 All right. Hello to everyone tuning in. My name is Frank Gaum and I run the Northeast Asia program here at the US Institute of Peace. I want to welcome you all to today's virtual discussion on the fate of the Asian peace with Van Jackson and David Kang. I'm really excited about today's discussion, not only because we have two fantastic experts, but also because today's talk addresses a perspective on peace and security that goes largely undiscussed in Washington. Typically, we talk about US national security through the lens of threats, military strength and deterrence, meaning that, you know, there are bad countries out there, they pose a threat to the United States. And the only way to deal with them is to ensure that we have the most powerful military and economy in the world so that we can deter bad behavior and coerce positive behavior from these bad actors. And this type of thinking is often characterized as peace through strength or even as the pursuit of a negative peace, which is the absence of violence. But I think what often gets short shrift in DC is the corollary view, the other side of the coin, which is an examination of peace building or positive peace. So in other words, it's not only about preventing conflict through military means, but it's also about identifying the things that strengthen and sustain peace, like economic well-being, good governance, climate security and even diplomatic risk taking, and then making sure that we prioritize and resource these areas as well. So today, we're not going to have a conventional Washington discussion on deterrence. Instead, we're going to talk about peace and do so in the context of East Asia and the Pacific. And I'm not going to go any further into this because we have two experts here who have researched this issue for many years, and I'll let them elaborate in much greater detail. Our first speaker is Van Jackson, who is a senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and a former US Defense Department official. He's also a longtime think tanker, and he just published a book on the Asian peace called Pacific Power Paradox. And then our next speaker is David Kang, who is a professor of international relations and business at the University of Southern California, as well as the director of its Korea Studies Institute. He's also researched and written on the issue of Asian peace for over 20 years, including in his most recent book in 2017, American Grand Strategy and East Asian Security in the 21st century. So this is how we will proceed. I'll let Van speak for about 10 minutes or so, and then I'll turn it over to Dave for his own comments and thoughts. And then I'll continue the discussion with some additional questions, including some of my own, but also with questions that we received in advance. And then finally, we'll finish up with some Q&A with the audience. I also want to remind the audience that if you want to ask a question, there should be a chat box that you can input your question into. So with that being said, Van, why don't you get us started? Yeah, thanks everyone for tuning in and thanks especially to Frank and Dave and Lucy and USIP for making this happen. I mean, where to start? I guess, what is the Asian peace, right? What are we talking about? So we're talking about an empirical puzzle describing a period of remarkable relative stability in Asia. So like as a measurement, there is a dramatic decrease in mass casualty violence in Asia since this period in 79. But there's also been a total absence of new interstate wars in East Asia and in the Pacific region since 1979. And this observation does not include, cannot include the Indian Ocean region, right? So there's a big geographic caveat here. The Kargil war, among other clashes, suggests that whatever accounts for the Asian peace does not apply to South Asia. And if we included South Asia in our observation of the peace puzzle, it would erase the puzzle, right? There would be no 44 year peace to speak of. The Asian peace is also not super peaceful. So during this period, obviously, the Korean war remained in a frozen armistice, mostly very hostile, right? For most of the 1980s, Vietnam militarily occupied Cambodia. Talked to Cambodians about that. They got a problem with that. In the Philippines and in other places like Indonesia, you've had brutal counterinsurgency and pacification campaigns. And this is like stuff in our lifetime, or most of our lifetimes, right? Like living memory for a lot of us. And in East Asia, especially, we have a lot of structural violence because kleptocracy and oligarchy have been rampant within the US-centered global economic order. And we've had civil wars, right? We have one now in Myanmar. We had a genocide in Myanmar on Obama's watch in the latter years, right? And then we've had nuclear proliferation and nuclear crises that nearly ended the Asian peace. Most acutely with North Korea, right? So there's a way in which the Asian peace is a misnomer. It hasn't been that peaceful. It has been stable, right? But I still use the term because it's the best shorthand we've got for this phenomenon that is desirable and that is kind of a global public good, right? The absence of interstate wars ain't nothing. So the answer to the question of like, you know, what is to be done with US foreign policy or US grand strategy? It ought to be at least informed by, if not driven by, an understanding of what accounts for this Asian peace. And my argument is that any sober understanding of Asian international relations the past 44 years, it has to see the Asian peace as what I describe as like a layered peace, right? Which is to say that it's the byproduct of multiple converging sources of stability and time that have all favored the thing we call the Asian peace, right? So the phenomenon is bigger than any one factor or actor. And it's also important to recognize that there's a regional level picture of peace as the absence of interstate wars. But there's also micro climates of peace within that regional level picture, right? So Northeast Asia has maintained a largely frozen, negative, shallow peace. The absence of interstate wars, yes, but lots of close calls in near missed crises too, right? So it's been kind of a precarious piece in a way. But then you look at like the Asian peace in Southeast Asia, you see something much deeper than just stability through mutual fear, you know? You see elements of a security community and there are sources of tension in Southeast Asia. There are conflicts within nations, but there are mechanisms and habits in place to smoothly manage the friction between nations. So in Southeast Asia, you know, war against neighbors, it's thinkable maybe, but it's very, very distant as a prospect. You know, the valence of Southeast Asia is overwhelmingly cooperative. And then in the Pacific, you have some, there are regional tensions from time to time, but it's within a framework of regional Pacific community. And then on top of that, the blue Pacific coincides with an American primacy and dominance that is like so overwhelming that only three countries in the region even see a need to have a military, right? If you exclude New Zealand and Australia. So under those conditions, obviously the prospects of war from within are like fairly unthinkable, you know? And my point is just that, no matter how we try to explain the Asian peace, we shouldn't lose sight of the historical fact that there are micro climates of peace throughout the region. And there's no single factor or actor that's going to account for all of that, right? So what are the sources of the Asian peace? I'm going to name them, but you have to understand that they're context contingent and they've all been, they've all benefited from occurring kind of in tandem with each other to a degree, right? So in no particular order, and with lots of caveats, US alliances and general deterrence, which have tended to go together, economic interdependence, regionalism, good governance, which you might translate as democratization depending on what you mean by it. And then the big one is great power de temps, right? And so I'm going to offer like a quick word about each of these for the sake of time and then just kind of open it up or turn to Dave. So US security alliances and the general deterrence posture that alliances have made possible. It has a paradoxical quality to it that Frank kind of hinted at in the beginning, right? On the one hand, alliances and forward posture have been decisive in preventing several near-miss crises from becoming wars, right? Depending on how much credit you want to give the US, 1996, Taiwan straight, right? Arguably in 2007, again with Taiwan for sure in 2010. Me and Frank were there in the Korea desk in the Pentagon. Arguably in 2012, Scarborough Shoal. On the other hand, US military primacy and questionable US risk-taking in the name of deterrence has embrittled regional security overall generally, right? And that primacy and risk-taking have been precipitating causes in the creation of near-miss crises, right? If you think about 1983, the nuclear war scare, 1994, the other side of the North Korean nuclear crisis, right? 