a story in which all of these components are part of a single strategic vision and part of Beijing. Is that fair?
Speaker 2:
[17:54] I think that's exactly right. Taiwan is inseparable from all of these other things that Beijing is trying to do to revise the regional and global order to be more favorable to China and also less favorable to the United States. When Beijing talks about multipolarity, that's code for, hey Europe, hey India, you and I, we have a thing in common, which is we may disagree about this or that, but we can both agree that the international order as currently constructed gives too much power to the United States and not enough to the rest of us. So let's go in together on this thing called multipolarity. We can sort out our differences later. This is just one of many examples. The broader point, Taiwan is not just a cross-strait issue. The status of Taiwan and the question of how the status of Taiwan will be decided is deeply interrelated with the broader power dynamics in US-China relations and how the region and how the world are organized. And that is why the US-1 China policy, which we've had for 50 years, is very studiously careful to point out that the US doesn't take a position on Taiwan status. The US takes a principled decision on how Taiwan status is resolved. Because the way in which it is resolved is fundamentally important for these broader course of events. And so, there's more ways for Xi Jinping to skin this cat than just a military invasion. In fact, I think he's trying to move against Taiwan in the same way that he's trying to revise the rest of the international order, which is not all at once, but bit by bit.
Speaker 1:
[19:31] Which is a good segue into the core argument of your book, how you think about the US and its allies being best prepared to counter that strategy. And you summarize your argument as the US needs a more coherent grand strategy to prevent war. I appreciate you're not accusing Washington of total incoherence, but perhaps it can move further down the spectrum towards coherence. And the book opens with a list of failures on the part of the United States in its effort to deter PRC aggression against Taiwan. So, what do you see as the most important gaps in US strategy or where perhaps a good piece of strategy has underperformed in practice when it comes to cross-strait deterrence?
Speaker 2:
[20:23] Never in history has one country had so many advantages across so many domains of national power as the United States, from its economy to its leadership in emerging technologies to its universities, its conventional military power, its strategic nuclear power, its alliances, its role in the global financial architecture. I could go on. The United States is not the hyper power that it was in 1990 or 1995, but it's still very formidable. What we have lost is the ability to do integrated planning, to understand how these various tools of international power interrelate in complex scenarios. As a result, we find ourselves tangled up, playing clean up on problems that we should have seen coming, leaving so many low-hanging fruit in allied coordination unpicked. The Iran crisis perfectly illustrates this. The United States started a war with Iran without anticipating that Iran would do what it has been threatening to do for 40 years if attacked, which is to close the Strait of Hormuz, and that if Iran did this, it would disrupt global oil prices. How did we possibly fail to foresee this? The answer is we don't have an interagency process anymore. We basically don't have an NSC anymore. And if you don't have an NSC and you have military people making these decisions, you don't have the financial people and the energy people in the room to point this out and to suggest that some basic preparations have to be taken. Similarly, we could have coordinated with allies in advance about how we would deal with joint releases from stockpiles to even out the effect on energy markets. But instead, we had to carry out those negotiations in public after we had initiated the hostilities when we had minimal leverage pissing off our allies, frankly, in the process. So this is just an example of what happens when you don't have integrated strategies and institutions to do integrated strategies and ally coordination. The good news, as I argue in the book, is that if you just integrate various capabilities that we already have or could easily develop, you can make China's pathway to victory much murkier in some of the obvious scenarios. So what I'm calling for is above all more than any particular policy change, a change in process and a change in approach. China, by the way, doesn't have this problem. For all of its faults and for all of its mistakes, the CCP is very good at putting together actions from across domains and making them work together. We need to learn something from Xi Jinping in this respect.
