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| President Richard Nixon and Premier Chou En-la (Image: Wiki) |
By Zachary Keck
By using the “madman theory,” the U.S. and its allies could inject a degree of risk into China’s strategic calculus.
In the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine, the Center for a New American Security’s Elbridge Colby and Ely Ratner have an article arguing, rightly in my opinion, that America’s excessive concern with trying not to antagonize China is facilitating Beijing’s more assertive diplomatic posture.
In their own words: “While preventing inadvertent war in Asia is obviously a worthy goal, it is just as important to discourage China from believing that it can employ economic, military, and diplomatic coercion to settle international disagreements without triggering a serious response. Making the risk of escalation too low will at some point start running counter to U.S. interests.”
They continue: “Why? Because China is taking advantage of Washington’s risk aversion by rocking the boat, seeing what it can extract in the process, and letting the United States worry about righting it. Beijing’s playbook of tailored coercion relies in part on China’s confidence that it can weather ephemeral international outrage while Washington takes responsibility for ensuring the situation doesn’t get out of control.”
To help illustrate their point, Colby and Ratner turn to early Cold War crises. Specifically, they point out that Nikita Khrushchev’s perception — stemming from the Berlin Crisis and Vienna Summit — that John F. Kennedy was overly concerned with stability and maintaining cordial superpower relations led the Soviet Premier to challenge the U.S. on a number of occasions, most notably the Cuban Missile Crisis. Similarly, China today rocks the boat in the South and East China Seas, confident that the U.S. will take prudent action to ensure the situation doesn’t get too out of control.
Read the full story at The Diplomat