2017, fire and fury, right? And I imagine, we'll talk about this more in the panel, but this is why deterrence is like, it's not a durable source of security. It buys you time, right? Dependency on deterrence puts you in situations that you might escape intact maybe. If you follow the logic of it, you can navigate through a period of time stably. But the more you rely on it over time, the more you're just playing Russian roulette, you know? So another source of the Asian peace, economic interdependence. The important thing to say here is that it's intra-regional economic interdependence. So US economic hegemony is declining in certain important ways, but the US remains relevant to Asian interdependence. Like that's true. What's not true is that the US position within regional interdependence matters for peace. Like the US doesn't need to be central to Asian political economy for interdependence to hold as a source of the peace, right? Another source of the peace, regionalism, right? And then the norms and the habits of consensual inclusive diplomacy that underpin regionalism. It's a big deal. It's worth preserving, right? Inclusive regionalism, which is not what most many lateralism is, if I'm being honest. It's played a minor part in managing some near-miss crises, right? Including between Thailand and Cambodia in the Obama years. But it's played a large part in foreclosing on crises in the first place. It's a more durable form of stability. It fosters security communities, you know? There's more to say here, but we the US have had an antagonistic posture toward most forms of Asian regionalism over time. And the many lateral network stuff that's going on now, there's some pockets of goodness there. But as a trend, it's actually not good, right? And then democratization or good governance, you know, obviously doesn't apply to large swaths of East Asia. The problem today is that insofar as like the democracy trend was a good thing, it's going in reverse, right? It's on the back foot. And political democracy eventually suffers when economic democracy is absent, which is the case right now and in the foreseeable future. So there's another conversation to be had here again. But like the East Asian Development Model, it doesn't exist in the same way that it used to. Like arguably, it doesn't exist at all anymore, right? And that's a problem for political democracy because it's a problem for economic democracy. Like what's the growth model, man, you know? And then finally, the biggie, Great Power Detente or the cooperative framework of Sino-U.S. relations. It has been the single most important source of the Asian peace overall because it's embedded within or it helped fuel so many of the other sources of the Asian peace, right? People forget that before Detente, China had a revolutionary foreign policy. Like it was exporting military adventures, you know what I mean? So not only has Detente restrained Chinese adventures, Sino-U.S. cooperation facilitated the buildup of regional economic interdependence, right? It helped stabilize the global economy after the 2008 financial crisis. And for a while, it imposed mutual restraint when it came to Taiwan, you know? So China could have been a spoiler in the Asian peace long ago if not for a modus vivendi of kind of like collaboration and mutual understanding with the U.S. And I get that it's like not totally up to us, certainly not as simple as saying like let's cooperate. But it's also just a fact that by pursuing rivalry, we've given up on a major source of the Asian peace. And it's on behalf of a bad wager because there's no security to be had in rivalry formation, right? So, again, a lot more to say about all this. I'm kind of just setting the table for a bigger conversation. So I'll leave it there. Turn to Frank and Dave. Thank you. Thanks, man. That was a great summary to get us started. I'll turn over to Dave. Dave, you've looked at the question of peace in Asia for many years. And I think while you offer probably prescriptions that are similar to Vans, I think you're overall going in assessment of peace and stability in East Asia is actually a lot more optimistic and certainly not the fear based analysis that we typically see in DC. So Dave, can you weigh in on this? Yeah. No, thanks for having Frank and Van. And I think this is an important conversation to have precisely because we've all watched over the last few years, five years, as both left and right in DC have moved from a wide variety of views, particularly about China and the region to basically a consensus, a pretty firm consensus that engagement has failed, it's time to contain, time to decouple, time to get tough. And part of the reason that I write what I do is that the region that I see is very different region than the one I read about in foreign affairs or hear about in DC. And let me give you an example. The way that I would characterize the East Asian peace or the paradox or whatever is the first half of the 20th century was the story of Japan's rise. War, imperialism, civil war. Up through actually, you know, the sort of long the first three quarters up until about 1979, when we do have the last real interstate war. Vietnam China and that was about a month long. A bunch of other things happened in the 70s. In 78, Deng Xiaoping said to get riches glorious. The U.S. recognized China, you know, the Shanghai communique, the Taiwan Relations Act. These three things are fabulous evidence of a massive change in East Asia's regional security at the time. The fourth one is the phenomenal economic growth of many, many countries. The story of the second half of the 20th century or should I say the last 50 years or so has been the story not of war and revolution and civil war and imperialism, but it's been the story of business. It's been the story of economic growth and the kinds of relationships that the United States particularly forged with China have been staggeringly successful. If we look at it in those terms, the set of the status quo relations, which are not perfect about how we were going to deal with Taiwan and China and the United States, have allowed for 50 years of China to get rich, Taiwan to get rich and be a healthy democracy. Remember in 1979 Taiwan was just as authoritarian as China was. The KMT only ceded power in the late 80s to the early 90s. It allowed democratic transitions and allowed Americans to get richer as well as the rest of the region. And so in many ways I think we are rushing away from that perhaps too quickly. The way I characterize the Asian pieces then is absolutely right. There's a lot of violence around the region. There's a lot of violence around the world with internal insurgencies, etc. But the way I characterize it is this. If you go back to 1900-1950 up until 1979, almost every single country feared for its survival. It wasn't clear if these countries were going to get invaded or even see the next year or the next decade. Today, there's only two countries that fear for their survival. North Korea and Taiwan. Realistically, nobody else is actually worried about an invasion or an existential threat to their survival. And in that way, what we've seen is countries are not responding in the present as if their survival was threatened. Countries aren't arming to the extent that we all think that they should. Japan, the much wanted Japanese return is maybe, if they can keep it up, to 2% of GDP, the military spending. Yes, they'll be buying a lot of things, etc., etc., but 