Walter Russell Mead: belief

Transcript context

…Here’s a real softball. If China were to move on Taiwan, what’s the most likely scenario? Is it a blockade? They start by taking the small islands, they send a small amphibious force, they bomb everything? Or? That will entirely depend on the Chinese assessment of their own capacities and of the international political situation. What we’ve seen so far is that China prefers what people have called the cabbage-leaf strategy. The idea is that a cabbage starts very small, and it keeps growing one leaf after another, getting incrementally larger, but none of its expansionist moves quite trigger an overwhelming response. If we think about how China has gone from “Oh, we’re just going to build a few peaceful islands in the South China Sea. Don’t worry, there’s nothing there,” to militarizing those bases, to then using those to further extend Chinese power that we now see in the Solomon Islands, where they’ve recently refused to receive new naval visits from the US or Australia. China is now basically emerging as the lead partner of a strategically located set of islands that would cut Australia off from the US to some degree and from the rest of the region. We’re seeing very incremental opportunistic moves. I think we can say that the future of Chinese policy toward Taiwan will reflect that same kind of thinking, which would suggest nibbling and nibbling before you finally take the big bite. What was your dissertation on, and how has that work shaped your understanding of the current war in Ukraine?…

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