The Realignment | Preserve, Deter, & Accommodate - The Realignment's China Policy + Weekly Book Recs

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How to Think About the Great Power Conflict Era

Tomorrow’s episode with The Wall Street Journal’s Michael R. Gordon spends a significant amount of time focused on America’s lack of preparedness for an era of Great Power conflict. We also discuss the recent paperback release of his latest book: Degrade and Destroy: The Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump.

The episode combines Michael’s writing on America’s wars in Iraq (Cobra II, The Endgame, and Degrade and Destroy) with his recent pivot to 2020s era Great Power conflict. A preview of his recent piece The U.S. Is Not Yet Ready for the Era of ‘Great Power’ Conflict, part of a broader WSJ series:

Despite an annual defense budget that has risen to more than $800 billion, the shift has been delayed by a preoccupation with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the pursuit of big-ticket weapons that didn’t pan out, internal U.S. government debates over budgets and disagreement over the urgency of the threat from Beijing, according to current and former U.S. defense officials and commanders. Continuing concerns in the Mideast, especially about Iran, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have absorbed attention and resources.

The key thing to understand about the “Great Power conflict” formulation is that it does not endorse a specific policy approach. It is a description of the defining challenge of the moment. For example, my 1990s and onwards life has encompassed the following eras, challenges, and questions:

• The 1990s: Post-Gulf War and end of the Cold War. AKA, what do we do with the “peace dividend?”

• The 2000s-2010s: September 11th and the War on Terror. AKA, how do we preempt future attacks against the homeland, clean up the resulting post-intervention messes, and how long are we obligated to stay afterwards?

• The 2020s-2030s: Looming specter of post-unipolarity Great Power conflict. AKA, how do we deter/avoid a clash with peer or near-peer rivals like China and Russia.

Within each of these eras, there are countless permutations of different approaches separate from the descriptor. In the 1990s, we could have withdrawn from our long-term commitments to Europe, Asia, and postwar institutions/alliances like the United Nations and NATO, a la the post-WWI moment. In the 2000s, we could have strictly responded to 9/11 by either stopping at overthrowing the Taliban or even treated the response as a law enforcement measure focused on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In the 2020s, we could have treated Russia’s invasion rush to Kyiv much as we treated their seizure of Crimea in 2014: as something to be condemned and sanctioned, but not strenuously opposed.

All of the above isn’t to endorse any of the alternative approaches above, but to point out how essential it is to understand the moment and its challenges, and then formulate one’s response. Reading over the first three decades and speaking to decisionmakers who made the judgement calls at the time, demonstrates a consistent failure to do both.

This leads to my response to an aspect of the 2020s moment, the “China” question. Last month, I interviewed Dr. Jonathan D.T. Ward about his new book: The Decisive Decade: American Grand Strategy for Triumph Over China. He describes our response to China’s rise and the danger of Great Power conflict using terms like “triumph” and “victory.” While I enjoyed our conversation and Dr. Ward’s book, I was uncomfortable with his language. Not out of squishiness or my moderate tendencies, but out of the belief that we aren’t at the stage where “victory” and “triumph” are analytically helpful when answering 2020s Great Power conflict challenges. Instead, I’d like to focus on articulating a straightforward way of articulating to a lay audience, one justifiably concerned about American engagement in the world after the 9/11 era. Here is what we should do:

Preserve, Accommodate, and Deter. Aka, P.A.D.

There is surely a catchier/succinct way of describing American objectives toward China, but think of this as a first draft or an essay outline. Here is what I mean by each:

Preserve: We want to preserve the peaceful Great Power status quo in the Indo-Pacific and will not do anything to upend that status quo. Missiles aren’t flying across the Taiwan Strait, we aren’t going to declare Taiwan formally independent of China, and we certainly aren’t going to initiate a conflict with China. Any choice to launch a conflict or destabilize the peaceful status quo would be the responsibility of China, not the United States.

