SURGE US-China Symposium 2022: Security Panel

hi hello hi hello everybody thank you all for joining us today uh wonderful to uh transition into our third panel of the sino-us symposium at the 14th uh the 14th annual symposium at dallas university my name is haitone i am a senior at taos i'm a fourth year student and i study international relations and i'm the vice president of surge or sino-us relations group engagement uh once again um today we have a fabulous cast of uh three experts um who will be joining us in a panel i'm talking about the future of um sino-uh sino-us security confrontation and particularly with regards to the ongoing situation in ukraine and the uh new developments um coming um coming out from both sides of the taiwan strait so um the first one uh is uh our very own professor beckley uh at the political science department at tufts university who is a leading expert on the balance of power between the united states and china uh professor beckley is also the author of two books and multiple award-winning articles um a associate professor of political science at tulsa university and a non-resident uh senior fellow at to the american enterprise institute the aei previously professor beckley was a international security fellow at harvard's kennedy school of government and worked for the united states department of defense the rend corporation and the carnegie endowment for international peace he continues to advise offices within the us intelligence community and the united states department of defense once again thank you very much for joining us professor beckley yeah my pleasure thanks so much for for having me so i'll kick things off and just focus on the taiwan issue and then maybe in q a or discussion we can talk about sort of the broader u.s china relationship but just given russia's invasion of ukraine you know obviously a potential chinese assault on taiwan is very much on people's minds and i mean my own sense is that you know a invasion is is unlikely just because great power war is an unlikely event but it's more likely than any of us should be really comfortable with in the same way that a russian all-out invasion of ukraine was maybe not super likely prior to the actual invasion but it happened and shows that old-fashioned conquest is still alive and well and something that needs to be taken seriously and i'm i'm especially concerned because i think if there is a chinese assault on taiwan that it's probably going to happen sooner rather than later so ie in in this decade in the 2020s rather than in the 2030s or 2040s and i'm also very concerned because if war occurs i actually think the war could could escalate significantly could well become protracted because neither uh neither beijing nor taipei or or washington will easily be able to capitulate there aren't easy off-ramps to a war once it started so i i'll kind of flush those two main points out just in the next five to ten minutes um and you know what i i guess my first point is while we we need to think long term about competition between the united states and china i think on the taiwan issue we do need to be thinking short term because china's own history like the history of chinese use of force as well as its recent behavior suggests that um if there is going to be an assault on taiwan it could happen soon so there's been a lot of studies that have analyzed when and why china uses force and they all reach a pretty similar conclusion they argue that china goes to war not when it's rising and everything is going great for it but when its security situation is starting to deteriorate and its bargaining strength is starting to decline so tom christensen who's this famous uh china scholar at columbia says he did a big study and he basically found that china uses force to either exploit a closing window of opportunity or to avoid an opening window of vulnerability and my concern is that i think we face that situation right now that china has a potentially closing window of opportunity in the taiwan strait and at the same time it has an opening window of vulnerability in its broader strategic situation so i think it has a a window of opportunity in a taiwan strait right now because first of all china's just coming off decades of rapid military modernization china's been churning out warships at a faster rate than any country has since world war ii and so you had this major shift in the cross-strait military balance between china and taiwan but i think that advantage is going to peak this decade because the united states is also going to downsize temporarily its naval its air and naval presence in east asia because a lot of u.s warships guided missile submarines long-range bombers those were all built in the 1980s under ronald reagan and they're at this point they're they're kept they're literally catching on fire they're they're not usable anymore and so they're gonna have to be retired on mass and so in the late 2020s you're going to have this temporary dip in u.s firepower essentially in east asia and as a result that gives china even more of a potential opportunity but on the other hand i think that window of opportunity won't stay open for very long because both the united states and taiwan have ambitious plans to rapidly develop their their strike options in east asia to spread out their forces and make them much more resilient against a chinese preemptive attack and so china has its chance but probably not for very long and at the same time it faces this opening window of vulnerability at the grand strategic level and that's for a few reasons one is that china's economic growth is is starting to slow so you know for most of the past 30 years china you know its economy was growing like gangbusters it was mostly self-sufficient in most resources it had a huge demographic dividend with lots of workers and relatively few elderly people to take care of or or children and at the same time it had probably the most secure geopolitical environment in modern chinese history you didn't have you know japan preying on you or western imperialist powers attacking you if you're china and china also had pretty easy access to foreign markets and technology and a lot of this frankly was underpinned by a solid relationship with the united states which helped provide for a more secure environment but i think all of those factors i just listed are starting to reverse that china is running out of resources its economic growth is slowing it's running out of working age people it's starting to amass a huge population of senior citizens um and uh you know china just these economic headwinds are hitting china at the same time that china is now confronting an increasingly hostile security environment so just around the world negative views of china have surged to levels we haven't seen since the tiananmen square massacre and they're starting to manifest themselves in ways that are making life more difficult for leaders in beijing whether it's the rise of a more independent taiwanese identity um the fact that there's thousands of new trade and investment barriers that have been slapped on china over the last few years uh countries kind of balking at their belt and road projects um there's there's this series of sort of uh export control these sort of ad hoc coalitions of countries that are trying to cut china off from key technologies so the key example there is the semiconductors coalition where you had a bunch of rich countries try to cut china off from advanced chips that kind of model is sort of being scaled out over lots of other different types of technologies and even you know with russia's invasion of ukraine you've also had sort of the reinvigoration of of the west as it used to be known and you know some of these countries the major economies have kind of had some practice about what it would entail to cut a major power out of the global financial system and so that has to be very concerning for china just because you've already gotten these parties kind of together and talking and practicing if it were you know on russia and those kind of same weapons could be turned on to