Not talking to China is dumb
Naturally, some people don't want the Biden Administration to talk to China.
Leading congressional Republicans excoriated Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken on Friday for traveling to China this weekend, accusing him of undermining national security by attempting to normalize diplomatic relations with Beijing as they press for a more hard-line approach.
“The Biden administration’s weak actions on the global stage continue to embolden the C.C.P.,” Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 4 Republican in the House, said in a statement. The secretary of state’s trip, she added, will “legitimize” the Chinese Communist Party’s “continued subversion of our sovereignty.”
I’m sorry, but this is exceedingly stupid.
Why? Because there’s a not-zero chance we could go to war with China in the future. You know what threatens national security? Having a war with a nuclear-armed state because we refused diplomatic dialogue with them.
Here’s a recent Politico story about what a war with China might look like. It’s bad:
The Pentagon Is Freaking Out About a Potential War With China
Dozens of versions of the above war-game scenario have been enacted over the last few years, most recently in April by the House Select Committee on competition with China. And while the ultimate outcome in these exercises is not always clear — the U.S. does better in some than others — the cost is. In every exercise the U.S. uses up all its long-range air-to-surface missiles in a few days, with a substantial portion of its planes destroyed on the ground. In every exercise the U.S. is not engaged in an abstract push-button war from 30,000 feet up like the ones Americans have come to expect since the end of the Cold War, but a horrifically bloody one.
And that’s assuming the U.S.-China war doesn’t go nuclear.
“The thing we see across all the wargames is that there are major losses on all sides. And the impact of that on our society is quite devastating,” said Becca Wasser, who played the role of the Chinese leadership in the Select Committee’s wargame and is head of the gaming lab at the Center for a New American Security. “The most common thread in these exercises is that the United States needs to take steps now in the Indo-Pacific to ensure the conflict doesn’t happen in the future.
Daniel Larison writes quite often about how diplomacy isn’t a reward to other nations — as hawks would have it — but a means of trying to accomplish American goals without killing people and making things go boom.
Here he is writing about American talks with Iran, but the philosophy here applies also to China:
Our government doesn’t negotiate with another government as a favor to their side, but as a means of securing our interests. If it is done well, diplomacy should produce mutually beneficial agreements, but then that means that refusing to negotiate amounts to denying yourself the potential benefits of an agreement out of spite. Opponents of diplomacy can pretend that this has something to do with standing on principle, but it is really just vanity. It is the position that people choose to take when they already wanted to oppose diplomacy but need a plausible excuse for it.
There’s been a lot of talk by Trumpist Republicans about making the GOP a party of military restraint, but part of that approach has to be emphasizing diplomacy as a key part of America’s foreign policy toolbox. Refusing high-level diplomatic engagement with China — as the hawks would have us do — hurts American security.
Follow up:
https://pierreguidry.substack.com/p/teotwawki
Some people may want to wait for competent negotiators. Jack goes to market to sell the cow...will he return with 5 magic beans? And, yes I'm comparing Antony Blinken to Jack, the beanstalk guy. He should start a law practice with a couple of fellows named knod and winking. Would be the law firm of, Winking, Blinken and Knod. That's what some people think.