2% is a global average. The US, of course, is well, well, well above it. So when I characterize the Asian piece, that's what I mean. Countries don't fear for their survival, so they're not responding as if they did. And it makes sense. What are they doing that much of the United States is ignoring, is busily engaging, as Van mentioned, busily engaging in creating more and more economic, institutional, mini, and multilateral relationships with each other. The most obvious ones are the transpositive, you know, CP, TP, the transpositive partnership, RCEP. Just, what, 10 years ago, the first institutionalized Japan-Korea-China set of mini-laterals was set up. And in many ways, I think the United States focused on China as a threat, and the move away, again, by both left and right, from embracing free trade to being much more skeptical about trade expanding economic activities across borders. Both Democrats and Republicans have moved away from that. I get the domestic politics of it. I'm here to say I don't think that's good national policy for the United States in a region that is rapidly and continuing to move in one direction. So when we think about the Asian piece, that's what we're talking about. And I would pick up with two more points that Van made. And the first one is North Korea fears for its existence, not from China, but from the United States. And deterrence has worked, deterrence has worked for almost 70 years on the peninsula. But as Van pointed out, that's not a solution. That is a freezing of the status quo by the least sort of stable or enduring situation, which is just fear on both sides with very little attempts to build some kind of mechanism or relations or status that can make the piece be actually positive as opposed to negative. And I know that's deeply unwelcome in DC, but without some positive path forwards, what we are seeing by successive different American administrations across, again, both parties has been essentially a deterrence game. We all know how to play it, right? But it's not moving forward. The other thing, and I'll just make one more point and I'll talk the other country that fears for its vital is Taiwan. The thing that I notice about Taiwan is that they don't see a military solution to their survival. The Taiwanese military and even the DPP has been successively reducing. I know they're going to go from what, four months to a little bit more now of mandatory military conscription. But this is nothing like who's pushing them to buy more stuff is the United States. And I think we overlooked this. The status quo over Taiwan has worked very well for the last 40 some years. And as someone has said, I forgot who said this and I would quote them if I could, I would make it clear as if, but we are in danger of loving Taiwan to death by pushing so much to show how we support democracy and go over there and stuff like that, right? That's not a change that's going to necessarily help Taiwan's democracy, economy or the people of Taiwan. I think we should be very careful about us, the Americans unilaterally trying to push for more shows pushing Taiwan in one direction. But almost everyone who knows the region and knows the history of Taiwan and China would say is extremely dangerous. So in many ways, I think the Asian peace is very solid. I don't think any countries in the region are really looking to start actual wars. But there have been a number of events that have changed and trends that have changed over the years that make it much less stable and much less enduring as it might have been, say, 10 or 20 years ago. I still do remain optimistic, because again, countries in the region, they're not moving away. The thing that I find, I will conclude by saying this, the idea of decoupling, I find unrealistic, shall we say, the United States and China are massive global countries, whether it's economics, diplomat, we're not going to, we have to live with them. But one reason that countries in the region aren't going to easily decouple from China or rush to join only the United States or be very clear about this is they're not moving away either. Everybody has to live with each other. And what I see in the region is countries trying to find ways to do that. And what I would hope is the United States would play a positive and hopefully maybe in some ways a leadership role in trying to help move that forward as opposed to trying back away and try and get everybody to make a very clear choice of us versus them, which I do not think is going to happen. So I will stop there and I really look forward to the conversation with all of you. Thanks. Thanks, David. And before I get into my questions, I just wanted to point out what I see is largely a convergence in thinking of how you to view the piece of the last century. The biggest divergence is, you know, Van, you suggest that this piece is in brittle than you said you're pointing out potentially a lot of risks, whereas Dave, it seems that you're saying by and large, it's the piece is pretty solid. Van, do you have any thoughts there? Yeah, we are saying the same thing like a synonym right like it's it we're going the same direction. The way he's narrow Dave's narrating it is is slightly different but it's because he's talking about Asia per se. Whereas I'm talking about like us how you the United States relates to Asia. And so how much of the danger that resides in Asia organically that we're responding to is quite low. The danger comes from the way that we interact with Asia as if it's a powder keg unless we move in more ships unless we seek primacy unless we contain and deter and decouple and all that stuff right. So the danger really is us right Reinhold Niebuhr look in the mirror, you know what I mean. And that's really hard for Washington to do because we like to externalize these things. And so the danger has to do with the way that we relate to the region the danger is not that the region is just so dangerous by itself. Great thanks for that clarification actually it does seem like your views are a lot more online than I thought. Before we get started with the questions I just want to remind the audience again that if you have questions you can start team them up in the chat box below. So to continue discussion. I'll ask a few questions that drill down deeper into the sources of Asian peace. And these questions are addressed to both of you but I'll turn to van first again. I have discussed many of the factors that have contributed to the Asian peace, like the US for military presence alliances US China the time. But are there ways to evaluate the relative value of all of these various factors. Van when you described you said in no particular order. How should these things be weighted, you know, things like the things that the US values that the four deployments the alliances, how should these things be weighted against factors like good governance and economic independence. Does that matter. This is actually why I stress so hard that the sources of the Asian peace are historically contingent and contextually dependent whenever I talk to audiences like I'm always kind of foregrounding that those are not throw away descriptions that's not just wonky stuff. Like, you cannot reliably say that policymakers, you know, should always prioritize one cause of peace over others, right. Circumstances change. The thing that caused peace in the past is not necessarily always going to cause peace in the future. So if you're dogmatic about this, this discussion, then you end up losing the plot, you know, it's about having a framework to help steer through a messy context. So you can make choices within that framework, you can exercise judgment, right. You decide what factors should be more or less relevant, but you do so wittingly, you know, not intellectually half cocked. It's okay to say, we're going to take risk, it's logically okay to say I should say that we're going to take risks against economic interdependence, because we have a strategy that makes some clear eyed wager on some other sources of stability, right. But you don't want to have risk blind spots. You don't want to break up economic interdependence without any awareness that you might be burning the last bridge to peace, you know. So it depends. That's the short answer, I guess. Thanks. David, anything to add