Bargaining and Balancing – The Scholar's Stage

The Eight Tribes of Trump and China

31 March, 2025Bargaining and Balancing, Entangling Alliances, The Middle Kingdom, The Presidency

LAST OCTOBER I published a short breakdown of four geopolitical ‘schools’ that might shape China strategy under Trump. That piece was a pre-election preview of a much larger report I was writing for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. I published the preview as security: Trump might not win. If so I had better publish something before election day while interest in Trumpworld was guaranteed.

Trump won. Interest in GOP debates did not abate. I continued to work on the report. As of this week the full thing is out. You can read it, in all its twenty-page glory, over at the FPRI website. What follows are some of its key points:

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Republican Debates on China: A Political Compass

31 October, 2024Bargaining and Balancing, Diplomacy, Dogs of War, Entangling Alliances, The Middle Kingdom, The Presidency, Uncategorized

MANY HAVE TRIED to pin Trump to Heritage’s “Project 2025.” The Trump campaign has not only refused to endorse Project 2025—they have refused to endorse any detailed policy plan whatsoever. Trump prefers to keep his options open.

One unanticipated benefit of this approach is that Republicans have spent much of the last year engaged in intensive but open debates over policy. Ambitious politicians, congressional offices, and think tanks have laid out their preferred plans on almost every issue of importance. These plans often differ from each other in striking ways. Absent endorsement from Trump or his campaign, no one quite knows which of these policy packages will eventually be adopted as the Republican standard. The Republicans involved have thus been free to debate the merits and costs of each.

Take China policy.

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Patronage vs. Constituent Parties (Or Why Republican Party Leaders Matter More Than Democratic Ones)

20 July, 2024Bargaining and Balancing, By The People, Electoral Intrigues, History, The Presidency

The Republican and Democratic parties are not the same: power flows differently within them. The two big political news items of this week—the happenings of the Republican National Convention and the desperate attempts of many Democrats to replace their candidate before their own convention next month—reflect these asymmetries. Nevertheless, many discussions of American politics assume that that the structures and operational norms of the two parties are the same. If these party differences were more widely recognized, I suspect we would see fewer evangelicals frustrated with their limited influence over the GOP party platform, fewer journalists shocked with J.D. Vance’s journey from never-Trump land to MAGA-maximalism, and greater alarm among centrist Democrats about the longer-term influence that the Palestine protests will have on the contours of their coalition.

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Gaza and the Extremist’s Gambit

31 October, 2023Bargaining and Balancing, Dogs of War, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Near East

Can strategic sense be found in “senseless” violence?

This is the question I attempt to answer in a column I have out this week for Mosaic, tilted “The Extremist’s Gambit Helps Explain Why Hamas Attacked Now.” The piece was prompted by the many expressions of shock and puzzlement I read on social media when news of Hamas’ desert massacres spread across the internet. “There is a temptation to explain away heinous violence as a product of irrational emotions or beliefs,” I write. “Hamas terrorists, under this schema, murder Israeli children and partygoers under the influence of unquenchable ethnic hatreds, fanatical religious doctrines, or simply a perverse taste for cruelty itself.”θ All such explanations have an element of truth to them. Violence cannot be divorced from the primordial passions. But the more one studies violent action—both at the level of the state and at the level of the individual—the more instrumental it will appear.

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We Can Only Kick Taiwan Down the Road For So Long

29 December, 2022Bargaining and Balancing, By The People, Entangling Alliances, The Middle Kingdom

Over at Foreign Affairs, Ryan Haas and Jude Blanchette have published an interesting argument. Hass and Blanchette are worried that the United States and China are needlessly inching towards armed conflict over Taiwan because of the two powers’ shared belief that “the hard questions at the root of the confrontation” can only be solved by a military settlement. In contrast, Hass and Blanchette argue that “sometimes the best policy is to avoid bringing intractable challenges to a head and kick the can down the road instead.” Implicit in Hass and Blanchette’s framing is the belief the United States controls the pace of the can-kicking. Decision makers in Washington, not Beijing or Taipei, will determine the character of their triangular tango. The reasons for this conclusion are laid out plainly: the United States has the power to constrain Taiwanese behavior, while the Chinese, who understand that the costs of a conflict will prove ruinous even in victory, will stage no campaign unless backed into a corner. It is America that will choose whether the can is kicked into that corner or whether it is kicked further down the road.

