Trump’s Shot Across China’s Bow
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Daniel Cloud
“Donald Trump is either too incompetent to understand that his foolish phone call threatens our national security, or he’s doing it deliberately because he reportedly wants to build hotels in Taiwan to pad his own pockets.”
– (Democratic National Committee Spokesperson)
Is that true? Did “incompetent” President-Elect Donald Trump’s “foolish” telephone conversation with Taiwan’s President Cai Yingwen actually “threaten American’s national security”? Is Trump genuinely revealed, by this development, to be a bull in a China shop? If so, we should all be very alarmed.
But in fact… All that seems rather unlikely. Really, it’s more probable that Trump’s phone call has made us all, Americans and Chinese people and everyone else, slightly safer.
How? Carl Von Clausewitz argued that wars, at their beginning, always involve some sort of misperception. One or both sides must have a false belief that victory will be easy to achieve. If both parties shared the same, accurate estimate of the likely outcome of the war, then the only rational course of action for the inevitable loser would be to make whatever concessions were necessary to avoid an actual fight. Defeat without all the death and destruction of the war may not be a wonderful alternative, but it’s still better than the exact same thing, except with all the death and destruction.
So for a war to start, someone, one side or the other or both, has to make a mistake. How does this sort of huge, consequential blunder ever occur? Estimating an opposing force’s capabilities isn’t easy, but it’s within the range of things humans are capable of, at least on a good day. What seems to be much harder is estimating a potential opponent’s level of commitment to securing a particular outcome.
The Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor which brought America into the Second World War is a familiar example of this common sort of miscalculation. The Japanese knew that if the Americans actually fought back with everything they had, they would win. But they supposed that we wouldn’t see the things at stake as worth fighting an ugly war for. As it turned out, they were fatally wrong.
The wars in Vietnam and Iraq seem to have been examples of similar mistakes on the part of American politicians, who gravely underestimated their opponents’ willingness to carry on an endless fight. This is, in fact, a very typical kind of mistake. Imagining the enemy in some way that would make even rather reckless actions on your part work out well, basically because of some universal human tendency to not take very seriously foreigners who don’t closely resemble your culture’s ideal of an admirable person.
So there’s nothing more likely to cause an unnecessary war than a false appearance of lack of commitment to securing some particular outcome. Because it invites a kind of misperception that people are very prone to anyway. If you would, in the end, when the crunch really came, actually feel compelled …read more
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