there? Yeah, no, I, again, and I, you know, I largely view the world the same way what I would say is in some ways, I think one of the hardest conceptual things most of us have is a view that countries might view their borders as simply being, that's where we stop. So one of the ideas is that as China gets bigger, it is inevitably going to try and expand. I mean, this is just, this is, you don't have to be a intellectual realist out of this particular IR tradition. We just sort of think that in general from Thucydides' million dialogue, the rich do what they can, I mean, the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. And it's really hard for us to think that countries might actually have stabilized many of their borders with each other. And that these aren't necessarily sources of conflict where pretty soon China is going to try and grab something more, something like this. And I'm happy to talk about that more, but I think this is one of the biggest issues that we have conceptually. Thanks, Dave. I'm going to add another follow-up question, again, focusing on the factors that we've been discussing. A lot of these factors to me seem to be structural, meaning they describe these expansive ideas or frameworks like alliances or great power detente that create the conditions for peace. But what about the process factors that can help spark or mobilize the pathways to peace? Things like unilateral conciliatory gestures or diplomatic risk-taking, which has some support in the academic literature. So I'm thinking of people like Charles Osgood and Kenneth Bolding and Charles Kupchen. What role should these types of tactics play in our broader approach to peace? And I'll turn to Dave first. I thought you were going to go with that. I can turn to Dave first if you want to think about it. If we look, some of the real opportunities over the last 50 years have been with initiatives at the time were highly, highly skeptical, whether it's Nixon going to China, Carter going to North Korea in 1994, or frankly, Trump being willing to meet with Kim Jong-un. In some ways, I think that these are often criticized, but open up pathways that we would not normally have if it was simply waiting for things to happen. So, I mean, in general, I think that there's room for this if it's very carefully done. It would be my very short answer. Thank you. Van? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, distinguishing structures from signals is useful and important. And frankly, that's kind of how I think. If you understand structural constraints, then you understand sources of power. And then it's possible to have a sense of how ripe a situation might be for certain kinds of tactics or signaling policies to have a chance of success. And this is one of the reasons why I'm so bearish on our critical of rivalry. Because the process of rivalry making constrains the policy toolkit. It dampens the ability to use conciliatory gestures or restraint or anything with like a cooperative valence, to be honest. Like it constrains the ability to do that stuff to build deeper security, right? So it kind of forecloses the ability to have a deeper security. And the effect of like unilateral concession as an extreme example, I guess, depends on context. Like if you have a hostile relationship and you do one nice thing, but you keep the entire hostile structure in place, you have not done one nice thing. Nothing good will happen from that, right? And so like my metaphor is always jujitsu, you know, or Kuzushi off balancing the signals or the tactics that you're trying to use through policy. These are like submission attempts, you know, if you just throw up armbars randomly, throw up a triangle truck randomly, you're going to get killed, bro. You have to set up your submission. You have to give your signals the best chance to work. You have to put yourself in a position to succeed. And that means using policy to shift structures, right? Shift context, make a situation more ripe for the policies that you want to work. And like, statecraft in my mind is supposed to be all about this, right? How do we shift structures at time one or time two so that we can have policies of peace and conflict resolution work out at time three or time four? You can't just randomly do this stuff. You got to coordinate it, right? So like there is an interplay there that's really important. And the way like when I was 11 years in government or whatever, I never saw us doing policy this way. We were never thinking about trying to shift contexts so that we can make certain kinds of policies more likely to succeed. Like that's, it's disturbing to me that we don't think like this because we should be. Van, I'm glad you brought in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu reference. Dave, I hope you make a soccer analogy at some point over the next few minutes. So I have one last question on the sources of peace and then I'll move on to some specific dilemmas and I'll address this to Van. And this may actually be similar to the first question I asked. So if it's a repeat, then you don't need to go into too much detail. But is the recipe for Asian peace static in the sense that it may also may may always require the US to be the guarantor of stability? Or can there be different formulas for peace in Asia? And so, you know, for example, how does China's developmental model for peace fit into your framework? Yeah, so I mean, the previous recipe for peace, definitely not static, right? And in fact, like US strategy, it's pretty unequivocally premises. Even when it doesn't acknowledge it, sometimes it does acknowledge it, sometimes it doesn't, right? But like during the unipolar moment, pursuing primacy was not so risky for the US, right? It wasn't prohibitively costly to be sure. But the context has changed. Like everything that primacy requires now, like arms racing, military superiority, economic containment to some degree, geoeconomic blocks, fractured regionalism. That's all at odds with what peace requires now, right? So for the sake of time, I'll just say like, yes, peace today requires a new formula. Almost anything other than primacy would be better than the track we're currently on, I think. But that new formula needs to be sensitive to the historical record. So you can deviate from the old recipe, but you should be coming up with an argument that explains why you feel the need to deviate from the old recipe. And it's not about the old thing doesn't work anymore, so we're going to do this now. That's not persuasive. There's no wager in that for what will cause peace or stability. You have to make an argument about what you think will cause peace and stability. It's not enough to say, well, the old bet didn't work. We can debate whether the old bet worked, but you have to do more than just say that. You have to say what the positive argument is too. Thanks, Dave. Any thoughts there? No, I thought that was a good answer. Yeah, I'm happy to move on to others. Okay. Well, I'm going to stick with a China question since that's how I ended my last question. So the US has taken a lot of steps since the 1970s to improve relations with China. Dave, you mentioned a lot of things like normalizing diplomatic ties and bringing China into the international economic fold, enhancing security cooperation with the PLA and building these strategic and economic dialogues over the last couple of decades. And of course, there are some missteps along the way, but shouldn't the decades of the 40 years of US-China that Tant have provided the necessary guardrails to avoid the conflict that we're seeing today? And I'm just going to tie in some questions that I'm seeing already in the chat box because they're all on this China point. What should we be doing? And what are we currently not doing to ensure better US-China relations and stability in places like the Taiwan Straits? So I mean, that's obviously a very complicated question. I can talk for hours about it. Let me try and make a couple of points. The first one is that there are two countries that are having to learn to get along here. And so some of this is on China. Xi Jinping has clearly taken a much more autocratic centralizing power over the last 10 years. I mean, he's made himself essentially dictator for life. And so yes, and they have been far less deferential