Haas and Blanchette’s case is cogent and clearly argued. Some of its particulars—such as their warning to avoid symbolics “that would aggravate Beijing without improving security in the Taiwan Strait” (e.g. Pelosi’s recent stunt)—are especially persuasive. But Haas and Blanchette’s larger argument only is compelling if we think crisis can be kicked down the road—and kicked down it ad infinitum. It is not clear to me that this is possible.

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Of Sanctions and Strategic Bombers

31 May, 2022Bargaining and Balancing, Diplomacy, Monied Interests, Political Theory, Russia

In the aftermath of the First World War, military theorists across the West were desperate to fashion a path around the next war’s trenches. Engineers and tacticians spent that war tinkering away on machines that promised an escape from attrition: the gas shell, the U-boat, and the armored tank were all deployed with these hopes. All were found wanting. The aeroplane was not expected to have quite the same impact. The flying contraptions of the First World War were feather-like: they were both too light for heavy ordinance and too slim for bulky fuel storage. Few of these biplanes and triplanes could penetrate deep behind enemy lines. None carried a payload capable of making a serious dent in the nearer trench works. Thus the incipient air forces of the First World War were chiefly used to reconnoiter the static defense works of the enemy—or to shoot down the enemy’s reconnoiterers. But the airmen flying and dying in Europe’s gray skies dreamed of something more.

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Sino-American Competition and the Search For Historical Analogies

19 November, 2021Bargaining and Balancing, Entangling Alliances, History, The Middle Kingdom

In the most recent issue of American Affairs, Walter Hudson argues against “the pull of the Cold War analogy.”θ Cold War analogies for 21st century Sino-American relations are natural yet insufficient. A friend of mine recently complained to me about the thoughtlessness of these analogies. “It is not difficult to rail against lazy Cold War thinking,” I responded. “What is difficult is fleshing out a more illuminating analogy to fill the gap.” Hudson faces this challenge squarely. He argues that the mirror we seek will be found in the eclipse of the British Empire by the United States.

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Learning From Our Defeat: The Skill of the Vulcans

26 October, 2021Bargaining and Balancing, Dogs of War, Narrative, Small and Simple Things, The Presidency

The national security teams of Bush 41 and Bush 43, America’s most accomplished and most reviled set of statesmen officials… were the exact same set of people. The authors of America’s Cold War victory were the architects of America’s 21st century defeats. There lies the mystery! With more collective experience under their belts than any foreign policy team since the Founding Era, with a greater list of accomplishments than any group of national security elites since the creation of the modern national security state, the statesmen-officials of the second Bush administration should have accomplished glorious deeds. They should have lived up to their track records. Instead, they delivered failure and catastrophe. How could this have happened?

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Learning From Our Defeat: The Assumptions of Donald Rumsfeld

07 September, 2021Bactria, Bargaining and Balancing, Books and Literature, Dogs of War, History, Iraq

One hopes for statesmen chastened by defeat. In this world of our hopes, the authors of catastrophe would discuss their mistakes with the humility, introspection, and sense of disgrace these mistakes deserve. Decisions that led to death—death in its thousands and hundreds of thousands—would be examined with probing honesty. The decision makers behind them would be seized with a fierce guilt and urgency. They would quest to understand the nature of their errors. They would incessantly press upon us the lessons of experience, gripped with fear that the next generation might repeat their calamities.

One can imagine such a statesman, chastened by defeat. Douglas Feith is not he.

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Fighting Like Taliban

01 August, 2021Bactria, Bargaining and Balancing, Dogs of War

Over the last month or so we have seen several reports out of Afghanistan registering the shock of the Americans, the Afghani government, and even the Taliban itself with the speed at which the Taliban forces have captured the Afghani countryside.

I am surprised with this surprise.