(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



America Must Prepare Now to Avoid a War with China By Robert Creamer [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2023-03-13

In 2017, the historian Graham Allison wrote a book called Destined for War. Allison surveyed history to demonstrate that rising powers almost always end up embroiled in a war with dominant powers. He concluded that if we did not take action to prevent such an outcome the same would almost certainly be true of rising power China, and the dominant power of the last 75 years, the United States.

War has always exacted a massive price on the combatant states. One must look no further than the hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded and billions in damage caused by Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. Seventy-five years ago, World War II slaughtered millions and impacted the lives of virtually everyone on the planet.

But the exponential explosion of our technological power to destroy each other that heralded the end of that great conflict makes the prospect of another world war involving nuclear armed states potentially suicidal for humanity.

President Biden has so far done a masterful job of simultaneously escalating American support for Ukraine and avoiding direct conflict between the United States and Russia that could explode into World War III.

But the growing conflict between China and the United States over the future of Taiwan could easily back the world into just such a catastrophic world war.

Since the revolution in 1949, China has consistently claimed the island of Taiwan as part of mainland China. Since its recognition of the regime in Beijing in 1979, the United States has maintained a “one China policy” that simultaneously recognized that Taiwan is part of China, and also Taiwan’s right to maintain its own government autonomous of Beijing – a position of so-called “strategic ambiguity.”

In the last few years, China has become increasingly vocal over its claims to Taiwan. And the United States has insisted that it will take action to defend Taiwan’s political autonomy.

There is little question that if actual military hostility broke out over Taiwan, and that conflict directly involves the United States, it could easily escalate into World War III. We must act now to assure that we are not one day faced with two bad options: allow China to end Taiwan’s autonomy through military force, or precipitate a catastrophic world war.

America’s number one policy goal with China must be to prevent War. This does not mean – as President Biden had shown in Ukraine – that we should simply cower and capitulate to Chinese belligerence or aspiration for domination. It means that we must take preemptive action now to create conditions that will avoid the likelihood of a catastrophic war that would leave no winners.

It is critical that we launch a robust discussion engaging policy experts, Members of Congress, the media, the administration, America’s allies, and the public at large regarding the actual danger of war with China and steps that might be taken to prevent it.

A preliminary list of actions might include:

First, delay and defer a confrontation that might precipitate a crisis over Taiwan. If nothing else, time allows accommodation between the Chinese Government and Taiwan without the potentially disastrous downsides for both. That means we need to avoid provocative actions of our own that could lead to miscalculation or precipitous response – or strengthen the hand of Chinese hardliners who might promote military action to formally unify Taiwan with China.

Second, we must aggressively use every diplomatic tool available to encourage some form of formal accommodation between the Chinese government and Taiwanese leaders that meets the political and economic needs of both – most likely some form of “one-China policy” that is sustainable over time. And we must also discourage any attempt by Taiwan to unilaterally declare independence from China – a position that polls show is not popular within Taiwan itself and would certainly provoke a Chinese response.

Third, America needs to assure that it maintains maximum economic leverage vis a vis China – leverage that would deter it from taking reckless action because it fears that such action could threaten its own economy. We need to develop a robust set of economic weapons that could be deployed in the event China took unilateral military action – economic weapons that would not risk the likelihood of direct military conflict with the United States.

In addition, we must work with potential allies to identify a coalition of other nations willing to take similar action. And as Daryl Press, Professor of Government and Director of the Dartmouth Initiative on Global Security has argued, our approach should be that of an organizer and enabler of a coalition of true allies who together develop common goals – and jointly develop a program they are willing to jointly execute – not a leader who demands fealty to a program that we prescribe.

And we must also take steps to prevent the growth of Chinese economic leverage vis a vis the United States. For example, Dmitri Alperovitch of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, explains that it is absolutely critical to avoid allowing China to corner the “foundational chip” market – the manufacture of silicone chips that are required in the production of virtually every modern electronic product. China has moved to subsidize its chip industry and allow it to undersell all other chip producers with precisely that goal in mind. The CHIPS bill passed by Congress last year was a good start, but Alperovitch argues that further steps are necessary.

The United States should encourage Taiwan to increase spending for its own defense. Currently, Taiwan spends about 2.4% of its GDP on defense – about the world-wide average. But given the fact that its autonomy is in direct threat, more is most certainly needed to help deter action by Beijing. Last year, the administration approved a series of defensive arms sales to Taiwan. But it must be careful not to push so hard that it convinces Beijing it may back a move to unilateral declaration of independence by Taiwan.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Robert Daly, Director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States of the Woodrow Wilson Center argues that we must transform the policy frame for the discussion of this and other foreign policy issues. We must move from a model that assumes that the world should be viewed as a collection of competing power blocks, to an understanding that we are all united in a quest to assure that everyone in the world must prosper. This is not some fairy-tale, pie in the sky, utopian hope that can never be realized. It is a cold-eyed recognition of the crisis we must all confront – an existential crisis threatening human survival.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Benjamin Franklin helped weld together a set of colonies with disparate interests into the United States. As he signed the Declaration of Independence he said, “we must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” That is now true of humanity as a whole.

In Franklin’s time it was true because failure to do so would have allowed a third-party opponent to destroy us. Today it is true because the massive expansion of our technological capacity to destroy ourselves means that a miscalculation that careens into nuclear war could make our species an evolutionary dead end.

Robert Creamer, a partner at Democracy Partners, has been a political organizer and strategist for five decades and was a consultant in three Democratic presidential campaigns. He is the author of "Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win." Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/13/2157780/-America-Must-Prepare-Now-to-Avoid-a-War-with-China-By-Robert-Creamer

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/