What If We Avoid a Security Dilemma Over Taiwan?

Jessica Chen Weiss advises us all to calm the hell down.

Photo by Thomas Tucker on Unsplash

One reason I wrote “The Perils of Pessimism” last year for Foreign Affairs was my concern that all the great powers had grown more pessimistic about their future. Russia’s pessimism about Ukraine’s future led Putin to invade Ukraine. U.S. pessimism about the future has led many to grow paranoid about China. And there were incipient signs that China was growing more pessimistic as well (this has been Hal Brands and Michael Beckley’s argument as well). A world of pessimistic great powers is a world of red lines, preemptive wars, security dilemmas — i.e., it’s a world I would like to avoid. Indeed, this concern was also at the root of my “Legion of Doom” essay in Politico earlier this week.

If this century has taught me anything, however, it is that I could very well be wrong about, well, everything. So I paid attention when Jessica Chen Weiss wrote in Foreign Affairs this week about the United States overestimating Chinese military intentions toward Taiwan:

Fears that China will soon invade Taiwan are overblown. There is little evidence that Chinese leaders see a closing window for action. Such fears appear to be driven more by Washington’s assessments of its own military vulnerabilities than by Beijing’s risk-reward calculus. Historically, Chinese leaders have not started wars to divert attention from domestic challenges, and they continue to favor using measures short of conflict to achieve their objectives. If anything, problems at home have moderated Chinese foreign policy, and Chinese popular opinion has tended to reward government bluster and displays of resolve that do not lead to open conflict.

If Western policymakers exaggerate the risk of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, they might inadvertently create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of worrying that Beijing will gin up a foreign crisis to bolster its standing at home or assuming that Beijing feels pressured to invade in the near term, the United States should focus on arresting—or at least decelerating—the action-reaction spiral that has steadily ratcheted up tensions and made a crisis more likely. That does not mean halting efforts to bolster Taiwan’s resilience to Chinese coercion or to diversify the United States’ defense posture in the region. But it does mean avoiding needless confrontation and identifying reciprocal steps that Washington and Beijing could take to lower the temperature.

The hard but crucial task for U.S. policymakers is to thread the needle between deterrence and provocation.

Folks should read the whole thing to get a fuller sense of Weiss’ argument. It offers a useful reminder that self-fulfilling prophecies are a hardy perennial of world politics.¹ More importantly, Weiss highlights that U.S. overreactions can be just as detrimental to national security as underreactions.

Just to lay down a marker: readers of Drezner’s World have probably intuited my skeptical of the China hawk consensus currently calcifying inside the Beltway. This is not because there is no reason for concern. The China of 2023 is a hell of a lot more concerning than the China of 2013. Just as U.S. actions can trigger negative Chinese responses, Xi Jinping shoulders much of the blame for the deterioration in bilateral relations.

What concerns me, however, is that I don’t think a lot of the hawkish China rhetoric has much to do with China. Like Weiss, I think it’s driven by U.S. pessimism and the domestic political logic of blaming China for many of America’s ills. With both parties outbidding each other at the moment to sound hawkish, there is no countervailing force putting the brakes on escalatory rhetoric or action. And I find that deeply concerning.

1. For example, Vladimir Putin convinced himself that invading Ukraine was the best way to check NATO expansion — and as a result, NATO expanded.