Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Michael Mazarr.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access. Access to, not only our great daily newsletter, but all the original writing on our website as well at thechinaproject.com. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
For anyone who’s listened to this program at all, it should be probably no surprise to you that I’ve been, for several years now, very alarmed at the escalating rhetoric coming out of American policymakers and opinion leaders when it comes to China. I’ve expressed my share of displeasure at the group think that seems to have such a hold on China analysis in Washington at the way national security has crowded out, every other consideration when it comes to thinking about China, and of course, at the way, the very loyalties to the U.S. of anyone holding a different set of assumptions about China’s intentions and its ambitions. Different ordering of priorities or even a different take on how things got to where they are today, how those loyalties can be called into question.
Not explicitly on the show that I can recall, but certainly in other public venues, I have voiced real concern particularly in the last couple of years that things are feeling an awful lot like 2002, that the drumbeat is sounding very familiar, that certain media figures seem all too eager to step into the role of Judith Miller. That it feels as though there’s an effort being made to manufacture consent for a war with China in the Western Pacific. Not long ago, I was in D.C., I was talking with Jude Blanchette in his offices at CSIS, and he voiced the same worries. He told me that he’s seen what he called “grown-ass men,” his words, rolling dice like in Dungeons and Dragons, playing war games over maps, and moving around little ships and going, “Pew, pew, pew.”
And yes, Jude said it was fine for me to quote him on that. He also recommended a book, and he told me that its author, who’s somebody I had followed on Twitter and somebody whose works I’d read before, a former professor at the U.S. National War College, no less, was also voicing concerns about the disturbing parallels between the run up to the Iraq invasion in 2003 and the current situation with China. That book — Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy — is a thoughtful and penetrating account of the decision to invade Iraq. And in its closing pages, the author identifies many of the same factors that drove America to invade Iraq. Now back in play with the apparent urgency to confront China.
He warns of the dangerous reemergence of the patterns that he saw in 2002 and how, if they are applied to China, might even end up displacing the Iraq War as America’s greatest foreign policy tragedy. The author is, of course, Michael Mazarr, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. And after Jude put us in touch and I read his excellent book, I reached out to him, and I am delighted to welcome Mike to Sinica.
Mike Mazarr, great to have you.
Mike Mazarr: It is so great to be here. Thanks so much.
Kaiser: Well, Mike, obviously we can’t go through the entire book. It’ll take us a little off track. But I mean, by the way, it is full of really interesting detail based on just countless interviews and examinations of a lot of documents, so definitely read it. But let’s focus instead on the major conclusions that you came away with that are more, maybe, generalizable when it comes to making decisions about war, and not just specifically to Iraq in 2003. So, what were some of those top-level takeaways? What are the patterns that lead us to this kind of bad decision-making?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most general findings, which went against the grain of some of the revisionist or conspiratorial thinking about Iraq was, it’s important to keep in mind that folks on their way to war seldom think they’re making a mistake; they seldom think they are malign actors; they believe they have the best interest of the country at heart; they have some evidence to support them. And so, as the chain unfolds, it is prompted by people who are not really of a mindset to be corrected from that path because they think they’re doing the right thing. The path in Iraq and some of the parallels I see today, it sort of starts, of course, with a sense of American exceptionalism and the idea that the United States has the right and the responsibility to go forth into the world to make things better.
Obviously, that’s a great instinct in many cases, but when it gets out of control, it’s too much. And that gets married then to, as you saw in the book, a sense of imperative, a sense of urgency. And this is just common across, not just the United States, but so many decisions for war, where the choice to go to war or to create conditions that lead to a war — sometimes it’s not necessarily just the decision to leap into the war itself — is usually a product. There’s enough risk there that you have to have a sense that we have to do this. There has to be a sense of urgency and requirement to do it. And then, very often, there is some kind of a plan or scheme that allows the folks who are putting the nation on the road to war to believe that the costs and risks will be lower than their critics are suggesting.
“Don’t tell us we’re going to be in Iraq for 10 years. We’re going to go in, prop somebody up and be out in a few months. It’ll be low cost, it’ll be quick.” The Soviets had the very same idea when they went into Afghanistan in 1979. So, that’s sort of the beginning point, I would say, the foundation is of people who have a really urgent motivation of something that is an actual concern, a real national security concern, but that it closes their mind to a broader perspective on the issue because they believe that there’s such a need to act very quickly.
Kaiser: In addition to that, maybe just as importantly, maybe you can identify some of the popular ideas that are out there in discourse that try to explain the American decision to go to war in Iraq that you don’t think were relevant in how Bush, and Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice, and the rest decided to attack Iraq. For instance, you did not devote a chapter or even a real paragraph to this notion that this was ultimately about oil or nothing about Dick Cheney and his Halliburton contracts, or anything like that. Not much about really Saddam and the Bush family grudge necessarily either.
Mike: Right, exactly. I mean, you don’t need grand conspiracies to explain going to war, and sometimes going to war for reasons that turn out to have been misplaced. I didn’t find in the documentary record, in the materials that have been released so far, which is not enough, by the way, and I ran into the fact that FOIA is a disaster just like everybody else has been doing in recent years.
Kaiser: Yeah.
Mike: But in terms of interviews and other things, this was just not what was motivating people. It was a sense that after 9/11, we can’t leave Saddam in place. He is linked to terrorists in ways that the intelligence didn’t support and outside experts didn’t support, but they had become convinced of, and we’ve got to act. Furthermore, we have to act because we’ve got to make a really big point after 9/11 that you don’t mess with the United States. And there were these repeated discussions that the targets in Afghanistan were not sufficient to convey the kind of message we wanted to. And so, all this sort of created a sense, and this is where it gets really dangerous. As I mentioned in the book, one of the most telling phrases that kept coming up in my interviews were the words that would confront the doubters. And it was, ‘you just don’t get it.’
