A few days ago I took Republicans to task for bashing Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to China. I’ve revisited that a couple of days in other professional settings.
At the Defense Priorities1 newsletter, where I’ve been temping for the great Bonnie Kristian while she was on maternity leave, I drew on the organization’s expertise to point out why dialogue with America’s rivals is better than not dialoguing with America’s rivals.
Engagement with America's rivals is not a reward to those countries. It is an integral part of avoiding unnecessary armed conflict.
The point of U.S.-China dialogue isn't to find a "magic bullet" to end competition between the two, note DEFP fellows Grant Golub and Yameen Huq, but "to create the structural conditions for future cooperation." [OC Register]
Critics may say that China is untrustworthy, or that the differences between the U.S. and China are irreconcilable. But that reflects "a narrow conception of security … that misses why regimes care about security in the first place: to ensure the safety of their citizens."
That's why the two sides should talk more, not less. "Meaningful dialogue increases understanding of each other's capabilities, interests, and resolve."
I sound a similar theme in my latest column for McClatchy, showing some ire for the anti-diplomacy bluster of Kansas and Missouri senators:
Talking to China might not prevent a war. But not talking to China will make that war much more likely.
So it’s worth considering again what that war would look like. The New York Times described another set of war games. In that imagined conflict, America was battered by Chinese cyberattacks, bringing down power systems and communications around the country. Officials from another think tank estimated that the United States economy would contract by up to 10%. (During the Great Recession, that number was 2.6%.)
“What almost never changes,” the paper reported, “is it’s a bloody mess and both sides take some terrible losses.”
In a real war, those losses wouldn’t be contained to a computer simulation. Those would be your sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters, your husbands and wives, who would die.
Talking isn’t fighting. It’s better than fighting, because almost no one ever gets killed over a conference table
Both links are free, so give them a read if you like.
Defense Priorities is a national security think tank, which would not be the usual kind of gig I take — I still, despite my fallen state, have a lot of Mennonite pacifism in me — but DEFP is dedicated to the cause of “restraint” in foreign policy. In a national security scene dominated by hawks and even more hawkish hawks, I find that approach refreshing.