Van Jackson is a dissident among foreign policy intellectuals, a harsh critic of the infamous “Blob.” His Un-Diplomatic newsletter is essential reading (and its accompanying podcast essential listening), and his analyses of U.S. policy in the Pacific in Foreign Affairs are very useful for those who want to understand what is going on in the region. These include:
- Great-Power Competition Is Bad for Democracy
- America is Turning Asia into a Powder Keg
- The Problem With Primacy: America’s Dangerous Quest to Dominate the Indo-Pacific
- America’s Indo-Pacific Folly
Jackson is the author of the new book Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace and today he joins Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson to explain why he thinks U.S. policy in Asia is dangerous and putting us unnecessarily on the path towards conflict with China. It’s a vital conversation for understanding the most consequential tensions in the world today.
Nathan J. Robinson
You have been, over the last few years, highly critical of U.S. policy in the Indo-Pacific. But I think that Americans generally, on average, aren’t aware that we have a policy in the Indo-Pacific, because foreign policy is really not discussed much in mainstream American political discourse, or in the mainstream. To begin, what should everyone know about what the U.S. stance in the Pacific is?
Van Jackson
It is a big question. It’s important to start with an understanding that when American policy officials talk about America’s role in Asia and in the Pacific, they lean heavily on the rhetoric of “free and open,” because much of the liberal discourse focuses on the rhetoric of openness. They don’t mean it, even a little bit. I’m not saying that they’re being disingenuous, but instead that American foreign policy practice diverges radically from the rhetoric. I think most people are true believers, and some are cynics. They believe that they’re fighting for an open world. But what the rhetoric of openness and freedom does in practice is mask and deflect from what is the policy and a strategy of deliberate domination.
They seek primacy in every sense. In the Trump era, there was a national security strategy document that got declassified where they were laying out that American preeminence as the supreme national interest of America. Preeminence spans every domain of life: political, economic, and military. And Biden’s people have more romantic ideas than that—they believe they’re standing up for something. But, what they’re instantiating through policy is the search for domination and primacy in a world where that’s not so easy to do anymore. And so, a lot of the dangers and risks that come are downstream of this pursuit of primacy because we think that we’re part of an open world, but we’re not practicing that by any stretch.
Robinson
So people will hear a narrative of American idealism, and that our job, and the reason that it’s important for us to have power across the rest of the world, is to keep autocracies and authoritarian governments from having an outsized share of control and influence. But instead, you say that this narrative about our pursuit of freedom and openness is contradicted by the facts. What are some examples of things that contradict or unsettle this narrative?
Jackson
When Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she announced what was called the “pivot to Asia” in 2011, and in the pages of Foreign Policy magazine she wrote that Asia is eager for our business and leadership because we play this indispensable role in Asia as the indispensable Pacific power. Joe Nye called us “Asia’s oxygen,” and John Mearsheimer called us “Asia’s pacifier.” This is the way everyone in Washington is conditioned to think, and the way I used to think once upon a time. I worked in Obama’s Pentagon, and it’s just taken for granted that America is an exceptionalist power in the Pacific as in the rest of the world.
And so that means that our supremacy is, in the Washington mind, a public good, and what stands between us and the world going to shit. That’s the prevailing narrative. But when you look at the 2017 nuclear crisis, it was the closest we’ve come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was Trump blustering into Kim Jong-un. It’s the most direct example of us threatening the Asian peace because North Korea is not a peaceful actor. And, let’s be clear, North Korea did not change suddenly in 2017. You know what changed? Our president.
Robinson
Right, we got a “fire and fury” president.
Jackson
We started an escalating chorus of signaling, threatening fire and fury. We started talking about a bloody nose option, preventive attack. We were threatening violence, even if they did certain kinds of non-violent weapons tests. Even though North Korea is not a peaceful actor and makes all kinds of blustery threats themselves, you cannot put all the danger of 2017 on North Korea. I wrote a book about that, and it made me sit with the question: how are we so complicit in this nightmarish situation?