Speaker 1:
[23:06] I liked your point in the book. You referenced the Biden administration's integrated deterrence strategy and then highlighted every way in which China has actually practiced integrated deterrence at times with more skill and efficacy than what the US has been able to manage. In many ways, their system makes it easier than it is here in the US, but I think still a valuable reminder of the strategic advantage that process can provide. In terms of what effective deterrence does look like in a cross-strait context, one, you really emphasize the importance of gray zone deterrence, and that being able to deter the full-scale D-Day style invasion of Taiwan isn't really completing the assignment that the US needs to be able to deter the kind of gray zone military coercion that we see so often against Taiwan in the status quo now, which is I think a question that has just bedeviled policy makers for years, not only with respect to Taiwan, but also in the South China Sea and other challenges in the Western Pacific. So I'm so glad you came up with a solution. What is it? How do we fix gray zone coercion?
Speaker 2:
[24:23] Well, first of all, I want to say we can't rule out the invasion scenario. And it's not just the invasion scenario. It's a whole family of kinetically violent scenarios, which could include bombardment of Taiwan and or of US and allied facilities in the invasion, decapitation attacks against Taiwan's political leadership. I talk in detail in the book about what a decapitation attack would look like, how it might play out, cyber attacks that could cripple Taiwan's critical infrastructure, economic warfare, which could happen in a targeted and gradual way, or in a medieval siege type way, like the mining of Taiwan's harbors, or the indiscriminate firing at any ships and aircraft coming to approach Taiwan. Beijing is developing a menu of options, and it can deploy them sequentially or in combination. If we want to actually be systematic in dealing with this terrifying risk factor, we have to address all of them, and the book talks about how we address all of them. But I think an invasion isn't plan A, and I think that for two reasons. First of all, the operational requirements of an invasion, which the book discusses in a lot of depth, are formidable. Beijing might pull off an invasion, and it would be easier if Taiwan's leadership just folded. But they don't have a clear pathway to victory, and there's a number of failure points that we in Taiwan and our partners could exploit. The other reason it's not plan A is that it doesn't accord with what Xi Jinping has been saying about Taiwan to domestic audiences for his entire time in power. He's made dozens of references to this, and he always uses the same language, and I think you should weigh that highly. He uses the term peaceful reunification. Peaceful reunification. And by that, he does not mean democratic, you know, voluntary unification. He means violent, coerced, but not bloody or not particularly bloody, which is another way of saying he wants it for free. He wants it for free. And why shouldn't he want it for free if he thinks he can get it for free? And the way he gets Taiwan for free is not by eating the whole cookie all at once, not by being cookie monster, but by nibbling bit by bit by bit. So this is the question in the gray zone. We are already in the gray zone. It's not a question of when Xi Jinping chooses to enter the gray zone. We're already here. The question is how aggressively and in what ways does he push? At some point, he could create facts on the ground such that we are essentially checkmated unless we draw a line and escalate or respond. And the danger is that we will be boiled like a frog, and that by the time that moment comes, we will either let Taiwan go with catastrophic, cascading diplomatic consequences. By the way, that means not only letting Taiwan go, but letting Taiwan's semiconductor fabs fall intact and operational into China's control, meaning that China overnight seizes the commanding heights in AI. Or, we take actions that risk escalation to a war, a devastating economic crisis, or both. And some people ask me, well, what if we just blow up the fabs? From what I understand, we have a number of ways that we could disable the semiconductor industrial base on Taiwan. And some of them are kinetic, we could blow it up, or it's non-kinetic. But blowing up the fabs is a strategic decision that has enormous implications for the global economy. This is going to knock several points off of global GDP. You have seven or eight tech companies that comprise 40% of the S&P 500. What happens to NVIDIA if the fabs are destroyed? NVIDIA is not down 5%, it's not down 10%. What happens to OpenAI? There is no more OpenAI. What happens to Apple? So this is a financial shock of epic proportions. And that's even setting aside the risks of economic escalation between the US and China. What happens if US-China supply chains are shut down? Well, we saw the answer to that on Liberation Day. We