Accommodate: The post-Cold War unipolar moment is over. America’s role in the world and expectations of allies, neutral countries, and even adversaries will naturally have to shift. Our objective is to preserve the peaceful status quo and American interests within a shifting global order, not attempting to retain lost 1990s glory a la the United Kingdom and France’s inability to let go of their empires in the 1940s-1960s. We aren’t going to overreact to changing circumstances, and we certainly won’t engage in the hypocrisy that our position in the immediate Cold War allowed us. So even if we’re concerned about Chinese spying operations in Cuba, we won’t pull a Russia and utilize military force in abrogation of their sovereign right to form whatever alliances they desire. Lastly, while the talk of a serious BRICS bloc on Twitter is silly, the discourse reflects the fact that as in the Cold War, there are plenty of developing/emerging nations that seek to find an alternate path between the United States and its main rival. We should respect and accommodate that reality.

Deter: Last but not least, as Michael’s WSJ article points out above, all branches of the U.S. military need to go significant, even costly transformations to meet the moment. America’s Arsenal of Democracy wasn’t what it once was. Efforts to revitalize the military and the country’s defense industrial base aren’t defense industry conspiracies or examples of aggressive militarism. They are our effort to illustrate that breaking the status quo via an invasion of Taiwan/other regional conflict is a risk not worth taking. As Michael points out in tomorrow’s episode, the U.S. never fought a direct conflict with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Our objective is to do so once again when it comes to the 2020s and 2030s.

Last Week’s Free Episodes

385 | Wesley Lowery: Backlash Politics from Obama 2008 to the Summer of 2020 and Beyond

(AUDIO) (VIDEO)

384 | Peter Turchin: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path to Political Disintegration

(AUDIO) (VIDEO)

Goodreads Account & Weekly Book Recommendations

Per listener/reader request, I’ve started a Goodreads account to track recently completed books/audiobooks that fit The Realignment's themes. You can still support the show via my Bookshop link below, but many books I’ve read aren’t available on the platform.

From now on, expect an audiobook and paper book recommendation each week.

Audible Listen: The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys—and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy

I came across this recently released book thanks to a Supercast subscriber’s recommendation on the Ask Me Anything Page:

I’ll give the question a broader response on the next Supercast AMA recording, but I recommend this book for anyone interested in Cold War history/government accountability. The Last Honest Man should be paired with The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two. I recorded an episode with Steve Drummond, The Watchdog’s author, back in May.

Both books do an excellent job of critiquing aspects of the American system. The Last Honest Man focuses on the failure to reign in intelligence agency/FBI overreach during the first half of the Cold War, leading to the post-Watergate Church Committee. The Watchdog covers how then Senator Harry Truman aggressively fought defense industry/corporate corruption during WWII from his perch in the Senate.

Paper Book: The Right Man: An Inside Account of the Bush White House

I randomly picked up David Frum’s The Right Man as part of my Texas reading project, President George W. Bush having been Governor of Texas before assuming the presidency.

This is a quick, but honestly wild read, especially in the sections where 2003-era David Frum attacks opponents of military action against Iraq as “isolationists” and hand-wavingly dismisses critics who sought to point out the analytical problems with comparing Iraq, Iran, and North Korea with the literal Axis powers of World War II (Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy) via the “Axis of Evil” language.

That said, the book is a great memoir and I especially recommend it for anyone interested in a White House job. While obviously out of date (Frum left the White House in early 2002 and the afterword only covers President Bush’s reelection victory in 2004), the book gets more and more interesting the further out we get from 2003. I personally think that the Bush administration made numerous bad calls in the wake of 9/11 that directly led to today’s fractured society. To read a well-written, yet bafflingly overconfident account of the thinking that drove failed policy is an essential exercise.

Listeners and readers no doubt know that I am decidedly not a fan of Republican 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. See Saagar and my interview for context. Reading The Right Man reminded of what I find so off-putting about him: a deeply overconfident view of the world that as with President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, would almost certainly lead to disaster. Which is why his initial decision to describe his willingness to use “shock and awe” against Mexican drug cartels, AKA invade Mexico, triggered me. During our episode, Vivek defended my questioning of his preparedness by arguing that there is little he could do in a thirty minute conversation to convince me. At a minimum, indicating that he had read books like The Right Man and engaged with the last underprepared presidency would have been a great start.

The Realignment Bookshop

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If you purchase a book using our link, the show gets a 10% commission, a local, independent bookseller gets support, and you get an awesome book!

Books by Realignment Guests

What We’re Reading: 2023 Edition

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