There is a sort of a consensus established; the decision’s already been made; the smart people all think the same thing. So, if you’re not on board with this, what don’t you understand? And that’s a very dangerous sort of mindset to set in.
Kaiser: Well, that part certainly sounds very familiar because I am told that on almost a daily basis. Before we drill down into some of the specific parallels from 20 years ago or the historical rhymes, or whatever we decide to call them, maybe we can just sort of list some of them out before we get into too much detail on any one of them. What do you see right now that reminds you of the run up to Iraq and when did you first begin to notice that there were these parallels in the way that the U.S. administration and U.S. policy-makers were talking broadly about China?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think obviously, and we’ll talk about this, there’s some very big differences, and in a lot of ways, our dialogue about Taiwan is more akin to maybe a 1990, ‘91 dialogue about a country that’s threatened, and do we support them? But the biggest, sort of, in line with the last question you asked, the biggest parallel that I saw was of a sense of urgent emerging threat cropping up around an issue that was beginning, as you’ve said, to crowd out a continued, really considered broad-based open-minded, open-ended discussion of what the actual facts are and what’s true and what isn’t; what level of threat actually exists; what are our vital interests versus secondary interests?
Once that ball starts rolling downhill, you can get to a point where, as you were saying in your introduction, and happily, I don’t think, of course, hopefully we would agree we’re not quite there yet. There’s plenty of folks out there that are still raising all kinds of a range of opinions, but it is set up for, I think, potentially dangerous moments when an event in the relationship would trigger this into a higher level of intensity. And so, the biggest overarching comparison I see is just, I don’t want to say obsession, because one of the challenges is, is in both cases, there is a legitimate national security concern at the foundation of things, right?
Kaiser: Sure.
Mike: But it’s all in how you interpret it and what you decide you have to do about it. And the quality of the dialogue, I haven’t seen it go nearly as far as it got to in 2002 for Iraq, but it seemed to me that I was seeing some of the same symptoms of sort of a weakening of the true willingness to consider a wide range of potential interpretations of the situation.
Kaiser: Right. They’ve shut down this conversation, this discussion we were having about trying to right-size China’s actual ambitions and the scale of the challenge that it poses, right?
Mike: Well, and you know what’s interesting, and you’re closer to this, obviously, it’s sort of analogous in the sense that, and I know you didn’t mean to suggest this, there’s no like one way that is ideal with folks in the defense department all the time, and I’m sure you talk to folks, and there’s a wide range of opinions inside DoD about the nature of China, but it’s almost as if there’s an intrinsic momentum in a rivalry or severe national security confrontation like this that will tend to pull you in that direction over time. And, of course, there’s a longstanding thing, which we know from social science research, that hawkish points of view tend to have greater credibility, sort of, of public appeal and credibility on a lot of issues. So, all that sort of works together, and over time, it tends to crowd out. And then you get to a point where, as you’re implying anybody at the table who’s suggesting that a given, as you say, a given interpretation of Chinese ambitions, yes, they want to become more powerful. That doesn’t mean they’re going to invade all of Asia. So, let’s talk about something in between, that dialogue is just like, all right, go to another meeting because we’re talking about how we can prepare for the conflict.
Kaiser: Right. Let me quote a passage that you wrote, it’s at the end of chapter seven that, to my mind, really encapsulates really well what you’ve argued about, what really drove us to invade Iraq. And I think here, I hear a lot of rhymes. You wrote, “The Iraq War decision was grounded in sacred values and deeply felt imperatives: the United States must not allow regimes with ties to terrorists to have weapons of mass destruction; the United States must remove Saddam from power. And so, the proposition that the United States must fight such a war was resistant, even immune to serious confrontation with consequences. Warnings became the siren song of the wicked and the deluded. Like any dissolute temptation, they must, not only be ignored, they must be actively resisted.”
I think that that was really great. Your book talks quite a bit about this kind of missionary instinct or missionary sensibility, the sacred values in the above-quoted passage. In the case of China, American involvement and the fraught American sense of connection that China is very much tied up with American missionary work in China in the 19th and first half of the 20th century. That missionary impulse is something often brought up when trying to explain America’s China policy. John King Fairbank, he spoke of it. So, what exactly do you mean when you were talking about this missionary instinct?
Mike: Well, it’s connected to the American sense of its role in the world, its exceptionalism, the concept of City on the Hill migrating to a more active and, in some cases, military interpretation of how we have to bring goodness to the world. I mean, I also quote in there, I’ve come to have a lot of respect for Liz Cheney, but the book that she co-authored with her father starts off with a couple of pages that have just really overheated pros about America is the greatest country in the history of the world, and we have to tell the world what to do. In the post-Cold War era, that then gets magnified when we become the unipolar power. We’re running the international order with a lot of good intention, but it allows us to sort of marinate in this theological approach to our foreign policy, which is we are promoting what is right; people who disagree with us are wrong; and if they’re friends or allies, we will lecture them, and occasionally coerce them into doing what’s right. And if they are rivals or enemies, we will take harsher action.
So, it’s a mindset of that missionary instinct of changing countries that are not behaving or organizing themselves in ways that we consider appropriate. Now, I think that so far, obviously, some of that, like that quote you read, referring in particular to the dynamic that had cropped up within the Bush administration around the Iraq war. And so, you have some people, Dick Cheney and his national security staff, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, a number of others, who were actively hunting out people who disagreed with the war and trying to suppress their views, shame them, keep their stuff from getting into meetings, and all that. I think we’re a couple steps away from that, clearly, in the dialogue on China, but this is the time to be aware of that risk so that we never get to that point on this issue.
