hbtz
8mo ago
Well, I suspect it may be literally true. America First says we won't intervene if it doesn't serve our interests. Taiwan is worth more to China than it is worth to the US due to Chinese domestic politics. In a nation-centric realism world, they should have it by wagering enough hot war to make it worth it to them but not to us. Maybe we blow up TSMC on our way out. But maintaining "strategic ambiguity" allows us to do better than this! The main point is that America First is a step backwards for Taiwan deterrence.
To address your point about persuading Americans, I don't think pragmatic and nonpragmatic arguments are mutually exclusive. You can put them all out there. There are enough people to parrot the arguments to those who are receptive. The benefit of realist norms is that its more difficult to convince your people to do dumb things for non-realist reasons, which is perhaps understandably attractive in the face of failed US interventionism. But people have an instinctive aversion to such flat realism! People prefer to operate on a fluffier moralist level where it's difficult to assess just how much they are drinking their own Kool-Aid, and I suspect this is because it gives them an advantage in the time prior to open conflict.
Team Red wants fewer people to vote. Team Blue wants more people to vote.
A compromise solution that targets the nominal justification for their policy while preserving the balance of the thing they care about (that's why its a compromise) is uninteresting, so no serious efforts are being taken. It would be difficult to spin it as a bipartisan feel-good agreement, because both sides will have their share of internal critics complaining the other side got too much.
In my opinion, the Blue take is more honest in that the advertised benefits of their policy better represents the actual effects of their policy. They say they want more legally enfranchised people to vote, and this is basically what would happen in their preferred world. The Reds, on the other hand, are basically lying, because voter fraud is pretty much a non-issue. Voter fraud is trivial now and will continue to be trivial under their preferred policy; its the legally enfranchised people that matter. This doesn't make the Blues any less shrewd than the Reds, they just have the luxury of relative honesty in this matter due to the circumstances. But if you asked them about the proposed compromise, they would say you're wasting resources by defending against voting fraud that doesn't exist and then implementing social programs to repair the disenfranchisement that didn't need to happen, and they would be pretty much right.
I will offer a reason why the self-interested realism of America First “doctrine” is naive. Specifically, that saying out loud you are a jerk who cares only about your own self-interest lessens your power level compared to being a sanctimonious moralist-hypocrite. Of course, there are also tradeoffs to the latter, but here I will specify the benefits.
A very important aspect of international politics (contrasting somewhat with the video game versions) is that international politics is not zero sum. In a zero sum game, it is never advantageous to have fewer options. But this is not true for a positive-sum negotiation. For example, the Chinese population empirically care a lot about Taiwan, arguably to an irrational extent. This takes Taiwanese independence proper off the table for at least a few generations, because the domestic conditions in China are likely to force the administration to go to war if it happened, and all sides wish to avoid war. Similarly to ripping the steering wheel off your car in a game of chicken, the pigheaded moralism of the Chinese populace give the Chinese administration a negotiating advantage in the game. China has a credible threat of going to war, so the war does not happen.
If we take as a given keeping Taiwan de facto independent has some benefit, such as the semiconductors thing, one approach for the US administration is to generate as many reasons as possible Taiwan deserves to not be a part of China (liberal democracy good!) and use those reasons to manufacture consent domestically. This increases the credibility the US would defend Taiwan, which inherently gives us an advantage. China is less likely to march in and take it the more they are worried about US resolve and moralistic irrationality. Plus, domestic propaganda is basically costless— we do not actually have to support Taiwan that much materially! Adding more factors into the mix and making it unclear how committed we are is a costless way to prevent war in Taiwan until it happens. This is the main conceit of strategic ambiguity. Strategic clarity is a downside, and spelling out our interests in Taiwan precisely forces us to spend more in material terms there, not less, to assert the same credibility of resolve and deter a war.
Reducing ambiguity and rationalist doctrine throws away a lot of real advantage. Imagine if you walked into a business negotiation spelling out honestly in good faith exactly what you want and how far you are willing to go to get it! Your counterparty will take 100% of the surplus in the transaction. One benefit of a doctrine, spoken out loud, is that it creates an ambiguous honor commitment. My doctrine is to protect the Western hemisphere, and my people have heard me say it. If I do not live to that, my people will be angry with me, so don’t start trouble here or I will fight past the point of rationality. How far? It’s uncertain! That’s the point.
In this sense, America First is an anti-doctrine. It anti-manufactures consent domestically. It invites domestic critics to complain that such and such proposed action abroad (say, defending Taiwan), isn’t really in our interests. In a way, such a doctrine is totally content-free, because it says nothing China does not always know. They are also capable of modelling what we want in a pragmatic sense.
Counterintuitively, taking the realist stance and assuring China that their model is correct is good for fostering cooperation. We cede the possibility of escalation and the associated negotiation surplus in exchange for a stable peace. But Vivek sees China as a geopolitical rival. Vivek wants to beat China; Vivek wants a bigger slice of the pie. The America First doctrine as a foreign policy doctrine does not advance this. The America First doctrine prevents the US from nuking the pie and making it smaller for everyone out of misguided moralism, but it does not help the US seize any more pie from China. Therefore, Vivek’s hawkish position with respect to China is basically incoherent with his Taiwan policy. If he wants to beat China, he should definitely not be saying these things to China. Do you want to impress the Chinese administration with how pragmatic you are? They are seasoned pragmatists. The advantage is in frightening them with how crazy you can muster the will to be.
Truthfully, people generally know this instinctively based on vibes. We know US-aligned Taiwan = good, and so we will forget about the pragmatic reasons why, generate domestic enthusiasm by any means possible, and revel in frightening the enemy with that enthusiasm. Vivek countersignalling realism here is attractive to some audiences, but the vibers recognize this accurately as a defection for personal gain. If America First prevails, the greatest hope, in terms of keeping Taiwan, is that China will assess that the domestic messaging is meaningless, the deep state controls military affairs, and that Vivek is a principle-free demagogue and doesn’t believe what he is saying. The moment China becomes confident we are committed pragmatists and will not hurt our own interests to defend Taiwan, we will lose it.
Two arguments for no illegal fraud:
If there was fraud, I think it would need to be perpetrated by a institution, and again, since the Reds would benefit hugely by being able to point at any single significant thing, I think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence here.
As for ballot harvesting and no/low information voters, I rate this as the Blues doing what they are advertising. They want to enfranchise more people and presumably the ways they are doing it are not technically illegal or else they would get in trouble. So the bottom line is that you don't want these legally enfranchised people voting when they otherwise would not under a different policy decision. Well, yeah, its understandable why one might think so, but it's a difficult argument to sell! Massive voter fraud is an easier one. And if "voter fraud" is to be construed as code for Blue institutional shenanigans, then Voter ID requirements is fighting systemic bias with systemic bias. Which is what it is, but you can't say it out loud. The optical advantage is in the hands of those who advocate for more voting, so the Reds are forced to be more dishonest about it.
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