Robinson
Yes, there’s something that happens in the way Americans get to know about the rest of the world. We see the things that other people do, but we don’t see the things that we do that sometimes cause what other people do. So, we’ll be told about their actions—for example, the case of China, there is increasing belligerent and militarist rhetoric coming from them. But there is almost no examination of our policies, and I’m sure that about 95 percent—that might be an underestimate—of people could not tell you anything about the level of U.S. military activity in the Pacific. What is this missing piece we should know about? Help us start to think about the things that we don’t see the U.S. do, that cause some of the things that we do see other nations do.
Jackson
The North Korean nuclear crisis is a little too on the nose, as being contrary to our the narrative of ourselves as an upholder of Asian peace. But there were other direct examples too—that wasn’t the first nuclear crisis. Every nuclear crisis in East Asia, since the 1980s, had us involved in it. It was Reagan’s military buildups and horizontal escalation in the 1980s that was the backdrop to the nuclear crisis in 1983. In 1994, we had another nuclear crisis with North Korea, where we were threatening and posturing to attack. It was like a bizarro security dilemma, and we were bringing it on ourselves.
Those are direct ways. There are indirect ways in which we embrittle security, too. Alliances, even among liberals, are considered this vital thing that helps prop up stability that supports the Asian peace. Yet, to the extent that’s true, there’s a problem in U.S. foreign policy in being inconsistent with that. In 1985, we cut off an ally permanently, New Zealand, because they did one thing that we didn’t like. We had conflicting policies about nuclear deployments, and New Zealand is a nuclear-free country and didn’t want nuclear-powered submarines in their territory. That limit on American domination was too much to countenance. So, we cut off allies, even though two years earlier Paul Wolfowitz, back in the Reagan era, declared New Zealand a permanent ally. And they claim, even within the liberal narrative, that allies are what support stability, yet we take that risk because it challenges our ability to dominate.
Plenty of neoconservatives would say Asian regionalism and multilateralism is feckless and worse than useless, but we actively made it that way. Since the 1980s, we have consistently tried to make Asian regional institutions weak and informal. Reagan issued a national security memo directive, saying that regionalism should be open, informal, and led by the private sector for private sector interests. We vetoed every regional arrangement that has been proposed for Asia if it didn’t center us. The Asian financial crisis, which the region blames on us—and they’re not wrong—is downstream of the political economy of American hegemony. The political economy of American hegemony is centered on American military primacy, and our need to have military dominance produces imbalances in the global economic order that destabilize other economies and brings on security problems.
Robinson
I do think there may be listeners and readers for whom “the political economy of American hegemony” could use a breakdown.
Jackson
Since the 1970s, America had repeated military buildups in response to perceived threats. Whether it’s the Soviet military buildup, or the War on Terror, there have been multiple periods where we do these large-scale buildups. This is why America’s military is so ginormous. We have done that under conditions where we don’t raise taxes in four different instances since the 1970s, and because we don’t raise taxes and spend so much on the military, we have to bring in large amounts of foreign capital to finance it. And so, you create global imbalances when you’re the giant sucking machine sucking foreign capital into your economy.
The result of that is not just global imbalances, which produce things like the Asian financial crisis, but it also produces imbalances in our own economy, too. It creates real estate bubbles. So, this is a giant volatility machine to the global economic order and the financial pipes that bring the capital to us. We know it’s a giant volatility machine. It’s driven by high risk financial instruments and speculation, and all of this is pretty destabilizing, in a financial and creating bubbles sense, but it also creates a system where all of these developing economies in Asia have to suppress labor rights to be competitive in the export market because their models of development rely on exports. This system that we perpetuate in the name of supporting military primacy, and military primacy is supposed to in turn support the system, prevents domestic redistribution and balanced capital labor relations in these other Asian economies and countries.
