East Asia Expert Tells Portland Group About the War No One Wants, But Might Happen Anyway

Imagine two nuclear-armed, global superpowers sleepwalking into a war that would, by conservative estimates, cost at least 10,000 American lives but probably many more. That is the altogether possible scenario playing out between the United States and the Peoples’ Republic of China that CATO Institute senior fellow Doug Bandow described to a group of lawyers in Portland on Thursday.

The best way to avoid that conflict, Bandow advised, is to do a better job understanding how China thinks and start playing three dimensional chess instead of Chinese checkers, or even the Western variant.

A former special assistant to the late president Ronald Reagan, Bandow occupies a perch at a Washington-based, libertarian think tank and has written extensively on East Asia and international affairs generally. His latest book Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire is one of eight he has penned on varied policy issues, with several focusing on Pacific rim nations. He’s a critic both of interventionism and NATO expansion.

Chinese interests, Bandow suggests, are both regional and global. In what it historically called its “Middle Kingdom,” China — before its “century of humiliation” (1842-1945) dominated East Asia in a way it has yet to fully restore. Since Mao Tse-Tung’s communist victory in the 1949 revolution, though, it has substantially raised the standard of living for most Chinese, albeit at substantial costs in human lives.

Bandow drew a line between China’s desire to reassert itself in its neighborhood and America’s Monroe Doctrine, calling attention to the little-known fact that during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1961, a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine off the coast of Florida came within one vote of launching an attack on the U.S.. Soviet naval protocol required the captain, his executive officer, and the political commissar to be in agreement before unleashing a ballistic missile, and today we have one of those three to thank for skirting what would have quickly become Armageddon.

Globally, China not only strives to be a major economic player but has also accomplished this goal, whether through its “Belt and Road” initiative to secure its supply chain through a transport infrastructure linking it to all market, its dominance in shipbuilding, or its campaign to secure natural resources in places like Africa, he said.

Countering this, Bandow argues, requires smarter economic diplomacy and “friend-shoring” on the maunfacturing front, with an eye on competitive advantages.

“Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the other day we need to be screwing all the screws in America when it comes to making things like cellphones, but think about that realistically — if we actually made these devices in America, they’d end up costing $14,000 a piece,” Bandow said to illustrate his point.

Like many, Bandow is not a fan of Trump’s tariff policy.

“While I realize that chaos and disruption may be part of the strategy, right now we’re allowing China, the primary target of our tariff policy to go around to all the countries we need to have on our side and say ‘look, who’s the crazy one now, it’s better to deal with us, don’t you think?'” he said.

Chinese students in the U.S. are vulnerable to exploitation by the communist regime at home, Bandow said. In this sense, a soft power instrument — educational exchanges — can be weaponized against America through agents of espionage.

Responding to a question about Beijing operating its own police station in New York City, Bandow said that it was outrageous and that incidents like this should be readily prosecuted, especially given the fact Chinese would never allow America to reciprocate in their country where independent journalists are not even allowed.

Bandow also agreed that the infiltration of Maine’s medical marijuana market by Chinese organized crime demands an immediate response, as does the supply of deadly fentanyl to American drug users. In a sense these issues put the shoe on the other foot compared to the Opium Wars that Great Britain waged against a weak Chinese empire in the mid-Nineteenth century.

On questions of hard power, he said the central issue is Taiwan. Comparing the potential for disaster there with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, the spark that set off the First World War, Bandow stressed this is an area that demands smart targeted thinking.

That is why America would be wise to avoid what Harvard Kennedy School professor Graham Allison has called “Thucydides Trap,” or a situation where great powers set a structural course that inevitably leads to a war neither really wants.

Supplying Taiwan with F-35s is foolhardy, he said, because mainland China’s military, the PLA, will knock out its airfields in the first moments of a conflict. A smarter move, he said, is to equip Taipei with enough ant-ship missiles to turn the Taiwan Strait into what former Trump national security director for East Asia Matt Pottinger has called “a boiling moat.”

Less smart, he argued, are moves like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan during the Biden administration which rather than signaling strong U.S. support for Taiwan spurred Beijing to amp up its military build-up.

Trump has not said the U.S. will directly defend Taiwan militarily, Bandow pointed, unlike Biden who asserted it would on three occasions. Reagan’s decision to engage the Soviets in talks in the late 1980s came about as he learned how close the superpowers had come at that time to nuclear war based on misunderstanding of the others’ intentions.

America’s chief advantage over China remains its capacity for innovation and the openness of its markets. Maintaining, or as the case may be, regaining an edge over its primary strategic competitor requires Washington to play to the United States’ natural strengths and be nimble in assembling allied nations to counteract China’s ambitions, whether commercially or militarily, Bandow concluded.