This exchange between President Biden and a reporter caught my eye:
Most of the discussion in the press has focused on Biden’s confusing statements on Taiwan. But I am more interested in the reporter’s question. Why does the reporter think it’s “obvious” that the US should not get militarily involved in Ukraine?
[BTW, you can argue that we are militarily involved, due to massive weapon’s exports to Ukraine and perhaps other forms of aid. But (in context) the reporter is clearly referring to an unwillingness to send US troops to fight, so I’ll interpret the question that way.]
To be clear, I agree with the decision to not have the US go to war with Russia. I can think of many reasons to stay out of the Ukraine War, but most of them are not “obvious”.
Here are the two most obvious reasons I can think of:
1. We have no formal defense treaty requiring us to defend Ukraine.
2. Russia has a lot of nuclear weapons, and it would be dangerous to engage in warfare that might escalate to a nuclear exchange.
Are there other obvious reasons that I missed?
Interestingly, Biden never challenged the reporter’s assumption that militarily defending Ukraine is obviously a bad idea. Given that Biden chose not to use the US military in Ukraine, he might well agree with the reporter. But why? Has the administration ever explained its rationale for not intervening?
You probably see where I am going with this:
1. We have no formal defense treaty requiring us to defend Taiwan.
2. China has a lot of nuclear weapons, and it would be dangerous to engage in warfare that might escalate to a nuclear exchange.
Presumably the reporter didn’t think it was “obvious” that defending Taiwan is a bad idea, or he/she wouldn’t have phrased the question that way. That makes me wonder what the reporter had in mind when thinking about Ukraine.
This completes the main point of the post. But experience teaches me that some people might miss the point, and cite some non-obvious differences between Taiwan and Ukraine, of which there are many. Here are 5 examples:
1. Taiwan has an important semiconductor industry.
2. Xi Jinping is a bad leader, but less emotional and unpredictable that Vladimir Putin.
3. Ukraine’s sovereignty is internationally recognized, whereas Taiwan is officially part of China.
4. Ukraine is bigger than Taiwan, and located in Europe. Taiwan is smaller and an island. Russian is more likely to invade multiple countries if it wins in Ukraine.
5. Ukraine in a major food exporter.
The first two suggest that defense of Taiwan might be more justified. I has a crucial high tech sector and (compared to Xi) there is a greater risk that Putin would use nuclear weapons. The final three point to Ukraine’s defense as being more justified. But none of these five points are at all “obvious”.
The reporter who said the US didn’t intervene in Ukraine for obvious reasons presumably didn’t think the obvious reason we held back from Ukraine is that it has no semiconductor exports, or that Putin is more irrational than Xi. Those factors may be true, but they aren’t obviously decisive differences.
So what is?
PS. Here’s the Financial Times:
US secretary of state Antony Blinken says Washington will stay focused on China as the most serious threat to the international order despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Translation: Don’t bother us with facts, we’ve made up our minds.
I’ve seen this in economics. We now know that the 2000 tech stock price boom and the 2006 housing price boom were not bubbles. But economists have already made up their mind, so . . .
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
May 28 2022 at 8:22am
One I would add as a continuation of your point 2 is:
A hot war with either China or Russia would destabilize those countries. A destabilized Russia or China would be a dangerous Russia or China.
That’s not to say either Putin or Xi are good leaders or that their continued hold on power is for the best. But there is something to be said for “the devil you know.” I’d argue that, by destabilizing Iraq, we increased danger in the world. A destabilized Russia or China could be worse simply because of the nuclear weapons.
Fazal Majid
May 28 2022 at 9:25am
Until he launched the Ukraine War, Putin was the opposite of impulsive, with his each action carefully calculated for advantage and what he could get away with. But even a ruthless calculator only needs to miscalculate once for catastrophe to happen.
Taiwan’s dominance in semiconductors is such that a Chinese takeover would be a far heavier blow than, say, the loss of Saudi Arabia.
Ilverin
May 28 2022 at 11:31am
China has a nuclear no first use policy, whereas Russia’s policy is more ambiguous=first use if existence of state is threatened. Yes policy doesn’t guarantee behavior and policy can change, but nuclear policy is generally treated pretty seriously by both countries since the cuban missile crisis.
