It’s Debatable’s Greatest Hits

Emma Ashford: Hey, Matt! It’s a big day here at It’s Debatable. Did you know this is our 100th debate? We’ve been doing these since 2020; I remember our first column on March 7, 2020, didn’t even mention the coronavirus, which quickly overtook everything else we were arguing about—like the 2020 Democratic primary race—just two weeks later. We have kept going through COVID lockdowns, a major war in Europe, coups in Africa, and even spy balloons above the United States.

So what shall we debate today? Who’s won the most debates so far?

(ED: Ahem. No.)

Matt Kroenig: It is a big day indeed. A hundred debates. Wow. I guess there is plenty on which we disagree.

But instead of debating our debates, I was thinking this would be a good opportunity to—drum roll, please: Replay our greatest hits.

What have been the big topics on which we have had our most fierce disagreements over the past 99 columns?

EA: OK, let’s do this lightning round-style. It’s no surprise that our biggest disagreements center around the biggest debates on U.S. foreign policy: the questions that Washington more broadly is trying to figure out, from the question of U.S. alliances to the defense of Ukraine and Taiwan, deterrence of U.S. adversaries, and the bigger question of America’s future role in the world.

But let’s start with the question that has probably sucked up too much of the oxygen in Washington over the last few years, and one of our most controversial columns: Should the U.S. defend Taiwan?

MK: Yes. But much better than defending Taiwan from a Chinese invasion would be deterring the attack in the first place.

EA: No disagreement here! But the devil is in the details. How do you deter China from conquering Taiwan?

I think that the best deterrent would be a Taiwan that’s capable of defending itself: the porcupine model, in which the United States helps to arm the Taiwanese and they make themselves so hard to attack that China will decide it isn’t worth the risk. There are lots of innovative ways to do that; my colleagues at the Stimson Center, for example, put out a good recent article on how sea mines could be used to great effect to defend Taiwan. Ultimately, though, Taiwan is important, but not important enough to fight a potentially nuclear war with China.

MK: Taiwan needs to do more to defend itself and move to the asymmetric defense strategy you describe. But it simply lacks the capacity to fend off China on its own in the event of actual war. It will need help from the United States and its allies.

The strategy should be to deny China the ability to take the island. This means Washington needs the ability to sink the Chinese navy in 72 hours. To take the island, China will need to move thousands of soldiers, mostly in ships and helicopters, and the United States and Taiwan need to sink the ships and shoot down the aircraft. So that will require building many more anti-ship missiles, mines, torpedoes, surface-to-air missiles, and so on. And to your previous point, Washington should also leave the nuclear option on the table. There is no reason to reassure Beijing that it can take Taiwan without worrying about nuclear war.

EA: I certainly don’t think it’s worth abandoning “strategic ambiguity,” the long-running policy of refusing to clarify whether the United States would come to the aid of Taiwan if China attacked. That policy has served us well for a long time. But at a basic level, I just don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze here. Fighting a great-power war against China to defend Taiwan could be catastrophic, and the benefits of winning would be mostly to make it easier to triumph in a potential future war with China. That makes no sense. Better to defend further back in Asia if it becomes necessary; that is to say, if Chinese aggression doesn’t stop at Taiwan, America should absolutely defend Japan, the Philippines, or other Asian states. That would pose a significant threat to the United States; the Taiwan case alone is more marginal.

MK: Taiwan is the cork in the bottle. It is better to keep the Chinese Communist Party contained now than to allow it to gobble up a democratic neighbor at great cost to the global economy and be in a better position to dominate Asia militarily.

Another major point of disagreement has been Ukraine. I think it is important to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin in his tracks. And the Western strategy has been too cautious. The United States and its allies have provided a slow drip of weapons instead of a cascade. They were against providing every major weapon system (fighter aircraft, long-range artillery, etc.) before they changed their minds and eventually provided them.

If the West had just provided Ukraine everything it needed from the start, it could have won a decisive military victory and the war might be over by now.

If the West had just provided Ukraine everything it needed from the start, it could have won a decisive military victory and the war might be over by now.

EA: Look, I think it was absolutely the right thing to do to help Ukraine defend itself. But even if we put aside the practical questions of whether you could have given all these systems at once—training and supply lines take time!—there were good reasons not to. For one thing, there was the escalation risk: The United States and its NATO allies have effectively engaged in “salami slicing” against the Russians, sending more and more weapons without ever triggering a direct response. For another, I am very doubtful that sending many more weapons would have yielded quick, decisive victory. One needs only to look at the results of last year’s counteroffensive to see that it was very difficult to quickly integrate new tactics, training, and equipment across the Ukrainian military.