to the United States. I saw some of the Wolf Warrior diplomacy and things like that. Then they have in the past. And China remains an authoritarian dictatorship that engages in sort of regular restriction of many human rights, freedom of speech, et cetera, et cetera. And they haven't opened up as quickly as we thought they would, meaning it's like they're not a democracy yet, right? It's not the same as going to Korea or Japan. And so there are two elements here. The side of it that I think is disturbing or I find less than useful has been the idea that we then need to swing entirely towards confrontation. There are many, many, I know the Biden administration talks about cooperation and competition. From where I sit outside of DC, I see an awful lot of chest thumping across the US government, whether it's military generals or many of the initiatives taken by the Biden administration, the economic decoupling, right? I don't see a whole lot of the, hey, let's try and cooperate side. I see a whole lot of moves towards sort of performative toughness on China. We're going to show how tough we are. This rush to go to Taiwan, as I said, I think is deeply destable. I think there are two things that are going on here. One is that, yes, where the United States is, is different than it was. And then has talked about this. And I don't know, I study Asia, I don't really know the United States, but it's obvious that we as a country are in a very different place than we were even 10 years ago. We are way more internally divided. There's a lot more worry about our own economic future. And I think this is reflecting on how we behave towards China. The sort of self-confidence that the United States used to have, I think is beginning to wane. And so much of what I see is not a reflection of what China is actually doing, but our fears about what we might become or that we might lose our position. And that is not helpful to anybody, right? That's not helpful to us. It's not helpful to the US-China relationship. More specifically, I will say, for example, I think that we are in many ways seeing dangers that do not necessarily exist and responding to them. And I'll be happy to talk about this in more detail. But the one I see most is on Taiwan. Almost every single discussion I read about Taiwan begins with a Chinese invasion. That's all that anybody talks about. How can we deter China's invasion? How can we stop China's invasion? What's the trigger? People were saying by January 2022, I mean, whatever, by the end of last year, people, no, it's 2027. No, he's going to take it over, et cetera. And we'd simply start with China's going to invade and conquer Taiwan if we don't stop them. But the reality is that's not the trigger. The trigger is not that. The trigger is much more what China has said is we will use force. We reserve the right to use force if Taiwan declares independent, if it's going to become not one China, whatever that thing. And what the beauty of the one China policy is, it has been gray enough to allow us to do something and the Chinese to do something. And to try and rush to get rid of that, I think, is deeply destabilizing. And when I say that we are making it worse, that's what I mean. There are some books out there, some of the most influential books on China today, some incredibly powerful in the Biden government, start their books, and they should know better because these people are sinologists. Start with the Chinese Communist Party simply wants to take over Taiwan with no concept of how this is an enduring, trans-dynastic Chinese concern. From the Qing dynasty that we have explicitly, the Qing dynasty telling Japan in 1895, if you take Taiwan, this will never be solved between our two countries. Pass to the KMT in the 1920s, and then inherited by the Chinese Communist Party. This is a Chinese concern with Taiwan, and we ignore that at our own peril. And that's what I mean. Thanks, Dave. That's very helpful. Van, please feel free to address anything that Dave may have said or one of my initial questions, or I think one of the questions in the chat box was whether we should be validated and feeling the sense of risk and fear based on things like China's wolf war diplomacy. I mean, does a Chinese diplomat mouthing off on Twitter scare people? Is that something we should be living under the covers hiding from? No, right? That's not reasonable. The paranoia, the fear, it serves such a very obviously political purpose by all sides, right? And this is one of the pernicious things about rivalry. And if we had like a sober view of Cold War history, we would know this and remember this. Rivalry empowers fringe extremist paranoiac reactionaries on all sides. It benefits grifters. It benefits ethno-nationalists. It benefits militarists. It doesn't benefit democracy, right? This is historical fact. It's also intuitive, logically. So we're opening up this like nightmarish Pandora's box by succumbing to fear. And the irony is that in most places on the globe, almost everywhere except specifically the Taiwan Strait, the balance of power in every sense favors us so overwhelmingly that it's a joke that we would be afraid of anything. Now, the correlation of forces in the Taiwan Strait, there are specific constraints of geography and reality that limits our ability to project power and defeat people with a conventional military campaign the way we normally would like to dominate others with military overmatch, right? We run up into a dilemma there because our traditional way of doing things doesn't quite work there. But instead of like working within that constraint of like World War III is not a win for anybody. So let's figure out a different way. We're like, well, no, we need more cowbell. We need more arms racing. We just need more missiles. We need to beef up our force posture in Asia, right? And it's all built around this fear-mongering presumption of Chinese domination, Chinese invasion, conflating these things, and then working off of this fuzzy image of a red menace that's more vibes-based than anything. And like, that's just, we're just on a poisonous track. I forgot what the overall question was here. But my thing is like the way I see China, there's a way to deal with China as like a root cause type problem which has to do with political economy and that doesn't really involve economic containment at all. And then there's the like, how do we prevent war or manage stability in the Taiwan Strait? And I see that situation as basically a security dilemma. And we have a whole literature about how to manage security dilemmas. I'll tell you right now, it doesn't involve arms racing. It doesn't involve sticks. It involves carrots. It involves things we don't like to talk about or even contemplate, right? But that's how you get out of tragedy, you know? And the idea that we need to deter China from invading Taiwan is complete nonsense. China is deterred right now. The PLA has priced in ever since the Taiwan Strait crisis in the 90s. They've priced in that there's going to be a really high price if they invade Taiwan. Obviously nowhere near the top of their preference list. You know what I mean? That doesn't mean it won't, it can never happen. But the most likely context in which it will happen is one where like we are creating incentives for it to happen. So we have to think about that. We have to think about the interactivity and the relationality of this fluid situation. You know what I mean? So security dilemma calls for cool heads, calls for rationality, calls for restraint and pragmatism. It doesn't call for assuming the worst case scenario and then letting military buildups and defense planning overtake the steady art of statecraft. That's literally the definition of militarism. Thanks, Fan. We'll get back to the China topic later when we have time. I'm sure there are those who may say, well, how come, you know, no one's talking about, you know, China's belligerent military behavior in the straits of the South China Sea or, you know, their economic coercion, what happened in Hong Kong or their, you know, intellectual property theft, all these things. And so maybe we'll get to that later on. But I want to move on to a topic that's near and dear to all of us, which is North Korea. So I'm going to combine a couple. Actually, I'll just ask this one