Ilverin
May 30 2022 at 1:47pm
Also, because Ukraine is not an island, it is easier to supply. Trying to supply Taiwan without getting militarily involved is probably impossible, eg US behavior in early parts of WW1 and WW2 telling merchant ships not to go into the war zone.
Blackbeard
May 28 2022 at 11:38am
You say we have no “formal” agreement to defend Ukraine. What about the Budapest Memorandum? Ukraine gave up some 1,400 Soviet era nuclear warheads in return for the Memorandum, also signed by the UK and Russia. What do you think Ukraine thought our promises meant?
Jon Murphy
May 28 2022 at 12:15pm
The Budapest Memo isn’t a promise of military action.
Peter
May 28 2022 at 2:50pm
The military answer is Taiwan is small and an island. It’s a quick war even in a reconquer scenario. By the time the US ground forces are involved the war is over and it’s just a mop up situation.
Ukraine on other hand can escalate up into hundreds of thousands of UD troops.
Scott Sumner
May 29 2022 at 10:24am
So the fact that we’d obviously lose in Taiwan is a reason to intervene? I don’t get it.
Jon Murphy
May 29 2022 at 10:50am
I think Peter means US retaliation would be in air and naval power. We would reconquer Taiwan without the use of ground forces.
Scott Sumner
May 29 2022 at 1:56pm
OK, I misread the comment. Even so, it doesn’t seem obvious to me that it would be easier to win in Taiwan than in Ukraine, but I’m no expert. We could also confine ourself to air power in Ukraine (i.e. no fly zone) but choose not to—perhaps for “obvious” reasons?
Ruth
May 31 2022 at 12:04pm
We actually couldn’t just confine ourselves to air power in establishing a no fly zone. The only way to set up a no fly zone is to disable Russian artillery and anti-aircraft guns through direct attacks on Russian soil.
Monte
May 28 2022 at 4:48pm
What immediately comes to mind is the China threat. The Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), which sets the DoD’s strategy and priorities every 4 years, abandoned the 2-war doctrine (which required that the U.S. be prepared to conduct 2 major conventional wars simultaneously) during the Obama administration in favor of pursuing a broader range of security challenges. If a hot war were to precipitate in the near term between the U.S. and Russia, I think it’s safe to say that China could move unilaterally against Taiwan without risking U.S. involvement.
Mark Brophy
May 28 2022 at 5:54pm
Yes, there’s an obvious reason that you missed. The United States trades very little with Ukraine. We trade with Canada, Mexico, Britain, Japan, China, and South Korea. Ukraine is a very poor unimportant nation. Choosing sides in a war between Russia and Ukraine is like choosing sides in a war between Iraq and Iran.
Scott Sumner
May 29 2022 at 10:29am
If you look at the past 50 years, trade does not determine where we get involved. So that’s certainly not an obvious reason for staying out of Ukraine
TGGP
May 30 2022 at 3:54pm
The history of US foreign policy does indeed establish that there is no coherent Grand Strategy, as Richard Hanania has noted. But events like 9/11 sometimes result in us invading unimportant countries. We are now in the “Vietnam syndrome” phase after learning again what a bad idea intervention can be.
Jon Murphy
May 29 2022 at 10:48am
Which we did. The US provided support to Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).
Mark Z
May 28 2022 at 8:50pm
I guess I’m not sure “for obvious reasons” implies it was obvious we shouldn’t have gotten militarily involved in the Ukraine. The reasons – like potentially starting a nuclear war – are obvious; their sufficiency to make the case may not be.
Scott Sumner
May 29 2022 at 10:32am
Sure, but if the tacit assumption is that “America obviously doesn’t go to war with nuclear powers”, then Biden’s answer makes no sense.
johnson85
Jun 1 2022 at 3:38pm
I think you are giving the reporter too much credit. Most likely, she didn’t really mean anything by the lead-in. She just wanted to ask whether Taiwan was different.
Or to the extent she meant anything, it was something along the lines of “There are obvious reasons we wouldn’t intervene militarily in Ukraine that also apply to Taiwan. Is there anything that makes Taiwan different?”