Kaiser: No, I think you put that very well. In your book, you argue that this missionary impulse itself isn’t enough, that there’s the other tube you need to mix into the epoxy, what you call in that passage “The deeply felt imperatives.” And in the case of the Iraq war, that imperative seems to have grown pretty clearly out of the experience of September 11. I have trouble finding something analogous to that. When I look at the U.S.-China relationship, there isn’t some massive shock, some kind of critical catalyst as far as I can see. There’s nothing that analogous. Am I missing something or was there something slow motion or a Sputnik moment?
Mike: I think there are some things that are slow-motion equivalence a bit. I mean, this is one of the ways in which the analogy isn’t exact, of course, but it is true, as you were implying, that there’s not a direct analogy for 9/11 in the U.S.-China situation. The thing about 9/11, of course, was that it was an attack from one entity, Al-Qaeda, that caused us to lash out to Iraq. And in China, I don’t think we’re really going to have that. The question is, what are events or what is a slow-motion process that could produce a next level of hostility, or anger, or potential openness to more extreme actions in the American public? I don’t know that I see a lot that would lead to anything close to a choice for war on the United States’ side, short of, of course, China engaging in military activity against its neighbors.
What I’m more worried about is the potential hardening over time of a level of hostility that makes any individual events that much more dangerous, having much more escalatory potential because both sides have decided they’re in sort of a zero-sum situation. I mean, obviously, hopefully the recent dialogue will lead to some more connections that can help edge us away from that.
Kaiser: Amen. Yeah.
Mike: But in a lot of areas, economic, technological, military, clearly, the trajectory was moving in the direction of a fundamental decoupling and zero-sum conception of the relationship. That’s not the same as a 9/11 moment, but it’s kind of a slow burn movement toward a situation where you decide that the other side is kind of irredeemable.
Kaiser: If you had to look for an analogy, I mean, I know that this is definitely flawed, but I might think of February 24, and yeah, how a, in this case, sort of a proxy, but a war between was notional West and Russia, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was immediately transferred, in a lot of people’s mind, to the other side of the Eurasian landmass, to Taiwan. And it seemed to have amped up hostility. China’s having declared a sort of no-limits friendship with Russia on the eve of that February 24 didn’t help at all. And so, there was, I think, a lot of transference of hostility that heightened their security consciousness about Taiwan. I don’t think that maybe this is one of the events that may have precipitated the urgency with which Nancy Pelosi thought it was necessary to visit. I don’t know.
Mike: Yeah, there’s definitely, I mean, I think there’s… I feel like I’ve noticed, after the Russian invasion, more intense discussions on the U.S. side of Taiwan’s vulnerability. In fact, we don’t want to let it happen to Taiwan. The Russian invasion has produced greater tensions, but as much as President Biden has said a few times certain things about the U.S. commitment, I think senior U.S. officials have been trying to largely hold the line on the official statements of U.S. policy so that, for example, February 24 would’ve been a bigger trigger if the United States had responded by saying, “Okay, well, now we can’t let that happen to Taiwan. So, we’re going from ambiguity to a formal pledge. And in fact, we might even talk about some kind of an Article 5 style agreement with Taiwan.” We did not do that.
To that extent, I think it’s certainly manageable. Both sides, I think, are trying to limit the degree to which it commits them to sort of opposite sides of a war in a fundamental way. But it is sort of a hint or a harbinger of the kinds of things that can happen. I mean, it is the big difference between the Iraq situation and China, in the sense that I, as you’re getting at, I’m concerned about the general mindset of U.S. policy. I don’t see too many avenues where the United States ALA, 2003, simply decides unilaterally to use force in some way. It would be a U.S. decision short of that, right? To change its policy, to have some sort of military commitment, military deployment, military posture that would trigger a series of events that makes war more likely.
And, of course, I think that process is already underway, to a certain degree. Again, hopefully out of some of the current dialogues, we could arrest that a bit.
Kaiser: So, we’ve talked about the sort of moral component to this, this missionary impulse and this sense of an urgency, this need to act, these deeply felt imperatives that you talked about. Related to this, you make the case in Leap of Faith that when it came to Iraq, we saw cost benefit analysis just sort of go out the window, right? They got crowded out by this highly moralistic thinking. I think you quoted some philosopher, I can’t remember who it was, where you borrowed the term from him, value rationality as opposed to consequentialist thinking. Consequentialist thinking being the kind of cost-benefit approach that we, or that’s what underpins that. Can you talk a little bit about this, about value rationality and consequentialist thinking?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, it’s the sort of mindset that… The value rationality piece is the mindset that emerges when you’re in a missionary or theological mindset, when you have a sense of urgency, when you have a sense that you have a rule or a principle that you absolutely must fulfill. And the danger is at that point, sort of more consequentialist or outcome-based thinking of, okay, well, let’s weigh the cost against the benefits gives way to the idea that, “Well, we can’t really do that because we have to do this.” And of course, you see variance of that in a variety of U.S. decisions to use force from Vietnam to Iraq, in this case. Other countries as well, you see a similar kind of thing. Japan, 1941 is a great example. So, it’s when leaders get into a mindset or governments get into a mindset of thinking that I don’t really need to read the intelligence reports about the possible risks because this is just something we have to do.
And to our earlier discussion, I think a parallel in the China case could be the issue of a large-scale Chinese invasion of Taiwan, hopefully is not an immediate prospect. And that’s kind of a different thing in terms of, at that point, the United States is responding to large-scale aggression. But actions that the United States takes short of that, or in order to deter that, if we get into a mindset of, we simply cannot allow this to happen, that it’s not a matter of strategic calculus, but it is a moral imperative to do this, that could lead us to some peacetime actions that then make war more likely. So, that would be kind of the parallel that I see there.
