I Think We're a Lot of Smart People Can Come to the Absolute Wrong Conclusion About the Relative Costs and Benefits of an Invasion

This week on Sinica, Jude Blanchette (Freeman Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies) and Ryan Hass (Armacost Chair at the John L. Thornton Center at the Brookings Institute) join Kaiser to discuss their new essay in Foreign Affairs, "The Taiwan Long Game: Why the Best Solution Is No Solution.”

3:05 – Reconceptualizing Taiwan as “a strategic problem with a defense component” 

6:00 – Why expanding the scope of the Taiwan issue beyond the military dimension should not be conflated with capitulation

13:34 – Has current U.S. policy abandoned preserving status quo cross-strait relations?

17:27 – Why has China refrained from the use of force thus far?

27:05 – China, U.S., and Taiwan’s heightened sense of urgency

31:22 – How Ukraine alters China’s decision calculus on Taiwan

36:44 – What pertinent challenges should the US be planning for rather than exclusively focusing on the threat of invasion?

43:58 – The issue with democracy vs authoritarianism framing

46:01 – The importance of considering Taiwanese agency when crafting US policy

48:40 – How the U.S. should define its one-China policy

53:19 – Opportunities for a detente between Washington and Beijing

A transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.

Recommendations:

Ryan: "How We Would Know When China Is Preparing to Invade Taiwan," by John Culver; the film White Christmas 

Jude: The podcast In the Dark from American Public Media

Kaiser: "A Professor Who Challenges the Washington Consensus on China," Ian Johnson’s piece in The New Yorker about Jessica Chen Weiss

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