Mother's-Day-Week Wrap-Up
Falling behind, but swimming quickly to catch up
We spent the weekend visiting our son at college, which was an absolute delight but which has delayed this weekly summary.
Before I get into this week’s summary, I note that in last week’s summary I failed to link to two pieces of mine elsewhere, one about the Godfather movies, and one about intellectual property and vaccines. I apologize, to you and to myself, for the self-sabotaging oversight.
The Thucydides Trap Tightens
At The Week, I’ve got a piece about the rising risk of war on Taiwan, how both America and China could well lose, in the sense of suffering disproportionate damage from a failure to achieve their primary objectives, making conflict irrational, and how nonetheless the various possible strategies for avoiding it might yet make it more likely.
Both conflicts . . . are essentially asymmetric. Though Taiwan is smaller and weaker, China is actually more vulnerable in a conflict with Taiwan because they need total victory to achieve their war aims, and would suffer grave political peril if victory were not achieved. America, on the other hand, has far greater force-projection ability than China does, but we are ultimately more vulnerable in a conflict with China because battlefield losses would do far more damage to America's position and reputation than they would to China's. Indeed, bloodying America could well be viewed as having such political benefit to the Chinese leadership that it could offset a failure to actually coerce Taiwan into accepting Chinese rule, which means China might well rather fight a battle with the American navy than with the Taiwanese army.
Some have asked why I didn’t, in the column, draw the conclusion that Charles Glaser did in his essay in Foreign Affairs that the United States should simply abandon its commitments to Taiwan as part of a general strategy of appeasement of China over its core interests. This is not a silly question! If you’d asked me ten or even six years ago, I’d have said that, in fact, the real challenge for America was to figure out how to do precisely that without suffering a catastrophic collapse in America’s own position. I’ve been worried for years about the Thucydides Trap (I reviewed Graham Allison’s book on the subject here), a situation where a status-quo power is confronted by a rising power and fails to accurately assess what commitments it can actually sustain, but instead tries to maintain its position (often by means of alliances that multiply rather than reducing commitments), leading to a spiral of responses that eventually leads to all-out war. I lay out what changed my mind about the plausibility of appeasing China here; what it boils down to is, we could safely appease an odious China that posed no great threat, and we could safely appease a strong China that we could form a partnership or at least a modus vivendi with, but the China that actually exists is neither of these.
That’s not a completely adequate response, though, because in theory we could draw a line here and not there. To pick a conflict elsewhere in the world, we could maintain our commitment to the Baltic states against Russia without being obliged to make a similar commitment to Georgia. Even a tense standoff needs lines that both sides can live with. Why draw the line through the Taiwan Strait?
The glib answer would be to say: we shouldn’t! My column argues, in fact, that a more explicit U.S. commitment to Taiwan could well provoke the war it’s intended to prevent, and that, in fact, even arming Taiwan for its own self-defense, if it looked like it would be successful, could be provocative. But it does not therefore follow that actively abandoning Taiwan wouldn’t have far broader repercussions than Glaser assumes, particularly in the current context where China has alienated or angered very nearly all of its Indo-Pacific neighbors. It’s not hard to imagine America’s position in the western Pacific unraveling very quickly if we explicitly declared that we would not defend Taiwan, which I think is what Glaser is advocating.
In other words: we’re already in the Thucydides Trap, and the question is how to manage that fact and avoid both war with China and a collapse in our position, not how to avoid getting into the trap in the first place.
I will no doubt be writing about this subject many times again.
On Here
Only two pieces here in the past week:
“Time To Move the COVID Goal Posts Back Where They Belong” is my attempt to remind people of what we were originally out to achieve in our COVID response, and how the views of the most risk-averse elements are significantly moving the goalposts from where they once were and where they should be.
“Et Tu, Naftali?” gives my read on the failure of Benjamin Netanyahu to form a government, and what that might portend. If you are interested in the subject, I strongly recommend this piece by Yair Rosenberg about Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid party, the most-likely alternative candidate to form a government.
The World Elsewhere
Speaking of Israel, I find it striking that two things are happening at the same time.
On the one hand, violence continues to rage in Jerusalem between Palestinians and Israeli security forces, sparked by the pending eviction of dozens of Palestinian residents from their homes in East Jerusalem, to be replaced by right-wing Israeli nationalists. The evictions are pursuant to a finding that the property in question was owned by Jewish religious organizations before 1948; there’s no comparable mechanism for Arabs to reclaim property lost in 1948, however.
On the other hand, Mansour Abbas’s Islamist Ra’am party has apparently agreed to support a government led in rotation by Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett of the right-wing settler-oriented Yamina party—and Bennett has agreed in turn to Abbas’s conditions, which include recognizing a group of unauthorized Bedouin communities in the Negev. If it happens, this would be an extraordinary watershed in Israel’s history.
Apropos of Mother’s Day, I have been following the discussion about America’s plummeting fertility rate.
This is a complicated topic that I have touched on before, though not recently; I think my last piece on the subject was in 2018. The latest dismal numbers need to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt because of COVID, but as Noah Smith points out, even adjusting for the anomalies of 2020 the larger picture is what I described in 2018: a reversion to the developed-country mean. That has potentially significant economic and social consequences, many of them troubling.
I share Smith’s concerns about being potentially misunderstood; ultimately, fertility is a highly personal decision, and the government has no business trying to coerce women either into having or into not having children. I don’t think that means that the government should be neutral, though. Children are, quite literally, our future, and I don’t think we should be neutral about whether we value having a future or not. The government should, for moral reasons alone, be far more supportive than it is of children, childbearing and childrearing. That means being more supportive of working mothers and more supportive of stay-at-home mothers and more supportive of families that don’t involve mothers at all. If that increases fertility to something more like the replacement level, that would also be a positive for the economy and society, but we should do those things regardless of whether a big boost in fertility is the result.
The thing is, I don’t think we should be too optimistic about a big boost in fertility being the result. Pick your preferred strategy, right-wing or left-wing, for boosting aggregate fertility up to replacement, and there’s a good example of a major country where it hasn’t worked—or, has worked to some degree but not enough to reach that goal. Australia and Canada both have higher immigration rates than the U.S.A., with a focus on high-skilled immigration. Both have sub-replacement fertility. Germany has a word-class cradle-to-grave welfare state, plus lower average housing costs than most peer competitors. It has sub-replacement fertility. Russia and Japan have both been trying explicitly for years, with some success, to raise their fertility rates from very low levels. Both still have sub-replacement fertility. Colombia and Poland are deeply Catholic countries with severe restrictions on abortion. They have sub-replacement fertility. If this were an easy lift, lots of other countries would have done it. They haven’t, because it isn’t.
I’ll undoubtedly be writing more about this in the future. But I wanted to mention one more thing in this regard. I find that not only is it very hard to write about this subject without being misunderstood, because readers take it personally, but it’s also very hard to write about this subject without getting personal oneself. As I started to write about it, my mind wandered in a direction that wasn’t particularly conducive to policy discussion, but would be more appropriate to a personal essay or even a piece of fiction.
If either is the result, that may prompt me to experiment with publishing that sort of thing here. You are fairly warned.