And so, not only are we creating conditions where labor rights get repressed, and imbalances in other countries, it creates systems of kleptocracy and oligarchy, which is rampant in Asia—not everywhere, but it’s pretty prominent. It’s structural violence, and structural violence is what gives way to greater political insecurity, and makes countries need Chinese capital. Chinese capital spreading around Asia is one of the things American foreign policy is so worried about, but we’re creating conditions that we don’t like, and then we do things that worsen those conditions.
Robinson
Yes, it seems ultimately kind of self-defeating, even though we might say that what lies beneath the rhetoric of freedom and openness is the desire to pursue dominance and hegemony, or what the U.S. would call “U.S. interests.” Ultimately, I think one of the conclusions of your work is that our current approach is not actually leading towards a world where the United States gets everything it wants, but, in fact, is putting not only other people but also ourselves in quite a bit of danger.
Jackson
Yes, the thing that Washington has to wake up to, and that I’m worried that it will not because it has incentives not to, is that the requirements of peace and primacy are deeply at odds with each other. Peace requires a certain degree of economic interdependence, regional cohesion, inclusivity in various ways, and above all, military restraint. Primacy requires the opposite of all of that. It requires the formation of rivalry and geoeconomic blocs. It requires containment against your rising rival, arms racing, and weapons proliferation.
It’s patently obvious that by pursuing primacy, we’re making ourselves the enemy of what remains of the Asian peace. It’s that insistence on primacy, coated rhetorically as openness, that is undermining the sources of the Asian peace. The preservation of stability the past 44 years is something that we somewhat take for granted in Washington, and we shouldn’t because it’s eroding rapidly, and Trump was simply a very vibrant data point along a larger trend line. And so, we’re not on a good track.
Robinson
Yes. You point out that some of the militarization of Asia that you criticize the United States for pushing occurred under Obama. In fact, there was a response to one of your articles in Foreign Affairs in which someone was quite indignant, and one of the points they made was this began under Obama—I think the nuclear modernization or something like that—and your response was it doesn’t really affect your point that Obama was part of this as well.
Jackson
I’m not anti-liberal, by any stretch—I don’t want to get leave the wrong impression. But one of the weird things about liberals is that they obsess about apportioning blame. Everything is about blame because blame is the politics of deflection, and if you believe in American Exceptionalism, then you have to make sure America is blameless. They’re not thinking ecologically, relationally, or structurally, and don’t give two shits about the interactivity that’s inherent in international relations. They care about making sure America is blameless. That’s their starting point and ending point, and that makes it hard to have an actual conversation about the analytics.
Robinson
I want to read the last part of that response that was written to you, just to give a sense of what the alternate narrative is. In Foreign Affairs, Thomas Shugart wrote that what is actually happening, contrary to what you say, is,
“Washington is finally coming to recognize the looming danger that an aggressive and increasingly powerful techno-authoritarian Chinese regime poses for the region and the world and is taking action accordingly. Failing to recognize this danger and to pursue appropriate responses would increase the chance of conflict by making it more likely that the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party will someday decide that the military balance of power has tipped in their favor, and that they should take advantage of the shift by resorting to force.”
Why is that narrative wrong?
Jackson
Everything about that is wrong. Everything about that is made up. He’s using words incorrectly. It only passes in Washington because it sounds semi-sophisticated. The language that they’re using and expressing here is in the idiom of national security: talk about the balance of power balancing. Not only is the balance of power systems inherently unstable (see World War One), but the balance of power rests on establishing equilibriums in the distribution of power. What we have currently is an extreme imbalance of power favoring the United States, and one of the nuances that gets lost is that’s true, basically everywhere in the world, except the Taiwan Strait.
So, this is where my Pentagon background comes in because I’m fluent in this national security bullshit. And for the Taiwan Strait, it just happens that the correlation of forces because of the geography—it’s on the Chinese coast—it’s a place where we cannot establish military superiority. There’s just no way to do it, unless we put lots of U.S. gear and troops in Taiwan, which is obviously a casus belli: it would create war. But if we don’t do that, there is no ability to rectify the imbalance of power against us in that spot.