question from Dave Carlson. Should the U.S. recognize, and this is a, this is a question that has come up prominently over the last six months, certainly in the think tank space. Should the U.S. recognize the DPRK as a nuclear weapons state and work towards diplomatic relations? I have my own thoughts, but I'll let you two weigh in first. And I'll start with Van this time. See, I thought you were going to go with Dave this time. I kind of mix it up back and forth. It's so good. I mean, diplomacy and engagement, like it's part of the job description, right? You kind of, it's in the picture no matter what, but your diplomacy has to have an argument underneath it. So like, what's the theory of diplomacy, right? Tasset recognition of the DPRK is like a de facto nuclear weapons state. That's already the reality. We just deny it rhetorically. And that has not been working out well for us to be honest, right? But if you combine like a recognition move, you know, however you want to define it, with a series of other moves that credibly transform the relationship as like a totality, you know, while managing South Korean and Japanese concerns, there's a theory of diplomacy there, you know? So no single policy initiative is going to move the needle on anything. But give me an argument about how one policy move fits within a series of other moves. Then you've got a theory of change, you know? And I can see a theory of change where you would be required to not only engage diplomatically really heavily, but also have to come around to some kind of tacit recognition. I can see that. Thanks. And Dave? Yeah, sure. Absolutely. I remain baffled at why we think that ignoring North Korea and isolating them is going to give us any more leverage on North Korea than if we have the most minimal of relations with them, which would be diplomatic relations, and admitting something that clearly exists, which is they have nuclear weapons. They have more than one, right? And I get the DC mentality of that's our aspiration or something, you know, a nuclear-free Korea. I get it. But to simply, you know, stubbornly refuse to admit the reality of what's going on in North Korea and hope that it will get better, I think is not a smart policy to go by. Especially when we have decades of evidence that simply trying to ignore and pressure them doesn't work and that there are times that when we do try to move, take a little bit of a step forward, there's usually an opportunity there. And so in many ways, I think that, you know, to sort of echo what Ben said, you know, is a larger set of ideas about how we're going to deal with North Korea. I don't have a problem with it, right? That's not a magic bullet. There is no solution to the North Korea problem, because you know what? North Korea is not a problem to be solved. There's no set of carrots and sticks that I can tell you. And poof, everything will go away. We have to live with and manage our relationship with North Korea. And I'd like to have a little more interaction than we do now, which I think would make it a lot easier for us to understand not just the security side, but the economic, the human rights, and the local situation in Korea itself. So, yeah, I would be very much in favor of that. Yeah, so I'm largely with you guys, especially in terms of looking at empirical evidence to see whether pressure has worked on North Korea it hasn't and the correlation between periods of engagement with the DPRK and lower levels of provocations. So I agree there. I still think it's a bit premature to abandon denuclearization. The couple quibbles I have is one is, you know, I don't know how accepting North Korea's nuclear status, you know, addresses what they are asking for things like sanctions relief and an end to, you know, military exercises and U.S. strategic asset deployments. So that's one concern. And the other one is more on a political level, which is, you know, I don't think you can get the U.S. Congress to consent to any sort of eventual peace treaty with North Korea unless there was some mention of denuclearization, even if it had to be characterized as long term or aspirational or even big leaf, right? So, but otherwise I'm on the same page with you guys. I'm going to jump to another question that is combining a couple questions and we're turning more to the economic interdependence issue. The first one is from Hajun Chang. He notes that economic interdependence has played a very stabilizing role in the Asian peace, but current U.S. policies are limiting economic interdependence. So do you think the effects of U.S. policy are more likely to break up Asian interdependence altogether or simply consolidated in a manner that reduces U.S. relevance? And the related question is how should the U.S. respond to Asian economic regionalism that tends to exclude the U.S.? So you can pick one or the other or both. And then I'm going to turn to Dave first here. This time I was ready. And I'm going to use a soccer analogy. I think we are scoring an own goal on ourselves by not participating in many of the initiatives that are going on. There is so much going on in East Asia at the corporate level, at the national level, and at the regional level. Whether it's Asian investment, AIB, infrastructure investment bank, the reason that many countries are joining these, even if China is the biggest, is because they need it. This is not a political decision. This is an economic business decision about it. Everybody needs infrastructure throughout the region. For example, regional cooperation, comprehensive economic partnership, et cetera, et cetera. And these are just the big ones that the United States is actively trying to pull out of those and pressuring companies within East Asia to also sever relations with China I think will ultimately prove to be harmful to the United States. We already have a lot of economic data that shows that Trump's tariffs hurt the United States. We lost 100,000 to 200,000 jobs. Prices went up in the United States. And the trade relationship with China barely budged. It bounced right back after COVID. We have evidence that these policies are harming the United States and doing very little to actually change the network of relationships that exist in East Asia. So I would really be in favor of a much more forward-leaning economic agenda for the United States that would help us and help those countries. Thanks, Van. Yeah, I'm sorry. Thanks, Dave. Van, additional thoughts? Yeah. I mean, there's a risk that all this like America first industrial policy stuff breaks Asian economic interdependence. I had a piece in foreign affairs where I basically argued that. But it's not because industrial policy is bad. It's actually very necessary in a way. It's because our specific industrial policy right now is trying to rewrite the rules of Asian political economy, even though we don't have the throw weight to do that. Like I think the most likely thing, if I had to make a bet, is that the architecture of Asian political economy gets thicker and denser within the region. That's been the trend since the Asian financial crisis. And there's a history there that I would love to relay at some point. Maybe not today. But that architecture has the U.S. increasingly on the periphery of Asian political economy, even though the U.S. is still important in certain ways. And so the U.S. will gradually alienate itself from Asian political economy while the region moves forward pragmatically if the U.S. is not also pragmatic. Yeah. And if I'm right, the numbers are going to bear this out over time, just as they have since the Asian financial crisis. And so we should broadly be supportive of Asian economic regionalism, right? Even if China stands to benefit from it, because Asia stands to benefit from it. Like there's a huge surge of organic Asian interest in choosing strategic non-alignment over choosing Sino-U.S. rivalry, right? Because you choose China or you choose U.S., you're damned either way. Because either way, you're going to heighten rivalry, which is bad for the region, which is bad for prosperity, right? Bad for stability. And frankly, if you know anything about Third World history, you should know that you don't want to take an alienating or antagonistic posture toward the majority of the planet. You know what I mean? Like if you're worried