Interstate conflicts are "roaring back," according to James Fearon. One of the preeminent thinkers in the field of international relations, Fearon joins Colin Kahl on the World Class podcast to talk about why it feels like wars are becoming more prevalent, and how more might be prevented in the future. Drawing on both his academic research and his time in government service, Fearon shares his perspective on why and how the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran are unfolding, and outlines his recommendations for preventing active conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific.

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of political science. He is a senior fellow at FSI, affiliated with CISAC and CDDRL. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance. Fearon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Some of his current research projects include work on the costs of collective and interpersonal violence, democratization and conflict in Myanmar, nuclear weapons and U.S. foreign policy, and the long-run persistence of armed conflict.

This episode's reading recommendation is, “The Personalist Global Order: When Individual Whims Drive Great Power Policy” by Seva Gunitsky and Semuhi Sinanoglu, published in the January 2026 issue of Foreign Affairs.

TRANSCRIPT:

Kahl: You're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I'm your host, Colin Kahl, the director of FSI.

Today we're talking to my good friend, Jim Fearon. Jim is the Theodore and Francis Geballe professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences here at Stanford. He's also a professor in the political science department and a senior fellow with us at FSI. He is inarguably one of the most influential international relations theorists and methodologists of his generation.

He's also spent some time serving in the U.S. government, and he's about to begin a term as the co-director of FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation, or CISAC, which is one of our flagship centers. Jim's research covers an incredibly broad array of international security issues, including pathbreaking work on interstate war, conventional and nuclear deterrence, civil and ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy, and its impact on political stability, and the evaluation of foreign aid projects.

He's even branched out to study the cost of collective and interpersonal violence, and he has a terrific new book on the topic entitled Worse Than War. As the world grapples with a new period of heightened conflict and global tension, I can't think of a better person to help us think through these challenges and help lead CISAC in examining them than Jim.

So, Jim, welcome to World Class.
  
Fearon: Thanks, Colin. Very happy to be here.

Kahl: I want to start our conversation by rolling the tape way back. Three decades ago, you published a highly influential article entitled, “Rationalist Explanations of War.” The article addresses a core puzzle in international relations. And that is, you know, because war is costly and risky, a peaceful settlement that avoids destruction should theoretically always exist and be preferred by rational actors, and yet war still occurs. These days, unfortunately, it seems to be occurring more and more often.

So I want to ask you how the insights from this foundational article might help us understand some contemporary conflicts, including those in Europe and the Middle East.

But first—a lot of our listeners are pretty nerdy, but many of them will not have read your article. Maybe you can spend a few minutes just kind of explaining to our listeners the core argument you made in this.

Fearon: You're right; it is a frighteningly long time ago now. Scary for me to think about. 1995 it came out, written pretty much in ‘93.

I guess I’d stress two things in terms of summarizing it. One, even the way you framed it as, war is costly and risky, there ought to be deals, in principle, that rationally led states would prefer to the costly lottery, the costly big gamble of going to war. That was itself a framing that was not standard at the time.

And in fact the reason I wrote the article in that form — I was an assistant professor at University of Chicago and I had a different version based on a chapter of my dissertation. And a senior colleague very generously giving me extensive comments on that draft, disagreed vigorously with that point and said, “No, no, no, no, and here's a list of cases where both sides wanted to go to war, and there were just no deals.”

And that interaction made me realize, well, actually, you know, there's maybe there's a point here that that would be worth arguing out there in the field.

And then the other thing was I wanted to ask, “What are the full set of rationalist explanations for why rational leaders wouldn't be able to find a deal better than this costly lottery?” And basically I say there's two things. There's kind of informational stories and commitment stories.

“Informational story”  means that one or both sides thinks they know something about either their capabilities or maybe their willingness to fight, which they know privately, the other side can't directly observe it. And because if you told me, like, “Don't do that or I absolutely will go to war.” I might not believe you because I know that  you have an incentive to try to get me not to do that.

And then the second thing: commitment problems.That's when even if we largely agree on the probability of winning would be 50-50 or something, and have a good sense of what the costs would be, even if we know there's deals we'd both prefer to fighting, we may believe that one or the other or both of us would not be trustworthy to enforce a deal.