But in the rest of the world, we have a large margin of advantage in the balance of power. And so, what people in DC and what that guy is responding to and saying is the balance of power is shifting and we have to arms race, and if it’s shifting then the world will end. Yet, that’s missing the fact that if the balance of power shifts, that doesn’t mean anything necessarily for what China does. You have to make a separate argument analytically about how Chinese intentions would change. Does their willingness to go to war change if the balance of power shifts? You have to make that argument, and nobody really does, and that dude certainly didn’t. It’s just assumed.
Robinson
There’s a piece of information often left out in many of these conversations about the threat posed by a rising China, which is: where are we talking about there being a threat? As you said, we’re talking about the ability of the United States to remain dominant off the Chinese coast, not off the coast of Florida. All of this stuff implicitly assumes that the United States has an entitlement by virtue of its moral superiority over all other nations. It’s just assumed that our great and wonderful values of openness and freedom entitle us to be the dominant power, not only in the Western Hemisphere and in the Americas, but also in China’s neighborhood.
Jackson
Yes. The definition of militarism is when the preparations for war overtake public policy and the demands for democracy in any meaningful sense, and overtake the steady art of statecraft, which is just to say rational foreign policymaking. And that’s what’s happening when we’re doing the arms race thing, when we’re defining, “The PLA, China’s military, has local military superiority in fucking Beijing”—well surprise! Is that your standard that you have to overcome? You’re choosing the most unfavorable situation ever, and then you’re indexing what your baseline requirement is for the military to it. This is the rhetoric and the logic trap that’s used to justify what would otherwise be seen as just wildly obscene: a $868 billion defense budget—we’re closing in on a trillion dollars. Biden outbid Trump, Trump outbid Obama. It just keeps getting worse.
Why does it keep getting worse? You can point to corruption and stuff like that, which is all true, but it’s also that you have these feeble intellectual constructs about national security that are putting a veneer of legitimacy over this, like the lipstick on the pig. The idea that we have to achieve military superiority in the geography of our closest adversary’s highest capability is unreasonable. Also, it’s the justification to say we have to cut the welfare state, or we can’t do anything about the climate.
Robinson
Yes, there are all sorts of things that fall by the wayside. And obviously, it’s been very depressing to watch the collapse of the U.S.’s ability to cooperate with China on various pressing global problems. To what extent is conflict with China the product of self-defeating and disastrous U.S. policy, versus an inevitability that we cannot control because of policies that come out of China itself without our ability to impact them?
Jackson
It’s a hard thing to answer. China experts, the same ones, would tell you that China’s trajectory of deciding that it needed to be able to militarily deal with the United States is not designed to fight America, one on one, and instead is designed to be able to keep America at bay while China deals with a smaller actor in the region. China’s not trying to actually conquer the United States, it’s just trying to keep the United States out of its sphere of influence, in the worst-case scenario. China’s PLA [People’s Liberation Army] started out on that track after the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996. We made nuclear threats at that point, sort of subtly, and put an aircraft carrier in the area as a very veiled threat. They were aware of a military imbalance, basically, and that we have a conflict of interest over Taiwan. And so, they decided to set out on that track.
But those are defense decisions, just like America’s defense decisions to pursue primacy and all this stuff. They’re based on chasing shadows, but it’s in a reasonable, rational state of foreign policy that’s kept in its own silo—you don’t let that dominate the rest of the foreign policy agenda. Statecraft should not be reducible to what your military does; the military should be subordinate to a larger apparatus. And so, just because the PLA committed to that military track of balancing against us does not mean that we were off to the races, by any stretch. It doesn’t mean that China was a rival, but the neocons were plotting in the 1990s, and when they came on to George W. Bush’s campaign in 2001, they were trying to create great power competition back then and set on rivalry. But then the War on Terror happened and sidetracked everything.