Kaiser: So, Taiwan isn’t the only moral issue, the defense of Taiwan’s vibrant and very admirable democracy. It’s not the only moral issue on that side of the scale. I feel like there are a whole bunch of other areas where Chinese behavior sticks in our moral craw. And some of these are really egregious, Xinjiang, for example, some of them maybe less so. I feel like we’re in a situation right now where, because China has emerged as this near-peer competitor, because we feel threatened in some way, just our pride feels threatened, we tend to exaggerate or to magnify a lot of those moral failings that we perceive on China’s side. So, I want to ask you, I mean, because you seem willing to introduce notions of national character or traits, the national psychology into your arguments, so maybe I’m less hesitant to bring this up.
But our feelings about Xinjiang, our feelings about Hong Kong, would they be enough on their own, absent this discomfort that we feel at the prospect of being surpassed by China, of being displaced, whether economically or technologically, or even militarily? I mean, hubris is right there in the title of your book on Iraq. So, do you see that? I mean, you clearly see it as some factor when it comes to Iraq. Do you see it as a factor in our posture right now toward China?
Mike: Well, sure, I mean, it’s definitely a factor. The Iraq case, obviously, is ultimately about a U.S. decision to go to war. And of course, I don’t see that decision stemming from any of these other moral considerations with regard to China. I think what it does do is create this underlying sense that the nation, the government, the regime we’re dealing with is, at some fundamental level, illegitimate. And you see that come out obviously in the on and off discussions of, is the target of our policy “China” or the Chinese Communist Party? Which undertakes policies that, as you say, some of them are objectively morally objectionable. But that sort of general thought of, in the relationship, we are the white hat, they are the black hat. We are here to impose moral good and truth.
Again, as with the national security threat, there’s a certain degree to which that is true. But keeping that in balance with larger strategic considerations, and as you say, sort of the humility to recognize that there are aspects of the Chinese regime, Chinese governance, the Chinese model that are viewed as legitimate by its people. I think it’s going to be a really challenging time for the United States to rethink this balance. Because I think during the Cold War, we flipped all over the place, of course, because we had to engage all kinds of nasty actors because they were our friends relative to the communist bloc. In the post-Cold War era, we’re the uni-pole, so we can go around the world telling everybody what to do and put moral considerations at the forefront.
And now we’re in this quasi bipolar, but nested in a very significantly multipolar balance, where not only China, but look at the problems we’re having with Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and with a lot of the global south, which is not interested in our moral lecturing, even if some of the crimes that we’re talking about are very real. So, we’re going to have to, I think, reset our balance of the degree to which we allow the moral considerations to dominate our policy towards certain other countries. I think we’re struggling through the beginning phases of that without having really any idea of how we’re going to ultimately do it. And the leading test case for that obviously is going to be China.
Kaiser: Right. Mike, except on the fringes of American politics, we don’t hear the same sorts of calls for regime change in China that we heard 20 years ago with Iraq. But I think it’s fair to say that in a lot of the rhetoric that’s coming out of, even official Washington, there is, as you suggested, this kind of imputation of illegitimacy that China certainly picks up on this. I mean, of course, how could you not? Regime change is like still a far cry from our official policy, but if we accept that this is a big difference between then and now, we are still left asking, what are we really trying to do? Do you think that there is a plan when it comes to Taiwan? And are we just trying to goad Beijing into making a mistake to actually change the terms of our diplomatic stance with Taiwan, a shift maybe toward support for de jure independence is what do you think… And I know it’s impossible, but I mean, what’s your gut telling you?
Mike: No. I think, as with… This gets to some of the conspiracy theorizing about Iraq. Before 9/11, Saddam had gone after George Bush’s dad, and there were some people like Paul Wolfowitz who were scheming against him and so on. But the vast majority of the U.S. government had no desire to send a couple hundred thousand people, thousands of miles away to fight an expeditionary war that might very well lead them to a long-term counterinsurgency. I think just in the same way, I have seen absolutely no evidence of anybody I’ve interacted with that we are hoping that China will take more aggressive action to justify something on our end.
I think the universal hope is that none of that will prove necessary, that China will go back to talking about peaceful absorption and take a long-term strategy, and we can put it to the back of the drawer and hope that it doesn’t cause a problem. I mean, also because, obviously as you know, and I’m sure you’ve had a lot of folks on talking about it, folks that… I mean, Jude is right. I guess there are some people that play these war games with a sense of glee, but the vast majority of people I’ve interacted with in these games are really… they’re bracing experiences, and you can’t sort of see how a war might play out without thinking this is something we absolutely need to avoid.
I don’t know that there’s very much… I think the challenge is, sort of, analogously to the view that Saddam was linked in with all the terrorists, and if we didn’t take him out immediately, he was going to come get us, there’s, and as you said, there’s, I think, to my mind, as a non-China specialist, but from what I read, there are views of China’s intentions that make us believe that we have to take much more belligerent actions in the short-term to deter what we think they’re about to do. But if they are not about to do that, then our actions to deter could provoke them to do things that then create a spiral. So, that’s where I see the bigger danger, and the potential closure of thought is around sort of assessing their intentions and the nature of their ambitions. But I’ve seen nothing that would suggest that anybody’s hoping to provoke them into something.
Kaiser: Yeah, hopefully that’s the case. There’s, in the case of China, sort of a twofold suspicion when it comes to intention. One is that Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, before 2049, or as some people have argued, by 2027, will launch an aggressive war to take Taiwan. And the other is, of course, that China is nurturing this grand century-long ambition to simply displace the United States as the hegemonic, the single hegemonic power in the world. And yeah, so earlier, I asked you about explanatory factors that you didn’t really fold in your book. There’s one that just comes up now and again in some quarters when we try to understand what’s driving us toward confrontation. And that is the role of the military industrial complex or the defense industrial complex.
We all heard that back then, the neocons wanted an Iraq war to justify defense spending after the end of the Cold War, where they no longer had this big rationale for it. And now I hear there are some pretty reasonable people talking about the Navy, especially, playing up China threats to win bigger budgets for more ships. Now, there are also a lot of people who hear anyone say that and assume they’re wearing a tinfoil hat. Should we dismiss this argument completely out of hand? And how did you go about assessing those kinds of claims when you were researching and writing Leap of Faith?