china so i think that's the strategic backdrop that we need to look at the taiwan situation today because if you're if you're xi jinping who who by the way is going to be you know pushing 80 years old by the 20 early 2030s then you're probably thinking if you want to accomplish that long-standing national goal of reunification it doesn't look like there's any peaceful option just given where taiwan is moving in terms of public opinion and so you might need to turn more coercive options and the 2020s seem like if you're going to strike would be the best time to do it so none of this means that you know war is imminent in the taiwan strait but it's certainly more likely than i'm frankly comfortable with um and so this means that you know for the united states and taiwan they they both of them really need to get their act together as soon as possible there's all these debates you know going on in dc about you know should or should not the united states build a 355 ship navy like all you know or should we spend lots of money on r d on weapon systems that are going to be ready 10 or 15 years from now and for me i just think those are sort of beside the point that the united states actually needs a surge of um of weapon systems in the taiwan strait or around the taiwan strait as soon as possible to try to maintain some level of deterrence there and for in taiwan you know it's the same thing taiwan has developed new strategic concepts that would make themselves kind of like what the ukrainians have done making themselves a prickly porcupine that is just really hard to conquer but the problem is uh taiwan hasn't put its defense dollars where its mouth is so it's still spending money on fancy items like f-16s that may get blown up in the first few hours on the runway in a chinese preemptive missile strike or on indigenously built ships that you know may not make it out of port um at the outset of a war rather than on what the ukrainians have which are like lots of little you know lots of missile launchers and and and mortars and and other kind of fires that you could direct at a chinese um assault force so um you know i when i advise the us government a lot of it is just trying to like what can we macgyver together right now to try to shore up deterrence in the taiwan straight because i just worry that time is short um and the second point which i'll just make very briefly is that i worry that if the war occurs it could actually go long and that's because that's been the case for most major power wars usually you know the great powers they get in the war thinking it's going to be this short sharp conflict and they'll be home for christmas and then it ends up dragging on for years and years and both sides escalate both horizontally into new theaters as well as vertically by ramping up the amount of firepower that they bring on each other and so this again means that if you're the united states or taiwan you can't just be thinking about how to repel the initial wave of a chinese amphibious invasion or or the initial few weeks of a chinese blockade of taiwan you actually have to be thinking that this conflict could drag on which means you need the ability to uh to rearm to regroup and reload um and to build up the capacity to churn out war material for for the long run and right now the united states and taiwan really don't have much capability to um to do that um the last thing i would say is that the united states and taiwan need to be thinking about off-ramps because i for every article or book i read about how to fight china in a war over taiwan i read maybe like half of an article for every thousand articles i read about how to fight a war over taiwan i read maybe one article about how to de-escalate a conflict once it starts like what would be the kind of peace deals that could be struck because presumably the war would not end with either beijing marching on on washington dc or vice versa it's going to end with some kind of negotiated settlement so what would that settlement look like how could you allow china to save some face you know and claim some semblance of victory so that they don't feel they have to fight on and vice versa um these are the kind of things that need to be taken seriously but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be the case in most strategic debates today so i'll leave it there since i know we have other distinguished speakers and i want to get to discussion as well but thanks so much for tuning in thank you so much professor beckley very insightful analysis and uh next we have a professor mario del pero who is a professor of international history at sean's poll in paris where he teaches courses on the united states in the world of the cold war and uh 20th and 21st century global history he has published very widely in both english and italian and before joining sean's pope professor del pero has taught at the university of bologna and held professorships and visiting professorships at the european university institute the the klug center of the library of congress columbia university new york university and the graduate institute of international development studies of geneva he's currently writing a book on a mission of texan evangelicals in the early post-world war ii italy which tries to offer a micro-historical account of the global dynamics of integration of the cold war professor del pero also runs a blog and regularly comments on the united states international politics for the italian and swiss public radios and for sky news thank you for joining us professor dobhara oh thanks a lot uh for the invitation it's a great pleasure to be here uh uh i was telling lucas that i've been tested positive to cover it a few days ago so i'm secluded in my bedroom it means also i have a small child appropriately nicknamed godzilla in the other room so if you hear some screaming no need to call save the children it's just in my my daily life at home with a two-year-old and that's it thanks for the invitation it's also a great pleasure to be here with professor berkley god knows how many students of mine have read his 2011 2012 article on china's century for international security which i loved by the time i i then have you know inflicted on on many of my uh of many of my students so um i understood actually originally it was more of a back and forth of a cue of a q a between you and us but following uh what michael did uh i'll offer a couple of quick very quick reflections on ukraine and then we can move on and try to link the two because there is clearly a potential linkage between between ukraine and taiwan if you between china and russia so what have we seen in this what is a bit more than a month uh two months actually of of war began the 24th of february we have seen that uh banal to say a clear kind of you know uh uh um re-cementing of the atlantic alliance the war the blatant aggression of russia i don't know how else to put it has provided a long needed and a long absent if you will glue between the us and its european allies but even more among european countries because within the eu and within the european bloc of the atlantic community there have been there were there still are more on which in a second uh huge differences uh even in in the kind of policy uh in the kind of connection in the kind of relationship with russia so the war has re-cemented transatlantic unity that has been very visible uh under however a reasserted u.s leadership now we the atlantic community has historically worked via the presence of a clear hegemon somehow the atlantic alliance has been you know kept united and federated by the presence of a superior actor which was the us i don't think what we are seeing now is very much different uh there has been a lot of discussion on you know for example germany's decision to uh to significantly increase its defense spending uh and that i mean germany has not been the only european country to follow that line that is happening under a renewed atlantic umbrella it's not the you know macrons and quasi-neo-golist autonomy of europe what we are seeing now as i said it's it's happening under us