So, the US was plotting this for a long time, and we were playing a balancing game militarily against their military. But, it was within a political framework of great power decant or cooperation. The neoliberals of the Bush era were perversely on the side of stability in this internal debate because they didn’t want great power competition. They wanted Goldman Sachs to go over there and make some money. That neoliberal grip on policy has waned, and on the left, we’re happy to see it—you love to see it in certain respects—but they were the most powerful constituency against this whole rivalry impulse the whole time. You see a little bit of China’s assertiveness on the military side starting in 2007, but really started in about 2008-2009. It’s not because they’re communist. China is neoliberalism’s greatest success story if we’re being clear eyed; they’re hyper-capitalist. It’s not a clash of civilizations because it’s the same civilization before and since 2008. It’s not that Xi Jinping is evil, even though he might be—he’s a tyrant. But Xi Jinping didn’t come to power until 2012-2013, and the aggressiveness started ramping up in 2007-2008.
So, a little bit of this is the product of the military-industrial complex, and much of it is the global financial crisis, which again, was brought on by us and fed perceptions in China of the decline of American authority and legitimacy. Neocons like Robert Kagan, even right now, argue in the Wall Street Journal—and everyone in DC is a neocon now, by the way—that China is perceiving America in decline because we’re getting weaker, and it’s about weakness. Chinese perceptions of American decline are not about strength and weakness: it’s about legitimacy and authority being in decline. And as we take steps to revise the international order that we claim to defend, we further undermine our legitimacy and authority. People like Robert Kagan and the neocons want this to be about strength in military power because then the answer is more military power, and that’s not what it’s about at all. And so, China’s being more aggressive, but military power is not any kind of answer to that.
Robinson
From reading the titles of your Foreign Affairs articles, like “America is turning Asia into a powder keg”, “America’s Indo-Pacific folly”, “Adding new commitment to Asia will only invite disaster”, and “The problem with primacy: America’s dangerous quest to dominate the Pacific,” I think one can get that a persistent theme of your work is that we are creating the conditions for an avoidable calamity that doesn’t have to happen if we understand how the world works and other countries a little more realistically. We could have a better foreign policy and avoid stumbling into what might be a pretty hideous, violent confrontation with a nuclear armed power.
Jackson
Yes, that’s right. There’s nothing inevitable about conflict with China. There wasn’t anything inevitable about rivalry with China either until the global financial crisis. It’s the way that we’re set up in foreign policy, and we’ve refused to see how we create structures that incentivize behaviors and others like China that we don’t like. It’s that failure to see how all of this stuff is connected that leads us to this view of everything bad in the world is because of some bad guy who’s not us, and it’s just a mystery why they’re bad. That’s not good analysis.
Robinson
They hate us for our freedom!
Jackson
That’s exactly what’s going on now! And so, of course, we’re going to arms race with balloons and stuff because we’re blaming—
Robinson
The balloon thing! I need your hot take on the balloon.
Jackson
It’s so nonsense. The thing is it probably was a surveillance or spy balloon, and wasn’t just a weather balloon. But, if you choose rivalry, this is the price of rivalry: spy versus spy. The decision to have espionage happen, and the condition of possibility for that, is endemic rivalry. So, if you choose rivalry, there are certain costs and risks that go along with that. And America, again, being blameless, doesn’t like to look at the costs and risks. They like to make the choices and then have the costs be someone else’s problem. And that is bad history and analysis, and it leads to bad outcomes.
Robinson
I also assume we have our own equivalent of the balloon.
Jackson
Nobody’s mentioning this, and I do mention this in Pacific Power Paradox. Part of the acceleration of Chinese paranoia and triumphalism, in 2010—this only came to light recently, in the last few years—the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] discovered that the CIA had extremely high-level human intelligence plants in the party apparatus, including in security and intelligence ministries. The PLA saw that it was an extreme threat to regime security, and that it was the corruption of their political system itself that made them vulnerable to CIA infiltration.