MK: If they assembled a charcuterie board, it was by accident. It wasn’t a deliberate strategy. They were simply too afraid of “escalation.” The strategy should have been to help Ukraine win, while deterring Putin’s potential escalation, not cowering in fear of it. The counteroffensive did not work because it came too late and Ukraine did not have everything it needed to win.

EA: Salami slicing creating a charcuterie board? Very funny. One thing that hasn’t improved in 100 columns is our bad jokes.

So what comes next in Ukraine? Should the West send troops, as French President Emmanuel Macron seems to now be advocating? I’d argue that we’ve been remarkably successful. With our help, the Ukrainians have fought a much larger power to a stalemate. That’s a strategic victory in my view.

MK: Given where we are today, I do think it is time to shift the strategy. As I’ve argued elsewhere, Ukraine should go on defense. The United States should try to wind the conflict down along the current lines. This will provide breathing room to bring Ukraine into the EU and NATO. And like with German reunification, Ukraine and the West can use diplomatic and other efforts for Ukraine to regain its internationally recognized territory over time.

EA: Interesting. That’s not at all what I was expecting. I still think NATO membership for Ukraine is a bad idea, but it sounds like we’re in much less disagreement now than a few years back in 2022, when you said, “The endgame is Ukraine wins, Russia loses. … The West should keep pressing until Ukraine is free and Russia is put back in a box.” I guess our debates have changed your mind. I’ll chalk that up as a win for me.

MK: No. It just proves that bad things happen when the United States is too restrained—and when my advice isn’t followed!

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EA: OK, I know somewhere we’ll never agree: Iran.

MK: Iran is a destabilizing force in the Middle East, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, and, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, its dash time to a nuclear bomb is a mere 12 days.

The United States should use military force to impose a meaningful cost on Iran to get it to knock off its destabilizing activities in the region. If they kill an American, Washington kills a top Iranian general (like former U.S. President Donald Trump’s strike on Gen. Qassem Suleimani), and so on.

And it needs to stick by its policy of using all options, including much tougher economic sanctions and military force as a last resort, to keep Tehran from the bomb.

Right, Emma?

EA: Not quite. Iran is a menace in its region, but the vast majority of its activities are not a significant concern for U.S. national security. The main thing that is a threat is its potential for nuclear proliferation, something that would be better handled by diplomatic engagement and arms control than by military attack. And there aren’t any tougher sanctions left! Washington has used almost every point of leverage it can in the last few years of “maximum pressure,” and it still hasn’t moved the needle.

I can’t think of anything that would be a worse idea for an overstretched United States right now than starting another major war in the Middle East. But it really looks like that’s where we might be headed. This week, Israel bombed an Iranian Embassy building in Syria, killing a bunch of Iranian officials. That’s a significant escalation, and one that could easily prompt an Iranian response. Somewhere else we disagree, I suspect, is on whether the Biden administration should rein in the Israeli government before it drags us into a U.S.-Iran war.

MK: The opposite is true. The desire to avoid escalation with Iran only encourages escalation. Israel’s bold use of force will convince Iran to back off. Iran only understands power. Tehran will conduct some token retaliation and then scale back its provocations. It doesn’t want a major war with Israel or the United States.

EA: Sadly, no matter how newsworthy, I suspect our readers may be sick of us debating Iran by this point. Perhaps this is a good segue into some of our bigger strategic debates. After all, we’re talking about difficult questions: What’s the U.S. role in the world? Is the United States overstretched? Should it rely on arms control or on nuclear dominance?

MK: I cannot pass on an opportunity to discuss nukes. Arms control is nice in theory, but it does not work when America’s potential negotiating partners, Russia and China, don’t cooperate. Russia has cheated on almost every major arms control agreement it has entered, and China is barely willing to even talk. So, that is a dead end.

But “dominance” is not the right way to frame the alternative. What Washington does need (as a bipartisan congressional commission on which I was honored to serve recently recommended) is to plan for the first strategic forces buildup since the end of the Cold War. With China’s rapid nuclear expansion and Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling, the nuclear posture Washington designed in a more benign security environment in 2010 will no longer cut it. Washington needs a more robust nuclear posture to maintain a strategic deterrent for the free world.

EA: The arms control of the future might not look exactly like the arms control of the past. Heather Williams and Ulrich Kuhn have argued for what they call “behavioral arms control,” which looks much more like the “confidence-building measures” of the early Cold War. States might agree to provide notifications of missile tests, or agree not to keep nuclear forces on hair trigger. These seem like small things, but we know they can meaningfully reduce risk in a world where high-level arms control treaties aren’t yet available. If nothing else, the United States can avoid taking steps that are purposefully destabilizing.