leadership if you will under the us watch under the uh uh the uh the nato and transatlantic umbrella finally from a more if you will ideological discursive rhetorical point of view what we are seeing is kind of in a revalidation of a sort of called neo-code war narrative as a historian i'm very skeptical of cold war analogies i have also written a couple of articles uh against the use misuse and abuse of the cold war analogy but in terms of narratives somehow what uh we are seeing today it's the uh alleged apparent revalidation for sort of you know black and white narrative of a community of democracies led by the us kept together by u.s leadership as i was saying facing a very authoritarian state which has you know uh uh which uh has been subjected its population to a brutal neo-authoritarian turn post beginning of the war which is visible in multiple counts and it's visible also on the kind of a new diaspora of many you know even academics one of my dearest colleagues is a russian academic who left russia in 2013 after being you know he was director of a major russian university and he left the country after being harassed by by the regime and he was telling me that something similar at a lower and less visible level is happening today and presumably will continue to happen in the near future so uh to sum up uh the uh the war has provided the atlantic alliance with sort of rational re-strengthening the unity or somehow silencing the differences within the atlantic alliance the war has somehow reasserted us leadership and the war has revalidated a kind of you know ideological very binary partition of the international system or more specifically of what's going on in europe today that said i see no reasons to be optimistic at the moment there are no breaking points visible it's very hard to imagine an outcome so following up on what michael was saying you know imagining a taiwan war scenario what we are seeing in ukraine now is a war which is potentially bound to last clearly ukraine will not set for a a compromise of sort at the moment clearly russia will not accept a form of you know punitive defeat clearly the sanctions they take time to to to bite in a way and they also take time to make their effects visible all russia but even you know in those european countries i think of germany and italy which are more dependent on russia or more interdependent with russia so the absence of a clear breaking point point uh leads to uh uh leads me to believe that the war will go on for a while with all the you know the consequences of that and finally whichever the outcome and it's hard as of today to imagine an outcome whichever the outcome it will leave us with some you know major issues bound to remain we will have russia which is a pariah of the international system but it is a parallel which sits on thousands of warheads still endowed with uh uh the natural resources which russia has relied so much we will have a ukraine you know in which the national identity will be radically redefined by this war by the heroic resistance and by what ukraine is doing you know nations are i don't want to get too academic human nations are constantly reimagined reinvented they leave a foundational mix and in the ukrainian national mythology 2022 will will be almost foundational so to speak but this radically nationalist ukraine will be strongly anti-russian inevitably so understandably so if not russia phobic it will be a hyper nationalist country with a strong sense of you know victimhood i don't know how else to put it bound to have a kind of you know special truck to eu membership which is problematic on multiple accounts and therefore bound to you know have an impact within the larger you know european community european uh group and then finally you will still have divisions among european countries which are remain very deep they have been silenced by the war i mean russia managed you know putin has managed to do to somehow uh uh amass the largest quantity of strategic mistakes one can think of in a single shot right you have in nato and sweden now and finland and sweden are considering nato membership you have germany you know putting on hold the the pipeline north stream two and so forth and so on but that said those differences remain poland and germany or poland and hungary they have very different positions vis-a-vis russia for a variety of reasons and those will still be there at the end of the war i stopped here with just one last sentence those divisions that kind of you know european europe's pluralism or diversity is also very visible in the relationship and therefore in the attitude european countries have vis-a-vis china and the elephant in the room once again as always when we talk of europe today is germany i mean we can you know we can discuss of european integration and macron can play the military card to claim a role that france cannot have it i mean you know my colleagues at cnsb don't like to hear that there is still a very strong kind of neo-golist you know belief in in france's grandeur but the hegemony in europe is germany the actor that called the shots is germany we saw that post 2008 we saw that over greece we saw that even in the case of italy and that applies also to russia and to china just to make a one barrel example and i and i stop here if you look at china germany has as of today a total volume of trade which is almost the same level of the trade germany has with the us germany doesn't run with china the same monumental trade surplus it has with the us but china has become a key economic partner of germany and if you look at you know german germany's trade balance with china it is in europe in a league of its own i mean it's just in another planet if compared to you know the balance of trade and the volumes of trade imports exports of italy the netherlands who which has a large large deficit with china not to mention france okay stop here but i hope that would be the the possibility then to to come back to some of those points thank you thank you so much professor del pero it's as definitely uh very relevant as the french presidential election is still ongoing into the second round i believe and where friends will be heading to is um and europe as a whole will be heading to is definitely something to look forward to and um of course our third participant is um uh ebenezer uh azamati uh who is from the department of politics and international relations dpir at the university of oxford he is a uh ardent clash witson with keen interest uh in the interactions between wars and the origins of world orders azamati is a student in residence at the university college oxford and reads for the d field in international relations his research examines real politique and illiberal great powers conceptions of established international doctrines and liberal concepts in particular he is a student of classical realism and training who investigates the complex connections between international commitments and the national interests of great powers involved in the management of the international order via preeminent international institutions ebenezer you have the floor thank you very much for the invitation to participate in this i might say it's a great honor to be on the same platform with two professors uh one of which uh i have read one of whom i've read his article before and actually used for my own assignments uh some years ago uh again uh undergrad for some exactly it's a pleasure to be here finally with you and and um also a pleasure to be here now a lot has been said where do i want to start from uh the uh the previous speakers focused on china one person focused on china and the second person focused on russia and ukraine and also concluded with a little bit of china now i look at both nations because interestingly they are part of what i call liberal states and arguably the most powerful liberal states in the international system so i focus on those two countries now in my discussion um i intend to make three main points uh but i would start with two questions the first question is what does the west want if there is a west what does