Xi Jinping came to power on the heels of this revelation and decided the whole regime is at stake, and that they have to get less corrupt and purge America out of their system. America is a threat—that’s the Chinese view at that point. You see this huge acceleration in Chinese assertiveness 2010-2012. Nobody in American foreign policy talks about the fact that China stumbled on to the CIA having infiltrated them at the highest levels. Talk about surveillance, we’re worried about a balloon! We’re not worried about China having our Vice President, I don’t think. And so, that’s a wild discrepancy in the spy versus spy stuff. It’s the price of rivalry, and we’re doing it times a thousand. But if they send a balloon, it’s a problem.
Robinson
It’s very strange. Every time I hear people indignant about the balloon, I think, “Are you saying that we would never do this?” If it’s fair to be indignant about it, does the assertion that “this is an impingement on sovereignty” mean we oppose impingements on sovereignty generally, or just on ours? That has to be implicit in the indignation. It sounds as if what you’re saying is that we occasionally apply standards to others and demand they conform to them, and are unwilling to apply them to ourselves.
Jackson
That’s right. It all comes back to insisting on American Exceptionalism and on viewing the world in a way that exculpates us from outcomes in the world that we don’t like. It’s not that America is the root of all problems. I don’t believe that at all. The book is clear eyed about Chinese and North Korean behaviors that are destabilizing that policymakers try to respond to rationally, but in a boundedly rational way where the response is anchored in presumptions and narratives about American goodness that is not correct, and leads them to extreme actions and risk taking that they’re not even really aware of.
And that’s why Biden still thinks we’re operating this “America is great foreign policy and is the oxygen and pacifier for stability,” but we’re actually the most volatile actor in the region. At this point, we’re literally rearranging the economic order that has helped keep peace and bring up the East Asian economies. We’re wrenching it and saying, “We need to cut this in half. China may be the lifeblood of your economies, but gradually, we’re trying to economically contain them more and more, and you’re going to have to figure out new ways of surviving and the economic order that we’re revising in real time.”
Robinson
Something that makes the United States an incredibly dangerous actor is the lack of self awareness and to perceive ourselves as others see us: to see through the eyes of anyone on the receiving of our policy. It’s an arrogance that says that we would never act in a purely self-interested way because we’re America. There’s a fundamental assumption of idealism and goodness. I don’t think it’s widely realized that everyone in the world thinks they’re good, and you don’t know if you’re actually good and idealistic until you check how you look to other people.
Jackson
That’s totally true and this is a genuine source of danger, ironically. I used to believe all this stuff, too. I was a true believer in this kind of evangelical exceptionalism, the triumphalism of America as the “shining city on a hill” in foreign policy, even though I could see that our domestic politics were a little messed up. And, in fact, for the foreign policy mandarins in DC, having external threats and being able to externalize America’s problems onto another is psychologically the salve and the psychic wage that prevents us from having to deal with our own problems.
And so, China is a godsend to the foreign policy establishment because it means that they don’t have to take a hard look at the American surveillance state, the de facto policing of Black communities, or the deep economic precarity of the majority of the population. They don’t have to face the threat of the far-right militias, or the way that politics is post-democratic in many senses, with the oligarchic political economy that we run—there’s no time for any of that. And also, there’s no time for the climate crisis either because we got to smite the big bad.
Robinson
It sounds almost like a childlike observation, but I do think to myself, much of the time, isn’t it a little weird that every time we defeat one enemy of the day, another one just immediately pops up? Isn’t it weird that as the threat of fundamentalist Islamist terrorism declined, all of a sudden, we started talking about how we really needed to stop China from displacing us?
Jackson
Yes, it’s like the only answer to a bad guy with the gun is a good guy with a gun or some shit like that. It just leaves us all less secure. And analytically, the Taiwan Strait is the powder keg these days, and is basically a security dilemma.
Robinson
Could you explain what that is?