Mike: Well, the question I was asking there was what was actually motivating people as best as I could determine? And, of course, there’s always a possibility that Dick Cheney and George Bush went into a room and said, “Here’s our list of the defense programs we’re going to justify with this,” and had a good laugh, and then everyone else assumed they were thinking something else. But I don’t think so. I mean, to me, there’s a pretty easy middle ground to occupy there that does not require, I mean, as somebody who’s worked in this field for 30 years, and way back when, I worked at the Center for Strategic International Studies where Jude is now. In the early CSIS era, which was, we used to issue policy reports where the study group was half made up of members of defense corporations.
And they’re all retired military people. I mean, the former astronaut, Jim McDivitt was one of them. Great people. But today, for a good reason, you wouldn’t have that kind of close connection. But I’ve seen the role of the so-called military industrial complex dealt with the DOD Pentagon for three decades, been in the military. And I just think that the direct and directive influence that is sometimes ascribed to them just doesn’t exist in that way. That the factors, I mean, look, read… You can listen to just hours and hours of LBJ talking about Vietnam and all the accounts of all the officials that dealt with him and were a part of the whole thing. And promoting defense budgets is not really what’s going on. It’s other factors that…
Now, having said that, of course, the Navy’s going to take advantage of a potential perceived threat for bureaucratic advantage and say, “Hey, if the Indo-Pacific is the focus, then this is a maritime theater and secondarily in air theater, but we need to this one third, one third, one-third thing in the services has got to go because we’ve got to be the dominant service.” Of course, they’re going to say that. That’s different from suggesting that, for example, if we can hope for the possible magical outcomes of, if Secretary of State, Blinken, goes to Beijing and they decide on some remarkable arms control agreement or something that would temper our need to spend money, is that process going to be undermined by secretive actions of the military industrial complex? I don’t think so.
I think, in all of my studies of this stuff, the primary factors that govern these choices are strategic, political, personal sometimes. But around the edges of that, and in the background of that, of course, there’s bureaucratic posturing going on. Service is trying to one up each other. But I just don’t think, it certainly was not the dominant factor with Iraq. It hasn’t been the dominant factor of any U.S. war. I don’t think it would be the dominant, because the other thing is think about it from the perspective of a member of Congress, right? “Hey, the defense industry would benefit from this”. Well, yeah, half the U.S. Navy and Air Force are going to be destroyed in the first two weeks. Is that something you want to go through in order to increase the defense budget by 70%?
That is not a political strategic choice that anybody would make. So, no, I really don’t give a lot of credence to that as a major factor that’s going to determine where we end up.
Kaiser: Mike, your book doesn’t really dwell much on the role of media either in shaping pro or public opinion as some alleged it did, or in holding the Bush administration to account in the run up to the war. Could you share some thoughts on what you saw as the media’s role back then, and whether you see any parallels now? I mean, I’m asking this as somebody who went to Berkeley in read Chomsky.
Mike: Yeah. Oh, well, that explains everything. Okay, now we know why we’re having… It’s a great question. And in fact, in retrospect, I wish either that I’d put a lot more emphasis both on the media and on Congress, or that I had done like the whole book on it, or written a separate thing on it because each of those actors, I think, hasn’t gotten the criticism that they deserve in both fomenting and allowing the mistake that was made. And in the media’s case, people forget that just about every major media outlet ended up editorializing in favor of the war.
Kaiser: Oh, yeah.
Mike: Washington Post was in favor of the war. New York Times was reluctantly… many, many columnists. And then, of course, you had a few infamous cases like Judith Millers that became conduits for essential, I don’t want to say faked intelligence, because at least some of the people passing around thought it was real, but not adequately reviewed raw intelligence from the Iraqi National Congress and others that helped to create the basis for war.
And to me, one of the big lessons is that you can’t, and I’m not trained in journalism, and I’m probably saying something unfair, but they don’t necessarily, major media outlets don’t appear to see it as part of their responsibility to assure a really vigorous debate about an issue. They will print things on different sides of things, but ultimately, the story of 2002, into March, 2003 is clearly one where the mainstream media got caught up in the flow of events, was persuaded because they didn’t look closely enough by some of the information and intelligence that the administration was putting out. You had one of the few cases, the Atlantic Magazine, Jim Fallows’ essay, “The Fifty-First State,” was one of the very few examples of a really in-depth, long form look at “what do we do with this place once we own it?”
I mean, an obvious question to ask. Folks that I talk to, a professional journalist could have unearthed probably 70% of what I did for this book before the war started. For example, when they were having planning meetings and everybody left thinking, “This is going to be a disaster. We’re not ready for this.” So, in a lot of ways, to me, it kind of raised the question of, I mean, certainly not new, and we’ve managed to keep our democracy going all this time with the media that we have, but particularly now in an era of intensified misinformation and disinformation, where do you have that ballast? Where do you have that objective public information function where people can say, “Gee, I just heard this guy, Ian Easton, being interviewed, and he said China is getting ready to put landing craft on Okinawa. Is that really true? Let me go get…”
Now, of course, people can do that. There’s a lot of different opinions out there, but particularly in regard to specific policy debates and… I mean, a great example today, I mean, I don’t necessarily oppose some of the semiconductor moves, but even informed Americans probably know almost nothing about that. There are a few articles. And the general trajectory of U.S. policy toward China, as you’re asking about, where’s the debate about that? So, it’s just not something that will naturally happen from leading media. Then there are fringe people that will take you down all kinds of wacky alleys. And it leaves the question of, what kind of information function could have played that role in 2002? And I don’t have an answer to that question.