it want and secondly does the west need russia and china these two questions i would answer after my main three points i want to make now when i remembered about china and russia and whether or not there's going to be a great wall from somebody quickly said he he relatively is hoping that there's not going to be a a great war between china and russia and then um he continues to make the points that well even though some people say it seems likely he is uncomfortable with it but for me the the point that i want to make is when we are talking about war is the west interested in wars at the moment it doesn't seem like that that's the first point i'd like to make now take iraq 2003 when the neocons were in power and they were more interested in going to iraq now public opinion then was different access to information then was different in today's world information this dissemination has become so quick and every time they can harry has access to information at least if you can read and write you have access to information on whatever is going on in the world and over the years what the west has done is that public opinion is the west is the in the west it's the first to condemn whatever western leaders decide to do thinking about this leads me to the position that a decision by the west to go to war with china should china decide to invade taiwan would be absolutely controversial and highly contested now more importantly we've seen how um the west western nations have deleted it when it came to ukraine and russia because obviously again the argument of um we are not interested in the nuclear war russia might attack us we don't want to involve ourselves in a long ground war with russia etc etc and all this is also forwarded by public opinion now these factors have resulted in the west's evading realities and the invasion of realities obviously results in avoidance of war imagine the us put itself forward that should russia invade they would wage a war is a is a war against the international community under the the u.s nato led by the u.s was going to attack russia directly and surely vladimir putin would have threatened nuclear war but would we have gotten there perhaps not and that is why the times of grenada were interesting when reagan decided to increase the the number of u.s weaponry we realized where the russians got to but today the times are gonna reagan the times of the ronald reagans and the nixons and all the others have long passed and we are in a time where every time they can harry can comment on foreign affairs and has an opinion about foreign about international relations and what countries do and what they don't do this has also led to the limitation of what leaders can do and what they cannot do because they are they are afraid of public opinion of course i'm not saying public opinion didn't exist in those days existed but today it seems louder than ever now this has led to steam leaders always mean to be oh we are those who actually love international law we we love human rights and we know uh what to do in such times the love for human rights love for international law and all of these have left china and russia thinking that oh of course he will go to war the west is going to argue with international law the west is going to argue with human rights that actually because of this and that because of international law because of the fact that we love human rights we have democratic laws and etcetera they are surely not going to come after us surely they will use sanctions and this leads me to my second point but even before that the the continuous resorting to international arguments on international law human rights et cetera means that over the years china and over the years china and russia have been practicing what i have termed as real politic internationalism where basically where where international law human rights or any other international liberal doctrines actually plays to their advantage they use them and obviously when they know that the west is going to play the cuts of these international liberal doctrines they take advantage to exploit them all and obviously the west is left to continuously resort to oh we believe in international and of course china continue and do whatever they want to do one point i would like to make is this whole who um international law and human rights again over the years the continuous expansion of international law and human rights institutions to cover russia and china have now made it impossible for the west to be able to directly confront these two countries now if you use international do you continue to argue in the news what happens is that china and russia are left out because they don't strictly believe in these things as there was believing them they think it's actually least an end and they continue to exploit these means to an end some structures and this is where it becomes critical the continuous objects have not become normalized by the west and we should that country uh i think i think i've been asked oh he's back hi can you hear us yes i can hear you is it university college wi-fi i suppose unsurprising i'm surprised sorry did i get did i get cut off right a bit yeah i think i think you cut out in the middle oh sorry so why um um and the continued use of sanctions and the effects that would have in the united states and the west being able to confront uh china and russia if i remember correctly right right so um what the point i was making that was my third point is the continuous usage of sanctions against russia and china equally means that these countries are also learning and of course once you learn you also come to achieve something with what you have learned there is a favor there's a very famous african proverb that goes like if the if hunters learn to shoot without missing bets would also learn to fly without patching what that means is that if you continue to if you continue to sanction us would find ways around these sanctions and over the years china have been finding ways um we can hear you yeah right so when when these days when people say um sanctions against russia are going to buy to russia hard etcetera ask myself so do people think russia is not learning anything from these sanctions do people think russia is just sitting down without strategizing and planning surely russia and china russia is sitting down and planning and strategizing of course um once we are we are in the west we will be thinking that oh yeah our actions are biting them so hard etcetera etcetera but then it's good to look at the other end what is russia doing what will russia do after this war however long it takes what would russia do to become very useful and relevant again to the west because that will lead me to my next point but even for that and i want to set an example in 2014 when russia was well sorry in 2012 when you ukra iran was switched out of the the strict system we realized that just eight months afterwards china decided to start thinking about an alternative to the swift system and now we have the sip so imagine one day uh the west decides to completely cut out cut off russia from the swift system what happens surely russia would find out an alternative and in fact they even started that in 2014 when uh there were threats that they were going to be sanctioned and in fact they were they were sanctioned they are central their banks were sanctioned in 2014 they developed an alternative internally where they could still transfer money and do transactions monetary transactions in russia obviously once you're doing this what's happening is that the effect of the west is reducing gradually of course some people may say is um in terms of firepower in terms of military energy and all of that the west still has advantages but these things we do not realize their effects immediately they grow gradually the next most important point which answers one of my questions is does the west need russia and china surely it needs one of them but it doesn't need both unfortunately the strategic thinking that used to exist in the in the states department and the foreign office in britain and