Jackson
Security dilemma is a concept in international relations, and describes a situation where you take steps to improve your security, but those steps end up reducing everybody’s security, even yours, because the other guy that you’re trying to secure yourself against is perceiving what you’re doing as a greater insecurity to them. So, let’s say you have defensive intentions—you’re just trying to protect what you got. But they see that as a greater threat to them because you’re amassing arms or making threats or whatever it is, and so they have to respond in kind. And so, you’re both acting rationally and from defensive motivations, but you’re both implicated in a structure and a situation of interactivity that leaves everybody less secure. And this is the rational logic of arms racing because what’s the point of arms racing when you have enough nukes to destroy the world, which we do? Why do you keep arms racing that?
If you’re trapped in a security dilemma situation, then you can still think that you’re the good guy just trying to protect what’s yours, but you’re actually making everything worse. It’s an essential concept. It explains a lot about the Cold War event, and is the situation across the Taiwan Strait. It’s hard to find anybody arguing otherwise, with serious analysis. But if that’s true, this is an essential thing to grasp: if we’re in a security dilemma—scholars have weighed in very authoritatively here—the policy prescription for getting out of it, and the best way to manage it, is carrots over sticks. It is forms of peaceful signaling, restraint, accommodation, and compromise. You have to communicate in word and deed, persistently over time, that your intentions are defensive. Arms racing is the opposite of what is supposed to happen, and what commits you to the tragedy.
That’s why it’s a security dilemma. To escape the dilemma, it’s got to be carrots over sticks. And since that situation is a dilemma, we have to follow the logical policy of prescriptions to get out of it and to manage it stably, but we’re not doing that. Why? Because China’s 10 feet tall. It’s the big bad. They’re sending over balloons, we got a balloon gap, and it’s time to balloon race.
Robinson
That’s a great concept. Yes, we need a billion dollar appropriation for balloons. Clearly, we need to ramp up our balloon industry.
Jackson
The balloon industrial complex!
Robinson
Is it a security dilemma, though? Does it depend on the perceptions of the actions of the parties being defensive, or their actions being objectively defensive? It seems to me, from a certain perspective, the U.S. insistence upon maintaining an unreasonable level of hegemony in Asia, where we are not located, could be seen as aggressive, not actually defensive.
Jackson
I try not to make that argument too much because I have a lot of normies who are part of my audience who follow me and read my stuff. But there’s a way in which that’s probably true. We are a revisionist power. It is in the nature of hegemony. Any hegemon is, by its nature, a revisionist power because they’re imposing an order that didn’t exist before. Washington takes for granted that America is the hegemon, but they don’t follow that to its logical conclusion, that we are obviously a revisionist power. If you are a revisionist power, by definition, you are the problem. You can’t have a security dilemma if one side is a revisionist.
Robinson
What do you mean by revisionist?
Jackson
The willingness to use force to get what you want. You’re going to rewrite the rules by force if necessary. The alternative is to be a status quo power, where you’re in a defensive crouch and just want shit to stay the same. Hegemons are by their nature revisionists, but we have a way of narrating our own hegemony as being status quo. This coding distinction between status quo and revisionist states is what makes the security dilemma concept work. To be a security dilemma, you need to have two sides with defensive intentions, and it’s not clear that the US actually has defensive intentions here.
The mania of militarism that has overtaken the discourse, with the idea that anybody who argues for restraint, or is critical of US foreign policy in any respect about China, is basically working for Xi Jinping and is subversive. That’s where we’re at in the discourse, and it’s completely normal to expect that kind of reaction if you critique US foreign policy in any way. So, in that kind of environment, I don’t get a lot of mileage out of saying, “America’s the revisionist power, we need to pack it in. American retrenchment is the solution.” That doesn’t go very far in Washington, and that’s part of my audience. The next best thing is to say, “Maybe we have defensive intentions, but so does China. And so, that means we should do security dilemma prescriptions, which gets us halfway to a just stability.”
Robinson
And I assume those prescriptions would not include the current proposed policy of turning Taiwan into what is called a “porcupine”: to put so many spiky looking weapons that nobody would ever invade.