chickened out after 5 days. And the reason is the bond market panicked. So if we are faced with a situation where we have to choose between those two horrific options, Xi Jinping is absolutely going to push us in that direction. So the question becomes, number one, what is your concept for deterring him from pushing infinitely in the gray zone because it's a cost-free thing for him? And then the second is, if you do have to draw the line because he can't be deterred from pushing, what's your plan for doing that? Let's take them one at a time. If you're talking about deterring him from pushing, you have to show that comes with costs that are basically proportionate. And the difficulty here is that you can't push back in the same domain. It's not like I tariff you in your iPhones and you tariff me back in your soybeans because what equivalent is there if China, say, establishes a constant buzzing drone presence over and around Taiwan? We're not going to do that to China. We probably can't operationally. So what do you do as China surrounds Taiwan from all sides, politically, in terms of maritime presence, squeezes them economically and the rest? What you have to do is say, we're going to push back in other domains and we will follow a principle of proportionality. We will follow that principle of proportionality to create an overall balanced situation. It's a new situation. There's no such thing as the status quo here. China is salami slicing away at the status quo and we are too. But the underlying claim is that even if the status quo is contested and fluid, we believe there should be some overarching equilibrium in which there's peace and stability in the region. Beijing, if you don't like the way in which we are pushing back in the gray zone, if you think that the way we're doing it is escalatory, well, that's tough for you. You should stop pushing in the gray zone yourself. This is not a perfect solution. And another thing that you could use is intelligence disclosure as a tool. For example, in the lead up to Russian's invasion of Ukraine, we declassified intelligence that suggested we thought they were going to do it. Now, we chose not to do this at the time, but we might have, for example, started deploying NATO forces in Ukraine overtly or covertly, or we could have started transferring Ukraine equipment to improve its defenses. There's any number of things we could have done. Now, we chose not to do that in the case of Ukraine, Taiwan might be different. So I use this concept called Structured Ambiguity. Structured Ambiguity is, like, substantively it's the same as Strategic Ambiguity. You're still not saying whether or not you would go all the way to the mat to fight for Taiwan if invaded. But you're warning Xi Jinping, not only are we going to push back proportionately against what you do in the gray zone, if we get intelligence that you're planning a big move, we're not just going to sit idly by for you to punch us first before you find out what we're going to do. We may respond in a proportional way preemptively. And then the other thing which we can talk about in more depth is you need a plan if this doesn't work and he just bowls through and you have to draw a line, break the glass, whatever your metaphor is. In other words, if Xi Jinping is sufficiently determined to do this, that these techniques don't work. And you have to accept that there's a rupture in US-China relations and things aren't going back. What's the plan B? What kind of world do you want to live in? And that's a big question. It's a question of the future of global economic order. But we have to start thinking about those questions because they might be questions we're faced with very soon.
Speaker 1:
[32:05] I think there's often conversation about some of the financial implications you have raised regarding conflict over Taiwan, the devastating effects that a war would have on the global economy, on China's economy as well, the effects on technology supply chains. I think you made an interesting point in the book that emphasizing this point is actually unhelpful for overall deterrence, that it's more likely to deter Americans than Xi Jinping. Which is interesting because I think that the economic implications have become such a core talking point for American officials in trying to express this isn't just like a parochial US geopolitical thing, but rather a question in which every nation on earth has a stake because every nation on earth has a stake in economic growth. And you argue that instead the US should show that it could use a crisis to secure its interests through bold steps that would be impossible in peacetime. I mean, effectively saying, if I'm getting this right, not that a war over Taiwan would be economically devastating, but almost that it would be more devastating economically and otherwise for China than for the US. So getting Xi to revisit maybe his broader assumptions about how the balance of power would emerge from such a crisis. Can you go a little deeper on that thinking?