the united in the united states seem to have lost uh effect in the 70s when um the communists were trying to we're trying to gang up against the the west henry kissinger was smart and swift and he was able to he was able to court the chinese to his to the side of the west and they came against the the the soviets obviously that is not the only thing that is not the only thing that reduced the effects of communism around the world and the effects of of of of the soviets around the world but of course it was very very effective and useful but today both russia and china have unfortunately been demolished and for me my argument has always been maybe it would be better if we had a reconsideration of the kissingerian approach in the 60s and 70s where at the end of the day there was an effective way of reducing the effects of of the soviets around the world the final point which i would make is what is in answering my question what's that's the worst one at this point in time doesn't seem to know what exactly it wants does the west want a divided world or the west want a world that is infused together we have a one one world that includes china and russia or we want a world where russia and china are on their own with their allies and the west is also on its own with its allies this question has been the major question on the minds of uh policymakers since the end of the cold war and of course unipolarity has made it impossible for the west to understand that there will always be quote-unquote enemies people who don't really approve of the west at any point in time every point in time the world cannot think equally we cannot all have the same um ideas or the same style of thinking somebody with a post some group of countries would oppose what they were saying but sadly this has not been a reality that the west has accepted since the end of the cold war and also the west has equally not accepted that they want to have a a a united world that makes it difficult to know what exactly the west stands in fact to even even within the world among the west one one major problem is of course people talk about germany all the time and i asked myself what does the west want germany to be i want germany to be a strong military power or a weakened military power obviously within the west opinions are divided france and britain will surely not want to have a strong a militarily strong germany but to some extent the united states would have wished that there was a strong and militarily strong germany we have to acknowledge the reality that the united states alone cannot supervise peace over the world at this point as they used to do immediately and after the cold war so now the west has to make a choice as to whether there has to be other strong powers in addition to britain france and the united states or they want to keep things as they are now and of course once things are kept as they are now china and russia surely know that there's the west would just be backing without biting so i'll end here okay those are very interesting points um so i think what we're going to do right now is pivot just a little bit and try to dissect every a lot of the points that have been made and try to re relating them back towards sino-us relations um i think on the point that dr pero and ebenezer made about germany i think we should start there with regard to the ukraine situation and its relationship with china obviously we have seen a titanic titanic shift between german policy before the war and after germany rearming germany being a little bit more assertive in its affairs with regard to europe um dr del pero you mentioned that nato has historically always acted as guided by a hegemon can germany kind of fill that place while the united states increasingly pivots towards the indo-pacific or do you not do you believe that's not realistically or feasible at this moment i think that would be an important question to answer well thanks in a nutshell the answer is no it is no because germany still lacks the resources to do so and possibly the political will it is true that germany has been more assertive has reconsidered some elements of his russian policies uh uh even post 2014 2015 uh but at the same time uh germany is the actor somehow today uh resisting a a modification of the policy on sanctions and the extension of sanctions also to the key realms name energy resources the russian energy resources which uh germany and italy those are the two countries uh most exposed uh uh most dependent on those resources which in germany and italy and their economies still need my second point what michael thinks about it is that it's somehow artificial to separate neatly the atlantic new american so to speak situation and alliance from the asia pacific the two are tightly interconnected given how integrated china is in the global economy and therefore how important the position of china still is in the global supply chains for example often in the beginning or intermediate stages and the power of conditionality so to speak this chinese presence in the globally integrated economy confers to china put it very simply i don't think you can imagine a situation in which the u.s you know peoples to asia and delegate responsibilities to the europeans in europe a because the europeans are too fragmented and divided and without the american federator so to speak those divisions are bound to explode no one really wants the macron model of you know of europe led by france in the military strategic realm and b because if you want to contain somehow china weaken china you need europe europe on board given that you know chinese investments in europe china's trade with europe and china's ability therefore to rely on that to eventually make up for a loosening of the sino-us interdependence an example i often make with my students is the new nafta the new it's called now usmca agreement you know approved with a large bipartisan support in the us and there are many closes many elements in the new in the nafta too if we want to call it so which have a clear anti-chinese you know objective rational to get to the tariffs zero automobiles cars produced in the nafta space space they have to have a percentage of the components that make those cars that now have to reach 75 percent it was 62.5 before what does it mean that the ford factory in queretaro and mexico needs to assemble those cars with components which are themselves in large part produced within the north american space and not imported from elsewhere which means first and foremost from china that's the kind of logic that has informed the us attitude vis-a-vis china in the past few years both by the and and trump and europe is still very reluctant to follow the us on that path the kind of containment of china that the u.s envisioned today i think follows that route and therefore requires a full us european presence it requires the cooperation of europe and which is a cooperation that's very problematic to come long story short i don't think europe has the resources but also the political will to somehow you know stand on its own and allow the u.s to transfer resources and commitments to the asia pacific and also i don't think you can neatly separate the two somehow the us needs europe also in the asia pacific so to speak um one quick follow-up and then we can pivot to professor beckley um we saw that china and russia yeah i'd like to hear what professor buckley thinks about this part uh this particular point um we saw that china and russia made a joint statement right before the olympics and china has been a little bit it has made not tested support but indirect given russia indirect support during the creating crisis and we have seen that european governments are a little bit more hesitant than they were before about chinese actions do you think that china's actions vis-a-vis ukraine could change european perceptions in the long run and then we can i'd like to hear what professor beckley thinks about this um possibly there are some elements you think of the you know chinese direct investments in europe there are some elements on which some european