Kaiser: I definitely know of a few well-placed op-ed writers in major publications who were carrying water for the Trump administration’s NSC and printing whatever they would tell them about, especially this sort of lab leak theory, bioweapons conflation, that was just, yeah, terribly unfortunate. Mike, there’s a passage in your book when you discuss American culpability in the Iraq disaster, and you link it to this legal concept of criminal negligence. Tell us about what you call your doctrine of policy negligence and whether you think we’re in danger right now of maybe not doing things that a reasonable person should do when it comes to China. I’m thinking about what the media should do and what, of course, our congressman and senators should do.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think the idea there was meant to apply primarily to the executive branch. And the notion is just, I was trying to find a way because, as I said earlier, there are those who say George Bush is evil; George Bush’s clearly self-serving intent, this was a manufactured war. They’re all liars. I don’t believe any of that. But by the same token, they led the country into a disaster. And they did it in a way that both did not adequately search for potential risks and costs, and at times, actively suppressed those trying to raise those concerns. I stumbled across this idea of negligence in a legal sense, which if a car manufacturer knows that the brakes are going to wear out after two months and they issue the car anyway, and there’s a number of sort of principles that guide that, but essentially, it’s sort of a common person standard or a commons sense standard of a duty of care for the people that will use your product or whatever.
Then I say, okay, well, if that’s the standard, I have a few then criteria that I offer that are really built around, do the decision makers adequately interrogate the information they have? Do they consider risks adequately? Do they get information from multiple sources? Do they promote rather than suppress a strong internal and external debate as ways you can tell whether there’s policy negligence? Now, I will say, quite obviously, the Biden administration is very different from the George W. Bush administration. And although there are certain people in the administration that have maybe certain views about China, my sense is that issues are debated and discussed.
That there’s kind of the ideal of effective policy making that is the inverse of policy negligence, I’m not saying they reach the ideal all the time, but at least there’s an appreciation for those values and those principles, and they try to have those debates. I don’t know that I see the current executive branch as sort of falling into that as much as a combination of two things that are related, but not exactly the same. One is the kind of narrowing of the general dialogue that we’ve talked about and the sense that, over time, it’s a sort of sliding window of what is perceived to be a legitimate and defensible position about China and its intentions. And then the other is, the sort of persistent problem, which is a little short of negligence, which is that very commonly, U.S. governments have great difficulty working out, truly thought through long-term strategies toward any country.
And that we end up stumbling from one decision to the next, one crisis to the next. We’ve got some general long-term principles in mind, but we don’t even necessarily notice exactly where we’re headed until we’ve gotten there. That’s part of the story of for some people after 9/11, others knew exactly where they wanted to end up. So, that’s a long answer to say, basically, I don’t see the hallmarks of what I would describe as classic policy negligence at the moment, but I see a general context that is increasing the risk of that. And certainly, any future administration, if you get the Paul Wolfowitz equivalent, the Doug Feith equivalent, the Dick Cheney equivalent, right? You could be right in that risk again.
Kaiser: I think that the Xi-Biden meeting was ample evidence that there is still a conversation happening, that it hasn’t been completely shut down. I got an email not too long ago from somebody who’s very well placed in the administration, who told me that they’re a regular listener to the show, and that their one quibble is that maybe the conversations that we have here often mischaracterize the conversations that are happening in D.C., within the administration, as being a little less nuanced than they in fact are. So, that gives me some courage.
Mike: No, and I would say that, and working at RAND, we deal with folks in the Defense Department, State Department all the time, and I’m pretty consistently impressed. It’s a weird sort of combination of sensations. On the one hand, I’m always impressed that a significant number of people that I run into, briefing our studies or just chatting or going to talk to them about other things, have incredibly nuanced views about this stuff, and every intent and hope to avoid a more violent U.S.-China confrontation. At the same time, I do feel like the public dialogue and the general dialogue about this, and it’s hard, and I think you were saying this before, it’s like an instinctive sense. It’s hard to put my finger on it, I can’t quantify it, but it sure feels like it’s sliding in a certain direction.
And in this case, I think the legislature, the Congress is going to be more of a leader in that direction than the executive branch over the next couple of years in particular. If we talk about the Taiwan Policy Act, for example, and if that doesn’t go through as it was, but if you’ve got certain bits and pieces here and there, there may be a way to finesse it. Here’s another example, I think, where from the public reporting, it seems like the administration is really trying hard to moderate the potential impact of something like that, knowing the risks that it might entail. But I think if Congress is jamming us in this direction, like we’ve been talking about, it’s hard for a Secretary of State to get up and say, “I’m a lot less critical of China than they are.” Or, “I want a confrontation with China a lot less than they do.” Just inherently, you’re going to have to make that argument indirectly, I’m afraid. That gets into an unhelpful dynamic.
Kaiser: Mike. Just one more topic that I want to raise with you. Back in 2016, you wrote a great essay in Foreign Affairs that was actually one of the first things that I read from you, and it really put you on the map for me. It was about the liberal international order and our misguided attempt to preserve it intact or even to buttress it in its then current form without adjusting to new realities. The title was The Once and Future Order, I’m sure you remember it.
Mike: Yep.