The obvious reasons are just that, reasons to not go to war. She’s not saying the correct decision on whether to go to war or not is obvious. There are also obvious reasons to intervene (deterrence; fertilizer and grain supply; humanitarian reasons, etc.).
I don’t know anything about this particular reporter, but my heuristic for them is that they are either below average intelligence, or that to the extent they are above average intelligence, they apply that intelligence to being noticed and advancing, not to being good reporters. That’s obviously unfair to a lot of reporters, but if a reporter is getting noticed, it’s generally not because they are consistently knowledgeable and ask good questions; it’s because they are good at stirring up controversy and/or generating snippets that can be used by partisans.
Richard A.
May 28 2022 at 9:12pm
The text of the speech that Secretary Blinken made about China the other day:
The Administration’s Approach to the People’s Republic of China
Jose Pablo
May 29 2022 at 12:08am
What is really striking (and is missed in your post) is how similar US position in Ukraine is to US position in WWII previously to Pearl Harbour.
You can only wonder what would have been the US position if Pearl Harbour had never happened. I mean the sending arms to Europe, the fuel supply conflict, the internal debate …
How close is Putin to Hitler?
Scott H.
May 29 2022 at 8:45am
1. Seemed to me like the reporter was expecting a “no” for the same obvious reasons
2. Biden says we have made a commitment to get involved militarily in Tiawan.
Scott Sumner
May 29 2022 at 10:28am
“Biden says we have made a commitment to get involved militarily in Taiwan.”
Immediately after that his administration “clarified” that we have not done so.
Peter Michael Gerdes
May 29 2022 at 4:14pm
Isn’t the difference just that between prospectively promising to defend a country (where failing to do so then has extra harms in terms of credibility) and intervening when you haven’t.
Plausibly, we should have previously made the kind of strongly binding (I presume this is part of the weird diplomatic status of Taiwan signing a treaty with them would be tantamount to recognition as a sovereign) defenses promises spanning many presidential administrations of both parties to Ukraine. Maybe that would have avoided the current situation. But we didn’t so the situation is different. Prospectively binding ourselves to defend Taiwan has the potential to head off violence in a way that sending troops to Ukraine today doesn’t.
Bill White
May 29 2022 at 4:15pm
I think the reporter thought the question would lead to some dissembling. That the two obvious reasons (nukes and no treat) made the situations similar, so our No troops for Ukraine meant the same for Taiwan if we wanted to be consistent.
Capt. J Parker
May 30 2022 at 11:19am
I’m with Dr Sumner on this. Reminds me of this Venn diagram with one circle labeled People who think it’s obvious we should not send troops to Ukraine, the other circle labeled People who think we might well want to send troops to Taiwan and the intersection of the two still labeled People who don’t have a strong need for intellectual consistency. Joe Biden and the reporter lie in this intersectional catagory, apparently.
All the differences argued above have merit but it doesn’t seem to me that any are so obvious as to have the US commit sending troops to Taiwan when we declined to do the same with Ukraine.
Shinzo Abe argues quite curiously, that, while Ukraine’s sovereignty is clear, Taiwan has been claimed by China and officially the US and Japan have respected this claim so, this is precisely why the US should end Strategic Ambiguity and commit to defending Taiwan against a invasion by the mainland!
I wish we the US would forcefully defend democratic rule because democracies are the least likely governments to make war with one another. How to balance this long term gain with near term risks is a difficult question.
TGGP
May 30 2022 at 4:02pm
You sometimes want to signal to another country that you will militarily respond to an action in order to deter said action, even if you would really prefer to avoid any such action (economists would see a time inconsistency problem). So prior to WW2 there were a number of alliances formed with the intent of deterring German aggression, but the western countries still mostly wanted to avoid war after what happened the last time. So there was a Munich agreement granting Hitler the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, but then after the latter fell apart and the Germans grabbed the remainder as a “Protectorate” Britain & France decided not to permit any more… but then even after the invasion of Poland the declaration of war didn’t result in the French keeping their troops on German territory and it was called the “phony war”. Putin has already invaded Ukraine, so there’s no putting the genie back in that bottle. An attack on Taiwan is something in the future we might want to deter now.