countries have taken in the past few years a more you know a more severe almost strict kind of approach and attitude when it comes to chinese investments post 2017 that has been even in germany a more uh uh strict vetting and there has been a decline in chinese fbi's in europe which is not that different from the dynamic we have seen in the us clearly ukraine is a big test of china's ability to act responsibly uh now uh michael earlier on was saying china is kind of a window not calling it of opportunity of risk there is a window of risk the 2020s because usually china can become more aggressive when it is slightly declining more than when it is rising at the same time china has multiple interest in global stability in the status quo right so there is a tension there i think i'm not entirely convinced that china russia can move beyond the kind of opportunistic convergence as the one we have seen today in the past few months even because generating producing that kind of integration that china has seen has experienced in the global order post 1970s requires alt also the development of infrastructures the full integration within a specific still you know liberal or u.s mostly ruled or dominated international order it's very difficult to imagine something similar taking place happening between russia and china in the short term very badly you have to to create a kind of you know deep economic integration between the two countries a real form of interdependence you need you know to heavy infrastructural investments you know as of today it takes a week for a train to go from moscow to youtube la divo stock just to give you one example among many so there's a huge landmass in between a link in the two countries building pipelines railroads and so forth and so on does take a lot of time and makes this kind of you know alternative block if you want to call it so hard to imagine at least on the short term all right and professor berkley i'd like to hear your perspective on this i think you've written a little bit about this in foreign affairs so i think it's an important voice yeah no i i mean i agree with um professor del pero on on many points um in particular this idea that uh you know the united states can't sort of outsource european security to the europeans and concentrate on asia and the united states also needs a lot of european participation in order to implement its more a more comprehensive strategy vis-a-vis china um i think you know in my sense is that um sometimes people assume that you need this like block of countries all moving in lockstep and completely unified and doing the exact same thing and so if the united states can't get germany to to ramp up its naval presence in the south china sea that that's somehow a failure of the alliance what i what i see is more of like a web of lots of little ad-hoc coalitions springing up that are tailored around specific issues that when you add it all up forms a pretty could form a pretty powerful containment barrier against china if it comes to fruition so um you know while i i don't think the united states expects european powers to get directly involved in in any kind of military fighting if there's a war over taiwan they do they are working with european powers to develop you know new trade and investment standards that uh sort of implicitly discriminate against china i think a lot of what the g7 was doing even before the ukraine crisis was setting up these new standards and then ad hoc uh technology coalitions to cut china off from key technologies was already um sort of a warning a shot across the bow for for beijing so i think it's more of that sort of thing and then focusing on with the countries in the region in east asia to actually hold the line militarily the only other scenario would be if there's some kind of protracted conflict and the united states was looking for ways to escalate the conflict horizontally through some sort of blockade of china's energy supplies through the strait of malacca then european navies suddenly become extremely important for that as well but i don't think the united states expects nor should it you know any kind of european participation and sort of like a it's not it's not like the the front in the cold war you know plugging central europe and and plugging the fulda gap with a unified nato i don't think the united states needs that or is asking european powers to do that um so yeah it's to me it just seems like there's this web of various types of anti-china action coalescing whether it comes to fruition there's still a lot of divisions internally but i think ironically the ukraine crisis has accelerated it just because it seems like it's woken up countries around the west to number one that war is a real possibility like it's not some sort of abstract thing you know russia's kind of shaken us out of our uh our stupor with that and second uh just that uh these authoritarian powers need to be taken literally and seriously you know like when when putin was talking about how ukraine doesn't actually exist as a nation it turns out like that that's really what he believes and he's going to act on that and send massive military forces to make that happen and so now i think people are looking at xi jinping's statements on taiwan and the south china sea and maybe taking them more seriously and literally than they did before again maybe these things won't come to fruition but i see momentum gathering and gathering pace and and the ukraine crisis has even been stepping on the on the accelerator even to a greater degree and to me you know some people think that china has been having a good war with ukraine because somehow this serves chinese interest to have russia uh launch this war right after china announces a no-limits partnership but to me it seems like a disaster for china on numerous fronts because for one thing russia i mean russian power economic and military power is going to be crippled by this crisis no matter what the russian military is getting ground down by the ukrainians at the same time that the russian economy is being choked out through western sanctions so russia is just less less it brings less to the table simply because its power is being constrained so much by the crisis and at the same time uh it's it's galvanized you know capitals around the west to try to look at this situation more carefully so to me this just seems like a horrible outcome and then on top of that you know china is a major commodities importer and when you take russia a major oil producer a major supplier to china partially off the market and when you jeopardize also the food production of both ukraine and russia that can cause prices to rise and that puts china in even further of a bind because china is having to scramble for places to find just basic necessities like food and energy and so if this crisis continues i think it's going to be even worse for china just from a sort of macroeconomic perspective as well and just a quick follow-up you have um you've made your point very clear that you think china is peaking and that there's a closing window of opportunity with regard to taiwan um given how hard of a how difficult it has been for russia to defeat an enemy that's right on its doorstep has that thinking if if china was opting for the military option in the later later in the decade do you think this conflict has changed that point of view or do you think it the uh the use of force persists within xi jinping's inner circle yeah so i'm of two minds of this on the one hand i think if you're like an objective chinese analyst you have to look at this and really question even more than you did before the pla's ability to mount either an amphibious invasion or sustain a blockade against taiwan and we've seen this throughout history you know authoritarian militaries sometimes they suffer from the fact that they're so centrally controlled and so the lower level units are always looking to the capital for orders and so they're very rigid on the battlefield because promotions tend to be based more on loyalty and politics rather than on competence you tend to have a lot of corruption