Kaiser: I revisited it ahead of this interview, and I thought that maybe, is it the case, I was wondering whether you connect what you wrote then in some way to what’s happening now? Because it struck me that we didn’t heed your advice. Six years on, we’ve only kind of double down on trying to prevent any Chinese revisionism to the, in air quotes here, “rules-based international order,” but I have a hard time seeing how these efforts to revise parts of the order, as China clearly has done, was enough evidence to sell anyone, the American strategic class, especially, on this idea that China wants the whole enchilada. I mean, do you connect these two things, your warnings about we should make room at the table here to what we’re seeing now?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think, in two ways. One way is the bilateral U.S.-China piece, and I think we’ve just not… I think inside government and out that some work has gone on, but we have a lot of work to do to think about, what does an order, what does a world order look like that the United States and China can both live in? And let’s just bracket the Taiwan problem for a minute and put that aside because it’s so kind of unique in its way. But if we’re talking about standards on information and data sharing and security, if we’re talking about trade policies, investment policies, the role of state-owned enterprises in…
Kaiser: Distorting markets or…
Mike: Distorting markets, all that sort of stuff, what are the principles of a shared order that we could both live with? We’re spending so much time talking about… Again, coming back to where we started, it is absolutely true that China’s trying to shift some rules in ways that we might objectively say, even if we take off our theological missionary hat are things that we think wouldn’t be good for the international community. But I think the balance between that sort of critical view and a sense of, well, let’s start to check off a few issues, where we say, “Okay, we’ve got some ideas of rules we can both live by in these kinds of things.” In the process, as I think you’re implying, we’ve got to get out of our habit of instinctively opposing Chinese influence on everything, which we’re not going to be able to stop. And of course, as is now sort of, I guess, commonly discussed, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is a classic example of that.
Kaiser: Exactly what I was thinking, a poster child for that. Right.
Mike: Poster child. But we’re going to see more and more of it. Now, the trick is, like Huawei, I don’t know if it’s the same issue. I think it’s kind of a different issue.
Kaiser: It’s much more complicated for sure.
Mike: Right. Yeah. But anyway, but a thought of picking and choosing and saying, “Hey, China, we’ll join this and that and the other initiative of yours. When you want to head this organization over here, we’re fine with that as long as these rules stay in place,” whatever. Because I think, and again, you know this far better than me, but everything I read convinces me that China’s history and all of its current assessment in the United States convinces them that it is our intention to prevent them from having the role in the world they consider to be legitimate and rightful to them. Now, there are elements of what they might think that might be that we’re going to be uncomfortable with. But there’s got to be some elements that we can live with.
Kaiser: Right. If we take off the theological hat and look at it-
Mike: Exactly. Right.
Kaiser: Any reasonable person would say, “Yeah, of course.” I mean, a role in the IMF commensurate with your GDP role. Right. Yeah.
Mike: Right. And then the second piece of this that, sort of updating that article, that I would say is it’s also very relevant for the United States dealing with other countries, partly in connection with the China issue, but only indirectly, because again, we’re constantly talking with people about… And we’re getting better at this. I think this administration definitely has gotten better at not talking to every developing country about “How can we gang up on China better?” But rather talking about, “How can we help you solve your issue and then they like us better?” But those same sorts of issues, the IMF piece, different development standards, opening the aperture and realizing that, as we’re seeing in the G20 now, I mean, lots of evidence that a lot of these countries, the Brazils, and South Africas, and Indias, and Indonesias, and Vietnams, and Nigerias, they are going to want an increasing voice in how all of these sorts of aspects of what we call an international order are worked out.
Kaiser: That’s right. The problem is, of course, that China has to be the first one, and it’s the most problematic. And the issue set that we’re dealing with when it comes to China, the most thorny and problematic issues, the ones that leap forward to mind, like technology standards and things like that, those are the ones that are all sort of mixed up with national security and are really difficult to untie.
Mike: Yeah. There are some real Gordian knots there. But I think all that mixes together on a U.S. approach that has to find the smaller set of things that we are truly going to be uncompromising about, but then open a lot of other room.
Kaiser: I mean, the way that we’ve insisted on framing it, though, unfortunately, the ideological battle of democracy versus authoritarianism, that is gluing our theological hat right onto our forehead.
Mike: Yeah. No, that’s true. I mean, on the one hand, of course, the United States should stand up for human rights, and we believe that democracy is a better way to rule, but when most of the world is telling you, “Okay, we get it.” And in many cases, “We’re a democracy too, and the human rights conventions exist, and we will help you.” But I think that one piece of this… Interesting, like we did a bunch of… That article came partly out of a number of studies we did at RAND on the Postwar International Order. And one of the, you know, interesting lessons of that work is that the U.S.-led rule-based order was primarily based on two sets of rules: one around non-aggression, and one around trade and economics.
And the human rights piece was important, but grew into that, and then we end up calling it the liberal international order. But the liberal piece is sort of a bolted-on aspect, having an international order that has strong normative guidelines on the use of force and on economic interactions among states, including finance and responses to financial crises, is incredibly important and it is ultimately empowering of democracy in the long run. So, part of the message that we made gently in those studies, and that I believe a little more strongly is to overplay your hand on the democracy and, you know, the sort of democracy versus authoritarian piece, and put at risk more general consensus on the other things is not the right way to go.
Kaiser: And ultimately sets you back when you want to advance democracy.
Mike: Well, it does. I think it ultimately does. And the other thing I think is the United States is… There’s so much of the promotion of democracy and human rights that can be done with countries, societies that have already decided they want to move in a certain direction, and we can help them. But usually, like Tunisia post…
Kaiser: Arab Spring.
Mike: Arab Spring, once they get on that path, we sort of wave at them and say, “Here’s a few hundred million dollars. Good luck to you. Now we’re going to go bash on people that are not democracies yet.” We could have an incredibly powerful democracy and human rights promotion agenda that is largely built around working with countries that already want to move in that way. And then we can work respectfully, and hopefully non-confrontationally with countries that are not yet democracies and say some things from time to time. But we can stand for the values we believe in without shooting ourselves in the foot in terms of the really foundational pieces of a stable international order.
Kaiser: Or without just simply saying “mission accomplished.” Now the rest of it is “Be like us.”
Mike: Yeah.
Kaiser: I don’t know if you’ve read The Light That Failed by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes. It’s an amazing book. It’s about the sort of failures of the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Soviet communism. Really, really highly recommended book. Speaking of recommendations, we’ll get to that, but wow, thank you so much. What a fantastically interesting and rich conversation. I would love to have you back on the show again soon. And thanks for taking the time.
Mike: Sure.