Speaker 2:
[33:28] Well, that's exactly right. Let's try to break this apart systematically. There's two ways that you can break someone's economy. You can do it fast, so that they sort of implode on impact, or you can do it slow through attrition. And there's not actually a lot of cases in the economic history of great power wars of the instant implosion. We got close probably in March of 2022, when Russia was caught off guard by the severity of the sanctions that the G7 countries and others imposed on them. The confiscation of their central bank assets and more, that was more than Putin had bargained for. But Russia's financial system didn't collapse. Russia still had a couple hundred billion dollars of foreign exchange, they saved their banks, they steadied the currency, and then they weren't going to implode financially. It wasn't comfortable, but then it became, sanctions became a strategy of attrition, and they haven't worked yet. Russia's gotten poorer, but not so poor that they can't keep running their war. And the difficulty of deterring China through economic threats is that they have a whole lot more firepower to prevent their financial system from breaking down on impact if we oppose sanctions. Might it happen? Do we have tools that could create a possibility? Yes, and they can't assume that risk is zero. But I think they're increasingly confident that they have the foreign exchange reserves and capital controls and so on to survive that opening punch. And then they have the control over the population and the stockpiles and what have you, to grit their teeth and take pain, not necessarily forever, but for longer than we, as a coalition of democracies, can. So that's why I say that threatening China with economic mutual issue or destruction is more likely to deter us than to deter them. Because yes, obviously, if there's any kind of rupture in US-China relations, it's going to be painful. But the question is just, who is it relatively more painful for? Who's going to cry uncle politically first? The better way to think about it is not, what are the various things that we could do that would punish China and also really hurt ourselves? But what are the national interests that would be most relevant to us in a crisis? I think punishing China might be one of those interests. But there's a whole bunch of others, which we talk about in the book. One of them, prevent a financial crisis in Great Depression in the United States and in allied countries, because if they're having one, they probably won't be very useful to us. Also, we would owe them certain things if we were the ones triggering the crisis. Next, keeping the role of the dollar so central in the global economy and financial system. Whole bunch of reasons for that. It underwrites our prosperity. It helps maintain the efficacy of existing sanctions on Russia, North Korea and others. Preventing the collapse of critical supply chains on day one, so the American people can get medicine and all the rest. Maintaining an international economic system that allows us to trade with our friends. I mean, imagine a world in which the US and China aren't trading with each other, but Mexico is still trading with China. But then you have Chinese goods coming into the United States from Mexico and potentially vice versa. So, there is no scenario in which the world decouples from China and China is just hanging out and not trading with the world, and that continues indefinitely. It can never happen. China is a third of global manufacturing. So, if we're talking about a world in which the United States and maybe a few allies are sort of on one side and they're trading very little or not a lot with China, but there's a whole bunch of countries in between that are trading with both sides, what are the framework on which we're going to conduct that trade? If you don't have a concept for how you're going to do that, you have absolutely no vision for what the world economy is going to look like, not just on day one, but on day 100, day 1,000 after a crisis. So, now, I think, is the time that we should be having the conversation on a bipartisan basis. If relations with China totally fall apart over Taiwan or something else, and we're unable to sustain the current kind of economic relationship with them, what do we want the international economic system to look like? What are the guiding principles that should shape that world? You're not going to design this perfectly and write it up and put it in a drawer, and then take it out on day one and say, okay, we're going to do it. But you can potentially start to build some consensus about the basic principles. And I think, as I argue in the book, the United States has overlapping interests with many, not only allies, but neutral countries. So if you start talking about these principles, and it becomes clear through those conversations that there's broad consensus, then maybe you can show China there's a risk triggering a Taiwan crisis catalyzes an international coalition that couldn't otherwise be formed through ordinary diplomacy to say, hey, wait a minute, China's predatory economic practices, its beggar-thy-neighbor economic policies aren't working for us. Maybe there's a way to re-rig the international economic system at China's expense in a way that won't break the supply chains on day one, that won't cause a financial crisis on day one. If you can do that, then you can show Xi Jinping, maybe we can't blow up your banks on day one of the crisis. But if you trigger this, it will be a pure victory for you because you may end up getting the prize over Taiwan, but the structure of the world economy will be sufficiently tilted against China's growth model that you will not be able to achieve in the long run the other elements of national rejuvenation.