That might mean avoiding targeting systems that are dual use, with both nuclear and conventional uses. Or perhaps it might mean avoiding arms races in specific kinds of systems. But there are lots of great, creative ideas out there on how to avoid a new era of arms racing and unstable nuclear competition.

Here’s another big disagreement: Can the United States manage its large and growing global commitments? Surely, we can agree after the last few years that America is increasingly overstretched? Perhaps it wasn’t obvious before Ukraine, Afghanistan, and now Gaza, but it certainly is now.

MK: Nah. In fact, I think America is under-stretched. It is entering a new Cold War, and it is still trying to get by on a defense industrial base and military force posture designed for the post-Cold War peace dividend. During the Cold War, the United States spent on average 7 percent of GDP per year on the military. Now it spends 3.5 percent. That is near historic lows, and Washington is essentially cutting the defense budget after inflation.

So this is not a matter of capacity, but of political will. Washington (and its allies in NATO and the Indo-Pacific) needs to go back on a Cold War footing and build a military force posture fit for the world we are entering.

EA: Under-stretched sounds like we’re late for our tennis game at the country club, not facing the emergence of a more multipolar world. The defense budget is headed for $1 trillion, and while the U.S. government could potentially afford more, it will come at the cost of other, domestic priorities.

The United States simply can’t do everything, everywhere, the way it did during the post-Cold War period.

Today, U.S. power is in relative decline, and the country is facing challenges from China, Russia, and elsewhere. It simply can’t do everything, everywhere, the way it did during the post-Cold War period. That means it’s time to prioritize, focusing on the most pressing threats. Washington also has to be practical about how much leverage it really has. Look at how much difficulty we’ve been having in recent years imposing our will on the world. There are the obstreperous client states, from Israel to Saudi Arabia, who refuse to listen to U.S. policymakers, and the adversaries like Russia, Iran, and North Korea, who don’t do what Washington wants despite sanctions and diplomatic pressure. It’s time to try a more modest set of goals—ones that are actually achievable with the tools available to us.

But that’s another area of disagreement: Is the U.S. the indispensable nation? Should it be trying to maintain its old role as the world’s police officer? And can I fit any more cliches about American exceptionalism into this question?

MK: The United States is the only country with the power and the goodwill among like-minded nations to lead the free world. Alongside its allies, it built the post-World War II order that has brought unprecedented peace, prosperity, and freedom to U.S. citizens and the rest of the world.

If Washington retreats, that will mean a more violent and autocratic world as revisionist autocracies fill the vacuum.

EA: Yes, because the world is so peaceful and tranquil today. The United States is incredibly invested overseas but hasn’t been able to stop the chaos. That suggests to me that there never really was a “liberal order” that brought peace to the world. It’s just that we were living through a period of exceptional U.S. power—and weakness for other states. That era is ending.

So if Washington retreats, perhaps there will be more violence. But I’d argue there are things that can be done to mitigate those risks. And more importantly, it all depends on what you think the goal of U.S. foreign policy is. I would argue that it’s to provide security and prosperity to the American people. It’s not to build a more peaceful or just world at the potential cost of their security or prosperity. I dislike the phrase “America First” almost as much as I dislike Trump, but on this one he was right. U.S. foreign policy should be first and foremost for Americans.

MK: I agree with you and Trump; the job of the U.S. government is to put America first. So, it sounds like our real point of disagreement is on whether U.S. global leadership since World War II has benefited the American people. I would argue that it has—big time.

EA: It has, and it’s also brought some costs. We don’t have a few thousand words to spare, or I’d bring up the question of whether NATO expansion helped or hurt U.S. security over the long term, for example. I think the evidence on that question is actually pretty clear: NATO expansion strengthened the states of Central and Eastern Europe but undermined U.S. security over the long term by reigniting conflict with Russia.

And, of course, as they say about the stock market, past behavior is no indicator of future results. Part of our disagreement centers on our assumptions about whether that liberal system will continue to function in coming decades or not.

But I think it’s time to draw this to a close. It’s been a fun few years. Any topic suggestions for our next 100 debates?

MK: That will take us into about 2028. It is hard to predict what the major issues will be in that time frame. The great alien invasion of 2027? Whatever it is, I know we will be here to debate it.

EA: You’re on. Congress is already debating whether UFOs are real, so there’s surely something to this. Maybe it’s time to debate whether Earth should establish military outposts on Mars to try to deter the aliens? I, for one, believe we should embrace a more restrained strategy of off-planet balancing.