in these militaries and i think there's strong reason to believe that pla suffers from a lot of the same sort of software bugs and weaknesses that the russian military does so if you're an objective pla analyst i think you have to worry even more that your military may not may look very impressive on paper but given the lack of combat experience the amount of corruption and just the authoritarian nature of it and the really politicized nature i mean each major military unit in china's military has split command they have the battlefield commander and then they have the political commissar to enforce ideological discipline and that as a military person you would never want that to have two different cooks you know leading the kitchen in a military conflict it could lead to disaster but the problem i think is that xi jinping may not be getting this message because and i think we saw this on the russia case too where if you're an authoritarian leader and you've purged so many of your political rivals and have been ruling with an iron fist through fear your subordinates are not going to be giving you objective information because you've shot so many messengers along the way and nobody has purged more um comrades than xi jinping you know more than a million senior level uh ccp officials have been pushed out of the party disappeared jailed or basically been demoted over the last uh five or six years and so my worry is that even though there's an objective case to make that the pla should maybe tread more lightly just given the fact that you know in the fog of war things could go very badly for them even if they have immaculate battle plans on paper but the problem is i worry that xi jinping is surrounded by a bunch of yes people essentially that they will they won't tell him and be totally straight with him um because he's he's he clearly wants to have some kind of reaction under his his regime under his time in office um has made that clear and they they are worried about you know giving him information that may disrupt that because they don't want their head on the chopping block so that's that's my biggest worry okay and on that point of information i think we can pivot to something that ebenezer said in his opening statement with regard to the the west's willingness to go to war essentially to up the ante in a crisis like this um ebenezer you mentioned the nation the nature of information and how technology has made information so accessible around the world and noted that that could potentially hamper the west's ability to respond in the event of a crisis um in the past we have also seen democracies kind of be a little bit ambivalent or a little bit contemptuous with regard to the international system right before an attack and then once the attack happens whether it is the attack on poland or right now in ukraine democracies move into action relatively quickly do you think the information sphere has changed that technology has changed that or if an attack on taiwan for example were to happen or if the ukraine war escalates do you think that the technology of today has made that rule uh that past precedent irrelevant so um we i will start by pointing out that we have to shoot that uh there's been times that um democracies have been ambivalent or contentious towards the international system and in those times the sort of information that was available to the problem the amount of missing that was available to the public that's not the same as today the the amount of information we have um as the general public and to be fair if the ukraine if the ukraine war were to escalate or china were to attack taiwan obviously you're still going to get these loud voices and loud um uh so-called pacifists who would be predominant on all forms of social media screaming and shouting and and mention media uh debating why it is not useful for the west to get involved and these days emotions have become more useful in the west than realities people have well to put it well quite harshly failed to accept realities these days people are actually more interested in how much we can emote and not how much we can face the realities and for me china is looking carefully at what is going on in ukraine and noting down the fact that day in day out there are people from the west who are continuously arguing that it's not useful for the west to get evolved in this world and of course this evening includes academics uh and and so-called aspects on transfer relations who argue strongly that is not useful for the west to be involved in this world rather position in this world perhaps not but to me even if people such as i have mentioned do not have interest in the west getting involved in this world i do not think it is useful for it to be unveiled so public as they have done because look as as as stalin said some years ago i have quote i have very useful idiots in the west on coach that was stunning because in those days stalin could see clearly how much people were even advocating such soviet union in the time in the west right now if you have seen who has planted all sorts of spices all over in the west in the western universities in the western media even in western political parties etc and they are all listening and seeing all these sort of information and feeding them back to china clearly and they are watching and knowing that well i mean if we should invade taiwan the argument would be what everyone has been um taiwan has always been part of of um of china and it was only in 1949 as they left so surely we are going to get people in the west who would argue this and the other time i saw in a paper one particular paper in britain very very famous paper where someone was arguing that well russia's claim uh over over crimea is not uh right any more than the british any more than it's not wrong any more than britain's claim over over the four class so if you have like people in the west writing these things spreading these kind of information clearly and these countries would obviously be assured of their support in the west and once these supports are expressed loudly in the west it's going to make it difficult for western leaders to make any strong decisions to go to war or make any stronger decisions any decisions that are stronger than just imposing sanctions and i told early on russia and china are beginning to know how to go around these sanctions and so you made a point that oh yeah when the ukrainian wars when the war against ukraine started the west came to a decision very quickly even that is even debatable because we all saw the divisions among the western nations when some sanctions were were proposed and how long it took some of these countries to even agree to the proposition of an implementation of these sanctions so and more importantly yes they made a decision to to go with sanctions but is stronger enough in those days i'm sure democratic these democratic nations would have gone beyond just sanctions and do and do things more more decisively rather than just imposing sanctions that even up to today some countries do not fully agree with but just have to go with just because of public opinion okay that's very interesting um so now that we're approaching the end i think we could probably wrap up with a few closing statements on what the impact ukraine is having on the more widely on not just the transatlantic alliance but perhaps in the global order how will american foreign policy change as a result national security strategy was released right before the invasion and mainly focused on china but we now the egypt in the pacific strategy sorry and now we're seeing that perhaps the national security strategy might change with especially in the united states so how do you guys think this particular situation in ukraine will impact the long-term trends of this decade and further on um so if we can start with professor dopero move on to professor beckley and finish off with ebenezer thank you thanks uh well i i partially answered uh i think in my first intervention uh surely the on the short term uh it's reversing the trend on defense spending the post 2008 one