Speaker 1:
[39:06] I really enjoyed the portion of your book focused on economic deterrents. I found it to be compelling and also a little challenging to conceptualize implementation, but in an interesting way. One reason I appreciated it was that I think the conversation about mutually assured economic destruction or even short of that, an idea that economic retaliation through sanctions or through other economic measures could affect Xi's decision-making, in a world where he's decided that he's willing to take all of these risks to pursue his ultimate political objective vis-a-vis Taiwan. It's very difficult for me to imagine anything in terms of economic punishments changing the calculation he would have already made. Once we're at that point in the process, but I think it is much more compelling the way you frame the dynamic of instead trying to think about economic deterrents as a tool through which to convince Xi that the American people can sustain a war over Taiwan if they need to, because the US will ultimately come out on a stronger footing. Where I get stuck is on just how hard it is to actually craft that world, that you're envisioning or even to have a conversation with allies about crafting that world. And we can think about how effective Beijing was at weaponizing its choke point over rare earth and critical mineral supply chains last year to get the US to back off what was in its own way a much more modest set of economic grievances. And so I just want to get your thoughts on how, you mentioned that the best time to establish all of these economic security measures is now. And that's kind of in one way self-evidently true and in another way, very difficult to imagine because you're asking US allies, let alone neutral countries, to take on a really significant risk of Chinese retaliation without an obvious case for the urgency of the risk. So how do you think about that?
Speaker 2:
[41:21] So I think we should start, by the way, I'm not saying we will do this now. In fact, if a crisis comes, almost by definition, we're gonna say, oh shoot, all of that decoupling from China in like the drone supply chain and the medicine supply chain, guess we should have started that five years ago. And if we successfully do the drones and the medicines, it's gonna say, oh, guess the advanced materials, guess we should have done that five years ago. So if things fall apart with China, there will always be regrets. But I think the point of what we can do now is we can start doing some tangible decoupling on an allied basis of the drones and the drone parts and the legacy chips and the medicines. These things that basically everyone, even Europeans who are feeling bullied by America these days can agree, we really shouldn't be depending on China for that. And then starting to have the conversations about these big ideas and principles about what a world would look like. I take inspiration in this book, thinking back to the 1930s. In the 1930s, we were coming out of a great depression. The world was deglobalizing. There was a big America first isolationist movement in the United States. Authoritarian powers were on the march. The global economic system was not working well. It was similarly impossible to imagine. If you had told people in 1937, eight years later, it will have been a world war. America will have come out on top, and there will be all these new institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, and the GATT, which would become the WTO. People would have told you, you're crazy. But early in the war, Roosevelt and Churchill met on a ship off the coast of Newfoundland and they talked about the world that they would want to create if they won the war. It was an if because at this point, the Nazis were on the march and it was far from clear that they would win. They came up with something called the Atlantic Charter, which was a list of principles that they would like the world to look like. They had some big disagreements. Roosevelt imagined that the British Empire would be dismantled after the war. Churchill had different ideas. But they could set that aside and agree on some common principles, what was at the intersection of that Venn diagram. Not only did that give them something to fight for during the war, it meant that coming out of the war between 1944 and 1947, the Anglo-American collaboration could very quickly set up an array of institutions that brought 50 years or more of peace and prosperity. So I don't think that we can solve all of these problems in advance in an academic exercise. But by talking about them now, by inviting people to think through these scenarios, and by imagining that there could actually be not a better world, God forbid, but a world that we could live in that would be in accordance with our interest and values on the other side. What the guiding principles of that world would be, what some of the trade-offs would be. I think that by itself is a very valuable conversation. I certainly think that Beijing doesn't want us to be having that conversation, and that's exactly why we should have it.
Speaker 1:
[44:33] We'll have to wrap there. Eyck, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:
[44:37] Thank you so much for having me, Henrietta. I appreciate the questions.
Speaker 1:
[44:40] To our listeners, you can learn more about Eyck's thinking on Taiwan and cross-strait deterrence in his new book, Defending Taiwan, a Strategy to Prevent War with China. As always, we would love to hear what you thought of today's conversation and what issues you'd like Pekingology to unpack in future episodes. You can send your ideas to pekingology at csis.org. If you're new here, we hope you will subscribe, and we'll be back in your feed very soon.
Speaker 2:
[45:15] If you enjoyed this podcast, check out our larger suite of CSIS podcasts.
Speaker 1:
[45:21] Thanks for watching.
Speaker 2:
[45:21] You can find future streaming platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Visit csis.org/podcasts to see our full catalog.