about Chinese influence or something like that, you need to create conditions where the global south and southeast Asia and Pacific nations and countries that are trying to forge some kind of new non-aligned movement, which they're very actively doing, particularly in the economic and financial space. If you leave that space open and you're antagonistic toward it, China will co-opt it. You know what I mean? So be seen as an ally, be seen as a supporter of non-alignment over rivalry because the current posture that we have, it looks a hell of a lot from Asia like we're telling them they have to choose. But they know, because they know themselves and they know their region, they know if they choose China or choose the U.S., it's just going to heighten rivalry either way, you know? Thanks, Fan. We have about 15 minutes left, so I want to jump to the Q&A portion addressing the questions that have been trickling in. And so I'll ask two related questions, and it kind of takes us back to the issue of military balance or supremacy. The first question is addressed to Van, which is, Joe Nye famously said that the Asian peace can be attributed to U.S. dominance in East Asia through military alliances. Why is this wrong? And then the related question gets more specific to the Korean Peninsula. Is the presence of U.S. military forces on the Korean Peninsula a net plus or minus towards efforts to attain a peace treaty ending the Korean War? So Van, can you take those and then I'll turn to you, Dave, to if you had any additional thoughts on those questions. Yeah, just quickly. The Joe Nye thing is very self-aggrandizing. It's not totally wrong, but it's not totally correct. And this is literally, I wrote a whole book about this. It's called Pacific Power Paradox, right? The idea, the book uses the historical record to challenge the prevailing Washington narrative, which is essentially that Joe Nye statement, right? American domination equals stability. That's not true. There are all these other sources of stability in Asia that coincided with U.S. dominance. And the mistake that we're currently making is that we assume all those other factors, they either don't matter or they're just like epiphenomenal and that it's the domination that's doing the work. Domination is A, not sustainable. B, basically unjust, right? It's denying anyone else agency. It's telling a heroic version of history that centers you. It's narcissistic and it's historically inaccurate, but that leads to bad strategy, right? And so now we're pursuing primacy on the presumption that domination is what produces stability. But it's like not only is that obviously untrue at any time in history, like there are other things going on, but by doing that now, by doing domination now in a context where you don't have the ability to do that the same way and where the distribution of power has shifted, you're courting giant risks and you're not even acknowledging it. Huge problem. Like I said, and like I've written several times in the last year, peace and primacy are at odds with each other. What they require at different points in time, maybe you can reconcile them like in the 90s. Now they're at odds with each other and we have to come to grips with that. I forgot what the second question was. It was like U.S. force posture in Korea. Basically the same thing yet. How does U.S. force posture? Is that a net positive net negative when it comes to eventually reaching peace? I think generally speaking, it's a net positive. It certainly played an important role in like certain crisis moments, you know, like in 2010 comes to mind. But it's not a fixture. Like I said before, like if you're going to be dogmatic about this stuff and you're like, oh, this, you turn things from good into bad when you become overly conservative about them in a philosophical sense, right? So like we have to be willing to adjust our military presence in Korea as part of making a new bet or a new wager about how to produce stability or how to make a more progressive stability as in like more durable security, right? And so we, that doesn't mean like you just willy-nilly cut troops or cut our force posture there, but you have to be willing to relook at that. And the problem that we have in policy is that we treat things like, oh, the specific number of boots on the ground, that's sacrosanct. We can't look at that. That's everything will fall apart if we make adjustments. No, it's not. Come on, dude. What are you talking about? So like we need to be willing to be flexible with the factors that are like our sources of leverage because sometimes leverage comes from removing things, you know, or restraining things. And we don't think that way, but it's true. Thanks. I think that's a very helpful way to look at the dynamism of our policies but also our force posture. Dave, any thoughts there? Yeah, I mean, I think in many ways the idea that the U.S. is the cork in the bottle that without us everything would fall apart is enduring throughout DC. You cannot talk about reducing America's base footprint in East Asia in Washington, I think, without being totally considered, you know, just ignored, right? Right there, you're out of the conversation. We must. It's just taken for granted. It's the air we breathe. And so I get why we think that we have to be there. I'm not quite sure, just like with Van, I'm not quite sure that the actual empirical record stands up to that. And I'll give you one example. We are touting right now the tiny movement in the EDCA, the U.S. Philippines visiting forces discussions. But the Philippines in 1992 voted to get rid of Subic Bay of the American permanent military bases there 31 years ago. Subic Bay, it's the largest you guys probably know, you know, and probably put in many people watching, you know, it's the largest naval base in the world outside of the United States at its height. It employed 36,000 Filipinos, massive. I went a couple years later in there in like 94, I went just to look at what it was like. You know, it's amazing, right? Well, no Philippine president since then, even the pro-U.S. ones has even contemplated a return of permanent U.S. military bases. And usually what's happening is we're the ones pushing for more access, not the Filipinos. And I think that's very telling. If they had truly been concerned, if they truly were now, they would be inviting us back in, you know, with open arms. And I think that the story there is very different. What we see in DC or in the United States is whenever Vietnam lets us dock a ship and we don't see that Vietnam and China have done joint patrols in the South China Sea is precisely because they have to live with each other. And so, yes, the U.S. is very important on the Korean peninsula. It's very important. North Korea is actually the one country that might attack us with our troops there and our troops are pretty good at helping to keep the stability. But note that we used to have two divisions and we're now down to like 23,000, 28,000 or something like that. So as Vance said, it's not the number of boots on the ground. And I think we can too easily get swept up in. The U.S. must be doing this. And to not be even calling for it means that you're a defeatist or, you know, no. Ideally, we would be able to decide what's good for us and for the region. And you go from there. Dave, really quickly, just one may argue that the recent agreements that the U.S. and the Philippines agreed to, I think there's like four sets of agreements that increase access and, you know, rotational presence for the U.S. military. Maybe that's a sign the Philippines realizing that, hey, they do desire stronger U.S. presence. How would you respond to that based off of your previous comment? Yeah. Again, that kind of stuff goes up and down, right? These are all, there is a categorical difference between saying we want the permanent base is back. Yeah. It's not new U.S. bases. It's access to Filipino facilities. Yeah. Right? That's us trying to get access there. And one example of that is I actually, I'm going to make a shameless plug for myself, right? But I just published an article about U.S. Philippine relations. And as carefully as you can, I've been able to do it and my co-author Shinra, we can't see evidence of free writing. That's the sort of theoretical part. How do you