could say post 1991 in the case of many many european countries there has been a constant decline in military spending and ukraine is very banley the return of war and often very orthodox conventional traditional brutal war and what we have seen for the moment is that the first almost instinctive reaction is to commit to spend more on defense the second point i think it goes back to what professor begley was saying we need to take i don't want to call it ideology but you know the rhetoric the language the lexicon that comes out of those countries seriously as a matter of fact both in france and italy there is a long tradition of ukrainian studies and those experts have been saying that for quite some time pay attention to what putin or you know the main ideologues of the russian regime are saying about ukraine and pay attention to that and i think uh uh uh that what has has happened i imagine all of you remember putin's last speech before the beginning of the war which was you know this kind of historical kind of uh fresco on one century or more of history beginning with you know accusing lenin and moving on all the way to gorbachev passing by uh stalin and crucified between it gives us also a sense of the centrality of history of a certain view for certain you know historical imagination the last point which we haven't mentioned here is that there is a big you know a big variable a big unknown which is the you know the domestic political and electoral dynamics of the us and of the european democracies we live in hyper polarized and very volatile political systems we have seen pre-covet covet helped the european union and the certainly european cosmopolitanism if you will but pre-covered we have seen countries think of the italian government for a while which were explicitly pro-russian on the one side and very open to set up a kind of special relationship with china uh here in paris we will have in a week a run off with one of the two candidates who was extremely close to a link to putin uh russia and the two putinian candidates in the first round together got more than 30 of the votes you have the u.s going through a political constitutional crisis which is not over at all it is kind of you know in our attention it's left on hold because we're all you know focused on ukraine and china and other things you know state congresses are approving laws which will be then tested in 2024 potentially with you know unimaginable constant constitutional consequences and i can go on and on and on uh so long story short i think that's key variable uh and a key unknown which could of course affect the response i don't like it to call it the west anymore for a variety of reasons but in the case of the atlantic alliance it could have a major impact on the foreign policy of the us and its allies and therefore in the ability to preserve strengthen and make more coherent this renewed transatlantic unity uh drove and provoked by the ukrainian war um yeah i mean i i agree with pretty much everything professor del pero said so i'll just kind of foot stomp what he pointed out i think in the short term this certainly galvanizes the west what we call the west even though it includes many major eastern countries but in the long run you have this counterbalance in the form of populism which i think is very much alive and well obviously the french election is going to tell us be sort of a bellwether of that i think there's a non-trivial risk that donald trump is going to be president of the united states again the democrats don't really seem to have their act together now if if that occurs that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll have a complete breakdown of at least a coalition that's forming against china because trump and and other populists have been anti there's a big and uh even in the republican party in the united states there's a big anti-china basis there but at the same time it may they're not so hot on allies and so you may have the united states pursuing it in a more unilateral fashion as we saw during the actual the initial trump administration and that would be especially the case if various european governments end up uh electing right-wing candidates who want to stake out their own position and who admire someone like putin who has aligned himself with the orthodox church and is basically reasserting the supremacy of white christian dominance over other peoples that's very appealing to certain conservative strains both within the united states um and throughout europe so i think those are the two main things i mean i'm cautiously optimistic that there will be some semblance of at least geopolitical solidarity just given the nature of the russian and chinese threats and the vivid example that we have in the war in ukraine but i mean you know nothing is a foregone conclusion and populism is certainly alive and well and bubbling under the surface and to conclude i would just say three things the first one would be it's about time the u.s acknowledged that the strategy challenge is on and how do we deal with it sooner than later to me if i had the advantage or the opportunity to advise the u.s government i'd say maybe it's better to look among china look between china and russia see which one threatens us in the long term and which one threatens us in the short term which one deals would do a big blow to us if we have to actually face them down directly and which one doesn't and surely the one that doesn't we should be finding ways of trying to bring them into our umbrella so that we can have at least one enemy to fight and for me it seems to me that russia poses a lesser threat than china so it might be with u.s authorities reconsidering their decisions and their positions on russia in the past years the other thing i would like to mention um is about again the west being decisive as in what we want and what we don't want and what do we want germany a very important part what we want germany to be or do we want japan another important part what do we want them to be do we still want them to be to to be their kind of post second world war cells or we want them to be more powerful than what we've made them since 1945 that's very useful and once these two countries are made stronger beyond what they are today i think china and russia would have reason to reconsider their their their current positions the third thing and finally for me is again peaceful proclamation of yes we are the ones who believe in the greatest things that have ever happened to the world we are the ones who are holier than dao and we know what is best for the world some of these decisions have affected the west very badly um i wouldn't want to be the one mentioning some some of these decisions but obviously we all know how much the decision about climate change and diversification etc have affected the west body and maybe it's about time to reconsider some of these decisions and see a better way forward to ensure that in the short medium and long term the world doesn't become thank you very much for the opportunity um i don't think we could hear your last few statements or would you like to repeat that or yeah my last few statements with um babies about time the west uh reconsidered some of its decisions about you know some some of these [Music] policies that have in the long term affected affected the west badly to me i think um every consideration of such professions would ensure that in the short term the long term and the medium term the west would be able to overcome the the the potential challenges that um past decisions have have brought upon the west okay uh thank you all for your opinion and for your time this has been a very interesting uh conversation on the future of you know europe the united states and china so we're very thankful and search to be for you to agree to participate and we hope to hear your opinions again maybe in some are future articles or books that are coming out so thank you thank you so much thank you thank you thank you good luck with your studies thank you so much thank you for your exams um bye-bye thank all the best with everything bye