Rajat
May 30 2022 at 5:12pm
I’m not sure it’s obvious, but I think the US has provided implicit protection to Taiwan over many decades, since its inception as an entity apart from the Communist (ie ideological enemy) mainland. Walking away from that now would effectively end the role of the US as a global military power/policeman, which the US elite does not yet seem ready to do. Whereas Ukraine is relatively recently independent and wasn’t under threat since its inception from a Communist power.
Phil H
May 30 2022 at 10:20pm
Just to answer the question as posed:
You are looking at the reporter’s question and asking, “Based on what is obvious to me, this question seems a bit silly. What does this reporter know that I don’t?”
You should be asking: “What do I know that this reporter doesn’t?”
(Sidebar: no reflection on the reporter here. They often play dumb in order to elicit more explicit, quotable statements from interviewees.)
The obvious fact that the reporter referred to was Russia’s threat to go to war with any other country that intervened in militarily in Ukraine.
What the reporter doesn’t know (or is affecting not to know) is that China would make a similar threat in the event of a Taiwan invasion.
bb
May 31 2022 at 8:17am
Scott,
This may not be a great answer, but I think it hinges on three or four distinctions:
We have 70 plus years of Cold War history with Russia in which we’ve engaged in countless proxy wars all the while avoiding direct conflict. During that time, we developed a set of guidelines and limits (unwritten rules) to help us avoid a situation which would lead to escalation. In addition, we have had a very explicit set a redlines in the form of NATO My understanding is that the foreign and military policy establishments (the blog) on both sides understand and respect those rules. Our relationship with China does has a more mixed history. We have not been as consistently in conflict/competition with China. And the relationship with China has relied more on ambiguity. I don’t think we have as many written and unwritten redlines in Asia.
The other distinction, and I may be out of date on this, is that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is much more dangerous. They have all sorts of first strike capabilities and they have things like subs and mobile launchers that give them the ability to retaliate after a US first strike. For instance, at one point they needed 30 minutes to fuel their rockets. This info may be old.
Our alliance has proven very effective against Russia. I suspect that had Biden not been explicit on avoiding direct conflict with Russia, he may have lost the united front with Nato allies such as Germany. I think he deserves credit for building this alliance. And I think he did so by not getting out ahead of our allies and allowing them to get to this place on their own.
Most importantly, we’ve already indicated that we will not intervene directly in Ukraine. We still have the luxury of changing our minds in Asia.
Don’t love the word obvious though.
Scott Sumner
Jun 1 2022 at 12:32am
“Russia’s nuclear arsenal is much more dangerous.”
That’s debatable. Yes, Russia has far more nuclear weapons. But China has more than enough to destroy the US. We could not afford a nuclear war with either power.
bb
Jun 1 2022 at 8:37am
Scott,
I just google this, and my recollection was not wrong. I don’t totally discount this. China 350 compared to Russia’s 5k. China does not have a nuclear triad, Russia does. Apparently, their arsenal does largely consist of non-mobile, liquid fueled missiles which are both vulnerable and slow to deploy. And China has a no-first-use policy.
Russia has the opposite of a no-first-use policy. And they have a drastically more robust counter strike capability. They have mobile launchers, submarine based missiles. In a full exchange with Russia, both countries would be destroyed. It sounds like we could survive a nuclear war with China, while destroying China. This provides me with no comfort, but I do think the risk of nuclear escalation with Putin is much higher than it is with China, both in terms of probability and impact.
You can argue that American’s would never accept the losses associated with a single nuclear warhead hitting the US, and I would counter that I previously thought the losses of the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars would be intolerable, not to mention a million deaths from Covid.
I’ll add another factor too. Seize the initiative. If we wanted to have a no fly zone over Ukraine, the best time to declare one would have been before February 23. Forcing Putin to break an existing no-fly-zone is a different calculus to imposing a no-fly-zone on skies that are currently under Russian control. It’s too late to seize the Initiative in Ukraine. It’s not too late to do so in Taiwan. I still think a no-fly-zone in Feb was a non-starter because at least some of our allies would not have supported it.
While there are many similarities between Ukraine and Taiwan, I also think there are sufficient differences to make the range of sensible responses different, to include direct conflict with China.
I obviously don’t think any of the reasons I provide qualify as “obvious”.
Comments are closed.