measure that? But we did deeply careful views of the Philippine military spending, deployments and stuff like that. And one example is the army still takes the overwhelming proportion of the military budget, which is tiny. But the army takes it all. The army is not doing anything about South China seas. They are focused on Mindanao. To go back to what Van was talking about, the Philippines clearly their major security concern is internal insurgencies. Yes, they would like to have, you know, South China seas is out there somewhere, but that is not what they're concerned about. And that is not what they're spending their money on. So that access stuff is for us, not for them. Okay. Can I just add real quick, like there's, US foreign policy conversation exists in like a hype machine where it's everything has this like amplified character to it. And like Dave is bringing a kind of sobering perspective here because it's like, there are shifts happening, but then how far the needle is moving, whether it's Japan or the Philippines or even Australia, it depends on what you're setting as your benchmark or your baseline, you know, like we're not in a kind of like World War two hysteria moment in Asia, except in our imaginations. You know what I mean? Like except if you're reading the, you know, the New York Times version or the Wapo version of foreign policy discussions. So we have about seven minutes left. And so I'm going to try to squeeze in two last sets of questions. One is China related and one is more focused on basically advice for policymakers. And the first one for on China is just more of a positive lens, which is the question basically asked to please talk about opportunities for security cooperation with China and not just climate cooperation. So what are the things that we should be doing that we aren't doing, you know, we're hearing a lot about the more of the adversarial approach, but what are some of the positive avenues for cooperation that we should be doing with China? And I will turn to man on this one first. Yeah. So this is the problem. Like we should be having strategic stability talks at a track one level, not just track 1.5 or track two. We should be ultimately engaging in arms control rather than arms racing with China. You can't do pragmatic stuff like that in a context of like where the structure of the relationship is rivalry. What you can do depends on the overall relationship. And so like that's a reasonable thing to cooperate on security wise, right? It's to everybody's benefit. We just can't do it, right? On political economy, we could be cooperating, put climate aside even though it intersects. We could be cooperating on debt restructuring, right? The IMF is constantly in talks with China because China holds so much debt of Asian sovereign debt for Asian governments and there's a debt sustainability crisis in the region, right? And this is, it is the yoke of debt that is the cause of so much structural and violence in Asia and that's a cause of so much ethno-nationalist sentiment that's just being like held and that is a source of volatility. It's a risk to be managed, you know? So like we could be working with China on that, but we we're kind of not, you know? The IMF talks to China, China spurs them, spurns them. Why? Because the overall relationship is antagonistic, you know? We can get more done and the space for cooperation opens up if the overall relationship is not premised on like we expect you to invade Taiwan in five years and we're going to arms race you now. You know what I mean? Yeah, we certainly, when we had the better context or environment during say, for example, the Obama administration, we did have at least the strategic security dialogues, economic dialogues and even during the Bush administration as well. Dave, any thoughts on that before we go to the last set of questions? Yeah, just briefly in the interest of time, I would be doing a lot more, I would have our government be a lot more careful about what we're saying and doing with Taiwan. To me, that would be that's the only thing that really is I'm actually not that worried about it slipping out, you know, by accidentally getting into a nuclear war. We're not there yet, but we could be doing a lot more to try and stabilize that relationship because I think all of the things we say and then Biden will come out and say, well, I misspoke the one China policy, but all this stuff down below is clearly eating away at that. And I think we should be a lot more careful with China and with Taiwan about what the United States is actually going to do on that or how we want to handle that. Okay, our last set of questions relates directly to policymaking. And the first one is from Daniel, who looks like he's from the Australian Foreign Ministry Policy Planning Department. But the question is, you know, what advice would you give the policymakers for trying to take, you know, they're trying to take the root causes of insecurity in Asia seriously. But they remain guided by a concept of national interest that may preference things like political expediency or short time frames or getting the quick deliverables, right? So that's one question. A related question for again relate the policymakers is what would be the one practical takeaway about thinking about the Asian piece that USC policymaker should be considering more? And I'll let Dave start this one first and then we'll end with Ben. Ben, we'll get the last word. You can correct any mistakes. The thing that I would say about all of this to policymakers that are, you know, if there's one thing you can take away, it's that in East Asia, most elites, if you go the Southeast Asia, you know, Singapore just released their poll of, you know, their annual poll of elites throughout Southeast Asia. It's a great poll. Everybody should look at it. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. You go to Northeast Asia to Korea, Japan. When they wake up in the morning, they're much more concerned about domestic politics, the economy, immigration. And that's where we should be. Yes. Nobody wants a war. Nobody wants to have China bullying them. And we, you know, you've got to push back against China and then learn to get along with them. Yes, we have to do that. But the discourse in the United States and most of policymakers in the United States are totally focused on war and et cetera, et cetera. But that's not where the region is. And we could get there. That's where the Asian piece is. And that's where I think the United States should be. Great. And Ben. Yeah, I have two thoughts here that are related. One, we should not be focusing on China, but focusing instead on the problems that we think China represents and then targeting those problems overall rather than building entire bureaus and offices to deal with this one foreign regime, right? But we don't do that because we like to externalize problems rather than see how everything is connected. Two, we should be building an economic statecraft that serves the purpose of the piece rather than the purpose of punishment or primacy. I've published a bunch of proposals for how to do a piece-oriented economic statecraft. That's the thing that's missing. I don't want to blow your mind here, but a major reason why the US struggles with a generative rather than punitive economic statecraft is because US foreign policy has a huge class blind spot. It recognizes corporations. It doesn't really recognize worker of any nation. And the liberal rhetoric about openness and freedom is applied very inconsistently as a result. So just bringing US policy into alignment with US rhetoric would be transformational. That's all I got. Thank you. Yeah, one last point I'll make just on Dave's comment is that oftentimes the priority or the focus among the people in countries in Asia is on things like governance and the economy and jobs and things like that. But when the US government talks to their counterparts of the Asian governments, they'll talk about the need for reassurance. So oftentimes sometimes there's a mismatch between what the people are saying in these countries and what the government is reflecting about those needs. Van, Dave, thank you so much for your time. I thought we had a great discussion and I think our time is up, so I'll end it here. Thank you so much. Thanks, guys.