An example would be Iran and cases like that where we might want to make a deal — we give you some sanctions relief, and you agree to intrusive inspections and not to pursue nuclear weapons. But how do we know they're not going cheat? We think they might have reasons to. So that's the kind of concern. Maybe there in principle is a deal, but you're worried the other side has ways of sneakily or not so sneakily reneging.

Kahl: The Iran point is is particularly relevant to my personal experience because I remember during the Biden administration, it was very difficult for us to convince Iran to get back into some version of the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, because I Iran kept wanting us to credibly commit that we would not withdraw from the agreement, like Trump withdrew from Obama's agreement. And it turned out that was very difficult for us to commit to. Of course, we also had trust issues as it related to the Iranians.

But speaking of Iran, we're now past the six-month mark in the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran. We're mostly in the U.S. phase these days.

And we're now in the fifth year of the war in Ukraine. So we've got major conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

But I was wondering if you could link back to some of those concepts that you just elucidated to help our listeners understand, for example, why Putin made the decision to launch a full-fledged invasion of Ukraine back in 2022, or why President Trump decided to attack Iran alongside Israel back in February.

Fearon: Well, you've given a couple significant challenges here on the “rationalist” part. So, one thing I absolutely was not arguing or claiming in that piece was that all wars are begun by rational choices, and that this was the way to understand why all wars happen.

My hunch is that this decision to go to war was irrational. Say you have a specific psychological bias in mind that may explain it. Psychological biases and irrationality is defined on the basis of, or with respect to, “It's not rational.” Rational is like the normative, like, okay, you ought to do this, or if you're rational, you would do this. And that's how we even can tell what would be irrational.

In order to even figure out what's a psychological bias story, you have to be starting with a clear sense of what would count as a rational story.

So that's a little background on the motivation there. I'm definitely not saying that this current U.S. war with Iran is going to be best explained by rational choices. But to your point, I do think the information and commitment story helps us understand the underlying strategic problems that the leaders are dealing with and states are dealing with and may manage or address in more or less rational ways.

So with that as like a long lead up, let's start . . . well, we’ve been talking about Iran. Let's start there.

We only have a little reporting on this now, but it seems like the president really, like, went with his gut. Even despite getting . . . the CIA allegedly told him that what Netanyahu was telling him that this can bring about regime change . . . he was allegedly told by the U.S. intelligence community, “No, we really don't think that's gonna happen.” The ability of the Iranians to shut down the Strait of Hormuz seems to have been raised.

But he decides and probably is influenced by feeling like the Venezuela operation was a huge success. Ex post, it looks like he exaggerated his prospects for success.

It doesn't seem to me like there was anything to suggest that the U.S. had any particular private information about their capabilities or anything that would give them a rational basis for having mutual optimism with respect to the Iranians. The Israelis had these rather extensive plans for internal subversion, for regime change, but it seems like the U.S. intel didn't think that was likely to succeed.

At a more underlying level though, the whole issue for years now, fifteen plus years, has been this commitment problem issue of the U.S. worrying that if the Iranians got nuclear weapons, this would have various bad effects for a balance of power in the region and possible consequences for us on that.

You were intimately involved in dealing with this commitment issue in the JCPOA talks. And as you know, one of the big criticisms of the JCPOA talks was that it's not credible. That the Iranians would be able to cheat, pursue, get out of the deal, and that the only real solution here is regime change.

And their argument one way or another, ends up succeeding, in terms of getting the U.S. president to act on it. It has not succeeded, so far, on regime change, and we'll see what happens there.

Kahl: One thing that seems to be similar about the Ukraine and Iran cases, and wonder what your impression is, but before the war, in both instances, there were diplomatic engagements.

The United States was engaged with Russia to try to convince them that the war wouldn't work out well for them, that the costs would be high, but also in conversations to see whether a broader U.S.-Russia understanding about security in Europe could be discussed to address some of the security concerns that Putin had about Ukraine and about the eastern flank of NATO.

The zone of possible agreement was pretty narrow and there were huge commitment issues. They didn't trust us; we didn't trust them. So, that resonates.

Same with Iran. We were in the midst of negotiations with them. They didn't trust us. We didn't trust them. We had pretty maximalist demands. They had pretty maximalist demands on issues like enrichment. And so the zone of possible agreement was narrow, and trust just made it difficult to to find a diplomatic solution, which means you were kind of in the zone where war could be imagined in both Ukraine and in Iran.