Jackson
The porcupine thing is not a bad strategy militarily. There’s nothing that you’re going to do in the defense domain that will solve this problem. At best, you’re just going to manage it more or less stably. If you equip Taiwan with the “porcupine capabilities”, like undersea mines, coastal artillery, and that kind of thing—defensive weapons that make it really costly for China to invade—that’s not a bad military response. That’s one of the more stable things we could probably do. It’s just that it doesn’t solve any of the problems, and increases the costs if China decides to invade.
But, we’re also not quite doing that. We talk about doing that, and we do it a little bit, but selling Taiwan F-16s doesn’t contribute to a porcupine strategy. It’s just gratuitous, it’s extra, and the weird part about it is that China, not Taiwan, has air superiority. They have air dominance because all of Taiwan falls within the integrated air defense range of China because it’s right next to it. And so, we cannot, and Taiwan cannot, establish air superiority in the way that the U.S. military is accustomed to, like in the War on Terror and in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s one of the ways in which the balance of power is not rectifiable because of the geography, and yet we sell them those kinds of weapons anyway, even though they don’t affect the balance of power.
Robinson
Yes, and in a place where you’re very unlikely to win a war or a war would be extremely costly, probably the best strategy is to do everything you can to avoid having one.
Jackson
Yes, use instruments other than the military to try and manage this problem better. But instead, we foreclose all things except for the arming Taiwan part. It would be one thing to arm Taiwan much better, and that’s some kind of near-term intermediate fix if we weren’t also pursuing primacy ourselves, and increasing our military footprint in the region, which we’re doing. So, we’re proliferating to allies, and pursuing primacy ourselves. And it’s like, pick a lane, buddy. Even if you did one or the other, there would be reasonable arguments for the left to take up opposition, but we’re doing both. It’s the worst of both worlds, and then somehow we’re still blameless.
Robinson
I’ll conclude here by asking, when you say America is “turning Asia into a powder keg,” what is the disaster situation you envisage that we could be headed towards? What would the consequences be, and how do we avoid that?
Jackson
Wars are almost always preceded by crises. Crises are almost always preceded by geopolitical rivalries. That’s the logical flow that takes us into interstate wars. So, if you’re trying to like reverse engineer a war process so that you can have the opposite happen, you have to intervene in that process somewhere.
The danger of proliferating weapons, establishing primacy, and basically encircling China is maybe something that you can manage at the crisis level. It’s a little bit like Russian roulette, though, because you don’t have full control over what happens. China could miscalculate, and ethnonationalism could get stoked by domestic imbalances in China. That would not be unprecedented. China could make a calculation that it’s worth doing a military adventure somewhere, and then we’re into war. We have to intervene at deeper levels to get deeper security, and that means getting ahead of crises.
And so, committing to rivalries is problematic because it sets us on this path toward war. Undoing rivalry, and starting to create buffer space between war and crisis in our status quo, is what we should want. That requires a more competent statecraft. There is a military role for that in that space, it’s just radically different and more restrained than what we do now.
Robinson
I read your stuff to understand the Pacific, but as you mentioned, so many foreign policy commentators and thinkers these days do appear to be from the war party. There is a whole rest of the world to understand. If people want to understand the U.S. relationship with Asian countries, they can’t do better than to read your writing. Who else do you recommend that people read to get a better understanding of the world as it is that won’t bias them in ways that are likely to lead to calamitous global wars?
Jackson
There’s a great ecosystem of foreign policy people, largely on the left. Matt Duss, who is Bernie Sanders is foreign policy adviser, has a very sound mind. He’s a buddy, to be honest. Tobita Chow is really great on Asia. Kate Kizer, who co-hosts my podcast, is my go-to source on all things Middle East. She’s keeping track of Saudi receipts on the Yemen war. Jake Werner is fantastic on China, too. Within the think tank space, it’s mostly intellectually derelict. The Carnegie Endowment is pretty good. It’s not like foreign policy for the working class by any stretch, but they are a pretty good source, insofar as mainstreams go.
Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth. This conversation originally appeared on the Current Affairs podcast.
