Trump and WWIII

I'm worried

The entire project of ChinaTalk, at the heart of it, is to help raise the quality of conversation and help inform policies that would most likely avert WWIII. I’m worried Trump would do a far worse job avoiding the big one than Harris. Here’s a piece on the topic I co-authored with Peter Harrell, formerly of the Biden NSC and NEC, with some riffs on export controls and acquisition reform below.

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Former President Trump has made his promise to “prevent World War III” central to his campaign to return to the White House. But Trump’s foreign policy agenda is far more likely to drag the U.S. into catastrophic conflict than to prevent it.

Trump’s promise understandably resonates with voters. While President Biden did end the war in Afghanistan and keep U.S. troops out of direct involvement in conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world is less peaceful today than it was four years ago. In 2022, Russia launched the largest war in Europe since World War II. War in the Middle East makes daily headlines. China has increased the operational tempo of military exercises that threaten Asian allies. 

However, one-off dealmaking with dictators from a position of weakness is a losing strategy to keep the peace between great powers.

Putin and Ukraine

For starters, let’s take Trump’s promise to negotiate an end to Russia’s war with Ukraine. What is Trump’s “secret plan”? Reporting indicates that he would pressure Ukraine to exchange land for peace by cutting off military support. This approach will fail: Even if Trump cuts off military assistance to Ukraine and Ukraine is forced to cede territory to prevent immediate military collapse, Putin’s ambitions will not be sated. His goal is to assert Russian dominance across Eastern Europe — which includes all of Ukraine, the Baltic countries and Poland. Degrading Ukraine’s military in return for a temporary ceasefire only for Putin to renew conflict against a weakened Ukraine months later is disastrous dealmaking.

Trump’s approach to Ukraine would be particularly dangerous given how Trump wants to treat NATO allies in Putin’s crosshairs. He recently said that he would give Russia an explicit pass to “do whatever the hell they want” if NATO members do not “pay [their] bills.” If Putin succeeds in taking parts of Ukraine, this language will embolden him to turn his war machine towards America’s treaty allies in Eastern Europe — which would either drag the U.S. into war, or see the U.S. acknowledge its alliance commitments are worthless. This will seed more conflict, not deter it. To avoid direct conflict with Russia, the U.S. should help Ukraine further advance its military capabilities to force Russia to acknowledge that its maximalist aims are impossible to achieve.

Xi and Taiwan

Trump is also risking war where the stakes may be even higher: East Asia. In a recent interview with Bloomberg Trump responded to a question about America’s commitment to Taiwan by stating: “Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything. Taiwan is 9,500 miles away. It’s 68 miles away from China.” He sees Taiwan not as a democratic ally and bulwark against Chinese regional hegemony, but rather just another country who has wronged the US economically by taking “100% of our chip business.” 

This all amounts to Trump turning America’s eighty-year commitment to East Asian security into a short-term lease renewal negotiation. What Trump plans to do isn’t savvy dealmaking, it’s diplomatic arson.

Mainstream Republican national security thinkers like Elbridge Colby and Mike Gallagher have advocated committing to Taiwan’s defense for principled (preserve a fellow democracy), geopolitical (counter Chinese expansion) and economic (ensure a stable global chip supply) reasons. The credible threat of U.S. military support for allies in Asia today helps dissuade Xi Jinping from invading Taiwan. This of course can swing too far — like Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s assertion that Taiwan should declare independence. Under Trump, both China and America’s key allies in the region would feel far less confident that the US would actually help them resist a Chinese attack.

This loss of faith in America’s commitment to the region risks dramatic consequences. It will encourage Chinese adventurism against Taiwan, raising the odds of a war that ultimately drags the U.S. in. Even though U.S. allies including Japan and Korea have increased their defense spending in recent years, none of them can realistically deter Chinese aggression with conventional weapons without America’s backing. Pulling away from Japan and Korea would prompt them to either lean more towards Beijing or consider going nuclear, injecting more instability in a region where conflict could be truly catastrophic in terms of lives lost and global economic impact.

Preventing WWIII is not a one-off real estate deal, it’s a repeated game which requires signaling across decades to both allies and adversaries that the US is serious about preserving the peace. Since 1945, America succeeded in investing in our military might, alliances and global credibility to deter great power war. Today, America makes up a quarter of global GDP, while China comprises almost 20%. Together with its treaty allies, the US totals over 60%, while China’s closest thing to an ally, Russia, adds just one 1% to its ledger. Preserving this relative balance in national power will allow the US to keep the peace and further its interests far into the 21st century. Risking global realignment to juice up a few acquisitions deals plays right into Xi and Putin’s hands.

For all Trump’s bluster about preventing conflict, his actual policies, like the isolationism of the 1930s, would actually increase the chances of a war far deadlier than even today’s conflict in Ukraine. President Reagan worked with NATO and East Asian allies to show “peace through strength”. Trump’s strategy of treating America’s closest global friends like delinquent renters risks war through weakness.

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Back to Jordan sole-authorship. A few more riffs on ChinaTalk-adjacent topics:

Export Controls

AI could really, really matter for long term national power. AI consists of algorithms, data, and compute. Algorithms and data are probably too hackable to drive relative long term national competitiveness. So, we’re left with computing power, which after o1 is even more likely to matter in pushing the frontier from an innovation and diffusion perspective.

What will Trump do with the Biden administration export controls on chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment? Probably something like what happened to ZTE.

Step one: Trump’s bureaucracy finds a Chinese company flagrantly breaking US law whose continued use of American technology runs directly counter to US interests.

Step two: Trump saved ZTE because he gets a call from Xi.

I wouldn’t be shocked if he just lifted the controls month one as a goodwill gesture. If someone talks him into having a little spine on this issue, he’ll see a huge opportunity for a big deal as Xi would happily give Trump oceans of soybean orders and zoos-full of pandas for a few EUV machines.

There is no domestic political economy constituency for semiconductor export controls. The only political force today keeping them in place are national security professionals who rightly recognize their long term importance. An America First semiconductor policy, particularly in a market defined by scarcity, should aim to make sure all backordered are filled American fabs and datacenters before opening up an export market which would raise prices for US companies to acquire goods from a 3.5tn company and SME firms who have been ripping the past few years. Instead, lobbyists will have far more success than they deserve framing the controls as some deep state conspiracy meant to skew a trade deficit.

Acquisitions Reform

Rule #1 of avoiding wars is having a military scary enough that no one wants to try it. It’s clear as day that the US needs a dramatic overhaul to how it buys capabilities in order to deter wars in Asia.

If I’ve learned anything over the dozens of shows we’ve recorded on defense policy over the past decade, it’s that absent sustained commitment from a president and secretary of defense, we don’t see the reform at the scale we need.

Trump picked his Secretaries of Defense because they had cool nicknames and looked the part. With wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, it will be hard enough for the next Secretary to preserve bandwidth to push the system to change without having to deal with monthly crises in civ-mil relations. I have zero faith in a Trump administration giving this issue the sustained attention it needs to make the progress the US needs to most effectively deter war.

EVs

Maybe less important for the future of humanity, but this one is just weird. Why is he so into BYD making cars in Michigan?

Not that there’s a single swing voter in the ChinaTalk audience … but thank you for indulging me. Back to our regularly scheduled programming later this week.