An economist by training, Khanna advocates for new trade policies and strategic business partnerships to be front and center in U.S. diplomacy with China. This “rebalancing,” as Khanna termed it, is a call for both countries to pursue a fuller, more robust economic development strategy while continuing to engage with each other.

Drawing inspiration from President John F. Kennedy’s commencement address at American University in 1963, Khanna urged listeners not to view “conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats,” when it comes to managing the U.S.-China relationship.

Instead, Khanna outlined four key principles he believes will be crucial to navigating the tense years ahead. These include:

1. An economic reset to reduce trade deficits and tensions
2. Open lines of communication
3. Effective military deterrence
4. Respect for Asian partners and robust economic engagement with the world

Khanna is clear-eyed that these goals will take time to realize. Bringing jobs back to the United States will require large investments in domestic infrastructure. Leaders in Washington will need patience, persistence, and help from partners outside of politics to bridge communication gaps and ensure Beijing picks up its phones in moments of tension. Reallocating defense spending in a way that is fair both to American taxpayers and partners like Taiwan will need cooperation from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

But Khanna is confident that these barriers can be overcome. 

“I believe a constructive rebalancing with China can maintain the peace,” he told the audience. “It will not happen overnight. It will not happen with one president or one congressman. But it will happen if all of us - military and business leaders, educators, unions, activists, foreign policy experts and students work toward this goal. [We will win by] helping our own nation flourish and by putting our system and our promise of freedom on display for the world to see.”

Click the link to read Congressman Khanna's full remarks on
"Constructive Rebalancing with China."

The Chinese surveillance balloon that began drifting across the United States on January 28 prompted headlines suggesting the incident was a foreboding indicator of malign United States-China competition. Some scholars, however, emphasized that these assertions were nothing but hot air. After all, the balloon is one of several that have been detected in the United States airspace since 2017, and merely a physical manifestation of an ongoing trend of Chinese espionage that is often much more clandestine.

So, what was it about this particular incident that generated such swift, bipartisan calls for a military response? Our recently-published research shows that it was more likely the unequivocal, timely public attribution of this surveillance balloon to its country of origin (China), rather than the actual effects of the surveillance or the more unusual means of its collection.

How valuable is surveillance? China is believed to have used surveillance balloons to collect intelligence for the past several years, though the origin of the balloon program has yet to be disclosed. These balloons have been observed in American airspace before–including four times during the Trump administration–as well as in airspaces throughout the world. China is not the only country to use this technology. In early February, South Korea also spotted a North Korean surveillance balloon over its territory.

Continue reading at thebulletin.org

Click the link for a full transcript of “What We Need To Talk About When We Talk About Taiwan.“

The Likelihood of Invasion

In stark terms, Oriana Skylar Mastro, a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, believes there’s a 100% chance China will use some sort of force against Taiwan in the next five years. For the last twenty years, China has been making concerted efforts to modernize its military and increase its capabilities not only to assert force against Taiwan, but to deter intervention from the United States.

In the majority of scenarios, the United States wins in a conflict with China over Taiwan. But the United States also carries a distinct geographic disadvantage. The distance across the Taiwan Strait between the island and mainland China is approximately 100 miles, which is roughly the distance between Richmond, Virginia and Washington D.C. If China moves quickly, PRC forces could take Taiwan before U.S. forces have time to move into position.

When considering possible outcomes in Taiwan, it is equally important to consider the motivations driving Beijing’s ambitions. The leadership on the mainland has been planning and thinking about how to retake Taiwan since 1949. With the modernized capabilities coming online, the balance of power has shifted in China’s military favor, and the cost-benefit calculus favors Beijing’s ambitions. The long-term planning stage is now reaching its end, and the prospects of direct action are increasing.

The View from Taipei

Political leaders in Taiwan recognize the growing danger they face across the Strait. In Larry Diamond’s assessment, the end of Hong Kong's autonomy and the suppression of the “one country, two systems” model, the rising military incursions into Taiwan's air defense identification zone and coastal waters, and the whole rising pace of Chinese military intimidation has sobered Taiwan and visibly impacted Taiwanese public opinion.

Concerningly though, while the political elite recognize the real and present danger of the situation, polling of the general Taiwan public suggests that the vast majority of citizens still feel like an attack or an invasion by China is unlikely. Similar majorities suggest that they would be willing to fight in Taiwan’s defense, but volunteering for military service remains at a minimum.

To maximize safety, Taiwan needs to find ways to strengthen itself in its ability to defend, resist, and deter China, while still avoiding any appearance of moving toward permanent independence or any other action that could be deemed by Beijing as a provocation, says Diamond.

What the United States Can Do

When it comes to the defense of Taiwan, the strategic crutch hobbling the United States is geography. Most of the U.S. Pacific forces are not in Asia. The majority are in Hawaii and California, as well as a few bases and airfields in Japan. To be able to effectively deter China, the U.S. needs far greater forward deployed military capability in order to be able to either stop or stall the movement of Chinese troops into Taiwan, says Mastro.

Taiwan needs greater onshore military deterrence capabilities as well. One such strategy is the “porcupine approach,” which increases the number of smaller mobile lethal weapons. By Larry Diamond’s assessment, increased citizen participation in military training is also crucial, with an emphasis on weapons training and urban defense tactics. The U.S. could support these aims by overhauling the current system for weapons procurement to speed up the production and delivery of weapons systems not just for Taiwan, but to the benefit of U.S. defense and other contingencies as well. Working with leadership to create strategic stockpiles of food, and energy should also be a priority, says Diamond.

The U.S. also needs to put much more effort into its diplomatic efforts on behalf of Taiwan. Many U.S. allies and partners are reluctant to ostracize China because of economic ties and concerns over sparking their own conflict with China in the future. A key ally in all of this is Japan. If Japan fights with the United States on behalf of Taiwan, it is a guaranteed win and enough to effectively deter China. But much more needs to be done much more quickly in order to secure those guarantees and present them in a convincing way to Beijing.

“The clock is ticking,” Larry Diamond says. “And the problem is we don’t know how fast it’s ticking. “Taiwan is moving in the right direction. But we need to move faster than we're moving.”

Just days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Dmitri Medvedev, the former president and prime minister of Russia, took to social media to post a chilling message. He raged against Western sanctions on his country and suggested darkly that Russia could rip up some of its most important agreements with the West. He mentioned the New START treaty, the nuclear arms reduction agreement signed with the United States over a decade ago, but the threat was broader still: the sundering of all diplomatic ties with Western countries. “It’s time to hang huge padlocks on the embassies,” he wrote.

Read the rest at Foreign Affairs

After months of watching hundreds of new nuclear missile silos being dug in the dirt northwest of Beijing, it is welcome news that President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping seemingly agreed at last week’s summit on the need for strategic stability talks. Strategic stability — the idea that nuclear-armed countries should not be able to gain decisive advantage over one another — has taken on new importance as China expands and modernizes its nuclear arsenal.

China is expected to quadruple its number of warheads in the next decade, and is upgrading its nuclear capabilities with new missiles, submarines and bombers. Over the summer, it reportedly fired a missile from a hypersonic glide vehicle while testing its fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) — a technical advance that, if true, means the Chinese can attack targets from space with nuclear weapons. Although China insists it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons, this claim has less credence than in the past, when the country’s nuclear force was much smaller.

Read the rest at Politico