Escalation

 At some point after Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the rumors started flying: do you think Taiwan will be next? Mostly, though, I only heard this possibility mentioned in order to pooh-pooh it as an example of right-wing paranoia. Some extreme hawks were apparently making the argument that, if Putin were not immediately ousted from eastern Ukraine—including the areas he unlawful seized in 2014—then China would leap to the conclusion that the West posed no plausible deterrent threat to their own territorial ambitions, and they would invade their quasi-independent self-governing island neighbor. 

As I say, though, I rarely heard anyone take this argument seriously; they mostly just brought it up as an example of needless fear-mongering. As grand strategy, after all, it relied on an overly simplistic model of deterrence, and elided the differences between heterogenous situations. Besides, this sort of "domino theory" wasn't necessary to make the moral or strategic case for supporting the Ukrainian defense in the first place. Putin's invasion was and is wrong intrinsically: not because of what signals it might or might not send to other global powers who have an eye on expanding their sphere of influence. 

Within a few months, however, the tone of the coverage had shifted perceptibly. The idea that Putin's invasion might indirectly provoke the People's Republic of China to attack Taiwan began to be taken seriously. A little while after that, the idea was so firmly established that Putin's name no longer needed to be mentioned in this context. The possibility of a PRC assault on Taiwan was increasingly discussed on its own terms. Fear of such a contingency ceased to be cited as an example of right-wing alarmism; rather, news reports started to treat it as a live possibility. 

What's particularly odd about this shift is that it's not clear there was any change in the intelligence assessment or the actual facts of the case that would warrant it. It's just that quickly, by tacit consensus, we all began to talk as if the PRC might soon invade. To the extent anyone even felt the need to cite reasons, people who projected this as a likelihood pointed to two pieces of evidence: 1) Xi Jinping's territorial ambitions and his stated desire to one day reincorporate Taiwan into Mainland China; and 2) the fact that the PRC's official position remains that it does not recognize Taiwan's existence as a sovereign country and claims possession of its territory. 

Those facts may sound damning. But there is no time in the last seventy years in which at least the second of those two things would not have been equally true. So what is supposed to have changed in the last few months? Besides, the United States doesn't recognize Taiwanese sovereignty in a formal sense either; nor even do the Taiwanese. Their official position, no less than that of the PRC, is that there is only one legitimate government extending over the whole of Mainland China and the one-time island of Formosa. 

To be sure, that stance is a legacy of the period of the Nationalist dictatorship that I'm sure many Taiwanese people do not take seriously today. No doubt many Taiwanese citizens would prefer to just accept the independence of the island and govern themselves as a sovereign nation—separate from the mainland—if such a declaration would not itself be seen, paradoxically, as a further escalation of the conflict with the PRC. 

Besides, the imbalance of size, geopolitical power, and military might between the two countries would make it hard to equate the Taiwanese territorial claim to that of the PRC, even if the former was still sincerely entertained by people on the island. Taiwan is simply not in a position to be an aggressor in any conflict between the two countries; nor has it shown any inclination to be. 

My point, therefore, is not that the PRC's stance toward the island is defensible because it is reciprocated; far from it. A PRC invasion of a self-governing liberal democratic neighbor would be a moral and humanitarian catastrophe. Nor am I trying to deny that the PRC's stated claim to Taiwanese territory is a threat to world peace and stability. I think it is an intrinsically dangerous posture that invites future conflict. My point is simply that it's not clear why we all suddenly decided, a few months into this year, that this danger was greater now than it had been in any number of the prior decades that the PRC has held the same position.

But the rumors didn't stop. Before I knew it, people were talking about how Nancy Pelosi had to visit Taiwan. Why? In order to show the PRC that we had the island's back and we would not tolerate any aggression against our friends in the Republic of China. Again, nothing had changed so far as I could tell in the actual intelligence assessment of the situation. There was no equivalent to Vladimir Putin's amassing of an invasion force on the borders of his sovereign neighbor or otherwise mobilizing for a strike. I suppose people pointed to an escalation in some saber-rattling military maneuvers on the PRC's part, but nothing on a remotely similar scale. 