Kaiser: Again, the book is called Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy. And I cannot recommend it more highly. It’s just super engaging. It’s like reading like a long, well-written New Yorker article. It’s great. No, it’s a fantastic book.
Mike: Thank you so much. Thank you. If I’d only earned as much from it as the per word rate that the New Yorker pays, I’d be a rich man.
Kaiser: Yeah.
Mike: Thank you, though. That’s very kind.
Kaiser: Oh, no, very well deserved. And thanks to Jude for connecting us. Onto recommendations, but first, a really quick reminder that the Sinica Podcast is powered by the China Project. If you like what we’re doing with this podcast and the others in our network, really the best thing that you can do to support us is to subscribe to become an Access member. Costs you a hundred bucks a year. And you get to hear this podcast four days ahead of the other chumps. Anyway, help us keep the lights on. Do what you can. I can continue to interview thoughtful, brilliant people like Mike Mazarr, and all you need to do is subscribe. All right, let’s move on to recommendations. Mike, what you got for us?
Mike: Okay. I got two books, one that you’re probably familiar with, but that I only recently became familiar with and really enjoyed. And that is Paul Heer’s book, Mr. X and the Pacific, about George Kennan ‘s role in post-war. It’s just so instructive about the process the United States went through after World War II in thinking, rethinking, and then doubling back on a lot of the decisions it was making about its commitments in Asia. So, it’s really fascinating, extremely well written.
Kaiser: Oh, yeah.
Mike: The other book I would recommend is not about Asian Pacific at all, but in our polarized and fraught times, one of the best books I’ve read in years is by a guy named Geoffrey Kabaservice, who’s with something in D.C. called the Niskanen Center, and it’s called… And it’s really about sort of the wise men era of eastern establishment men in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, mostly ‘60s, built around a discussion of the then President of Yale University, but also other folks like McGeorge Bundy and Cyrus Vance and others. And it’s just an incredibly… I mean, first of all, it’s just an amazing tale of America during that period, and the political process. It was going through the decline of the old establishment and what that meant, but it’s also a story of the values of public service and community solidarity that was held by a lot of these folks, and the, sometimes, sacrifices they made for that, but the pragmatic and thoughtful approaches to many issues, including running Yale.
I just found it to be one of the most instructive books about the nature of our country that I’ve read in a long time. It’s called The Guardians by Geoffrey Kabaservice.
Kaiser: Fantastic. Yeah. I mean, all hail Yale male, pale, and stale, right?
Mike: Exactly. Right. Well, and this, I mean, this is the story, this guy, his whole thing was, I mean, he’s absolute blue blood Eastern establishment, but he came in, got a new director of admissions and says, “Nope, we’re moving away from that. I mean, there are so many hilarious and amazing things in that book. Like, when they go to visit, I think Andover, and they get a question, you can imagine all the Andover kids were going to Yale. That’s what we do.
Kaiser: Sure.
Mike: Right? And somebody asked the question, “What is going to be your new admissions policy to the bottom quarter of the Andover graduates?” And the answer was, “well, if you can’t succeed here, why would I think you could succeed at Yale?” And that caused an uproar. Because if we are from the Eastern elite and we go to Andover, we should go to Yale regardless of performance as kind of secondary. But anyway, this guy was a real, a reformer in that sense, trying to make Yale into a different kind of thing. And that struggle between this earlier sense of white male privileged establishment as being essential to run the country and the new vision of a more diverse and inclusive approach is just one of many stories that’s brilliantly told in that book.
Kaiser: Fantastic. Yeah, I’ll put that on my list for sure. I can’t tell you how much I like Paul Heer, though. I had a chance to spend some time with him a couple weekends ago in Chicago, and what a mensch that man is.
Mike: Absolutely.
Kaiser: I mean, just warm and funny. Just what a great guy.
Mike: Yep, absolutely. And a perfect example of, “oh, the intelligence community is threat mongering”, and well, there’s a lot of senior intelligence people that come out, and maybe what they had to write inside was a little different, but all kinds of different rich nuanced views that exist in these institutions.
Kaiser: Really, I mean, the sort of dovey part of my world is choke-full of very senior IC people. Yeah, absolutely.
Mike: Right. Yep.
Kaiser: I want to recommend something that’s a little, maybe less weighty than what you’ve just recommended, but it’s an excellent novel by the writer, R. F. Kuang, Rebecca Kuang, called Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. It is a really original quasi-historical fantasy. I guess some people would describe it as YA, young adult, although I don’t know what that genre really entails or what it means, but I have to say, I mean, I did find it on my daughter’s bookshelf when I visited her in Madison, she’s a freshman there recently, and she had read another book of hers and recommended this one to me. She hadn’t really gotten very far into it, but I read the back cover and was just immediately intrigued.
It’s about colonialism and revolution, but it’s really about language and translation. Magic plays an important role, and there’s this system of magic that the author created, which involves using silver as a kind of medium that’s activated by these incongruities, these imperfections in translation between words from one language to another. Somehow that creates magic. And it’s really brilliant. It’s also about the opium war. So, anyone who has read books like Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel which is set in Victorian England, or no, actually the Napoleonic era. I recommended that once on the show. They’re probably going to totally dig this book too.
I think it’s going to find an audience with this listenership, and not only because of the China angle, but also because of the whole language thing. Highly, highly recommended. I am actually now going to read something else by that author, but first, I reached out, I got in touch with her through Jing Tsu at Yale. She’s a graduate student in the East Asia Department at Yale, so I figured I could get her through Jing. And Jing put us in touch. We are going to be taping a show that I will probably publish right around Christmas for y’all. Anyway, it’s a great book. It’s called Babel. Mike, thanks once again. What a pleasure it’s been talking to you.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I really enjoyed it, and thanks so much for having me on.
Kaiser: Yeah, wonderful. Thank you.
The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com, or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, if Twitter still exists. And be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