Of course, the escalation and use of weapons perilously close to Taiwan's soil have now increased, in the past two weeks. But, this heightening of tensions all occurred precisely because of Pelosi's visit, and therefore cannot be used retroactively to justify it. Of course, to point to this obvious causal link between the two events is not to say that the PRC's response to her trip is morally justified: I don't at all think it's okay to try to intimidate and prevent people from engaging with Taiwan. But their reaction is entirely foreseeable, nonetheless, and Pelosi's team foresaw it. Her trip therefore represents a unilateral alteration of the status quo, justified by what appears to me to be an entirely hypothetical concern that China might be the ones who are about the upset the status quo. 

It's hard to escape the conclusion, therefore, that our political and journalistic classes are talking themselves into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It suddenly came to be treated as highly probable that the PRC might escalate tensions. And, in order to prevent this, the U.S. is taking steps that will escalate tensions. And all too often, these paranoid spirals acquire an inner logic that is hard to resist. Once someone in the U.S. started talking about how the PRC might invade, it suddenly became necessary to send someone to deter them from invading. And once the possibility of someone going to Taiwan was conceived, then any eventual decision to refrain from going would have been seen as giving in to PRC pressure. And this whole spiral of self-reinforcing logic can play out—you will notice—without the PRC doing anything at all to provoke or influence it. 

There is a scene in Huysmans's Against Nature, in which Des Esseintes is obsessing over the risk of being converted to religion against his will. The more he ponders it, the more he realizes: "The very fear of this malady will end by bringing it on, if this continues." (Howard trans.) (Huysmans would indeed undergo such conversion later in his career, in typically self-dramatizing fashion.) Whether an accurate view of religious psychology or not, though, Des Esseintes's fear of bringing on the very thing he dreads, simply by thinking about it, discloses a truth of human psychology. 

I am reminded too of the opening episode of Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, when the character Janey starts to worry that her boyfriend may have lost romantic interest in her. At first, she tests him: "You're going to leave me," she says one day—though "only out of petulance," as Acker describes it, not because she believes it. And just by uttering this possibility, she seems to make it true. The boyfriend goes quiet and doesn't deny it. "You ARE going to leave me. Oh no. No. That can't be." (She was, Acker observes, "creating the situation [...] Every time she says the worst, it's true.")

It's like the time as a child I asked my father: "we're going to live in this house forever, right?"; and my parents announced the next day that we would soon be moving to Florida. Or the time a former boss of mine asked me: "you promise never to leave this job, right?"; and I had to confess that I had just made up my mind earlier that week to quit and go to law school.

Plainly, human beings have the power to make the very things we fear come true, just by worrying about them. Of course, it's possible that I'm getting the causality of this relationship backward. It may be that, in all the above-cited instances, people were intuiting in a vague way what was already coming, and were merely verbalizing it before it happened. On this theory, Pelosi's visit to Taiwan was fully justified. There was something in the air, heralding a PRC invasion, even if it wasn't yet in so obvious a form as boats and boots and rockets; and she was simply making explicit the change we had all already sensed. 

I suspect, however, that the way the process works is just as commonly reversed. By uttering aloud a possibility, we plant the seeds of future actions. Acting on the theory that the PRC is about to invade, for instance, is one of the surest ways to ensure that it will in fact invade. Attributing escalatory motives to one's adversaries is itself an escalatory move, and will bring about the very heightening of tensions that it claims to warn against and be trying to prevent. Such is the game of chicken that all too often precedes armed conflict. 

It is not worth it. The stakes are too high: not only the risk of another great power conflict breaking out on the other side of the globe, drawing resources away from the Ukrainian defense; but even more importantly the lives and futures of millions of Taiwanese and Chinese people. Of course, the people who supported Pelosi's visit and warned about a PRC invasion were aware of all these dangers. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they weren't actively trying to incite conflict (at least not all of them). I suspect that many of them were sincerely afraid of a possible PRC invasion. 

If this is indeed their chief fear, however, I think we need to say, with Des Esseintes: "The very fear of this malady will end by bringing it on, if this continues." Don't let these fears become a self-fulfilling prophecy.