But what's interesting is that both Putin and Trump believed certain types of information rather than others, and basically they believed the wars would be easy. Putin thought the war in Ukraine would be over in a couple of weeks. Trump thought the war in Iran would be over in a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks. They were getting information from different advisors, but either they were believing certain advisors or they just had very firm beliefs in their own heads about how easy this was going to be that couldn't be shaken. They just thought the wars would be easy.

So if you kind of combine the zone of possible agreement and commitment issues being pretty problematic, and then both leaders thought the wars would be easy, maybe there's some commonality between the conflicts. I don't know if that resonates with some of your views.

Fearon: It does, and I think you're right; there are some similarities there. In both cases, I think the underlying issues have to do with revisionism plus anarchy making for credible commitment problems.

One thing that the Iran case and the Ukraine case have in common [is] they’re wars of regime change, or at least, to a large extent. Putin wants to go to Kyiv, throw out the regime, establish something different or incorporate almost the entire current Ukrainian state into Russia.

When you see regime change as the primary objective, you should think “commitment problem.” This was true in the 2003 U.S.-Iraq war, where the Bush administration really wasn't that interested in cutting a deal with Saddam Hussein. They thought we had an opportunity to change the regime, make things a lot less costly, a lot better. Either he’s working on nuclear weapons now or he's going be able to soon. 9/11 gives us this great opportunity with the U.S. public to to do this.

World War II for the Allies: Churchill and Roosevelt meet in Casablanca early on, well before they have any good reason to think that they're going to be able to defeat, do a landing, and drive all the way to Berlin. But they declare at that point our goal is unconditional surrender. We just have to get rid of this regime. Why is that? Well, they don't think that any deal with Hitler would be stable. Because he's revealed enough about his preferences that he wouldn't comply.

That combines in both the Iranian and the Ukraine case with what, after the fact, look like quite overly optimistic views. In the Ukraine case, ex post we can see like, “Oh gosh, you really miscalculated.” This was not a one-week special military operation. It's five years of staggering, staggering World War I-like losses and lack of progress. So, surely he was irrational in getting that wrong.

But as I recall in the first week or so, people I heard in the Pentagon were like, “Yeah, this is going to be over. It's gonna take them like a week or two, but they're going to win.” And that was also a view that wasn’t just in the U.S. It's not just Putin who was surprised; a lot of people were surprised. There's some interesting reporting in a series of Washington Post pieces in late 2022 where they're talking to Ukrainian military and political leaders, and they were surprised to some extent. They were not a hundred percent sure, ex ante that you would see the degree of coordination, nationalist enthusiasm, support, pulling together, that they actually saw. So even they were a little bit surprised.

I do think that there's a plausible argument for mutual optimism, as we say, that some private information contributed to the sum of their beliefs about their chances of winning being greater than one. The Russians seem to really dismiss the Ukrainian’s capability and they thought that people would defect from the regime, that there wouldn't be a lot of public support, which was totally wrong.

Kahl: I think that's right. Maybe this was a byproduct of the fact that all the senior advisors to the Secretary of Defense were Army guys, and the Secretary of Defense himself was an Army guy back when the invasion happened. But when they all were all looking at the giant green map, and I say that because it was literally this huge green map that Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, would roll out on the table in the Secretary's Conference room and start pointing to what the Russians were intending to do based on all the insights and intel that we had.

I think our military, again, these Army guys, basically saw a repeat of 2003 Iraq, which was that the major combat phase of the war and the regime change part of the war might be over in a couple of weeks, right? You'd have the equivalent of a thunder run to Kyiv, like we had the thunder run to Baghdad. But also like Iraq, in the aftermath of that, Ukrainian nationalism was real, resistance was real, and that you'd have a combination of basically insurgency, civil uprisings and disobedience, serious occupation problems.

Milley is talking to Gerasimov, his counterpart in Russia before the war, he's saying, “Look, you think this war is going to be over in fourteen days, but it's going to last fourteen years.”

But when Milley was saying that, he was talking about the post-war, post-regime change difficulties that we faced in Iraq. I think it was a shock about how poorly the Russians performed. It certainly was a shock on our side. And also how well the Ukrainians performed, and not the least of which because the Ukrainians didn't appear to have a plan. But I think in retrospect, they did have a plan. They just didn't share the plan with us because they didn't trust us all that much. So there were some information asymmetries.

I think the biggest one that Putin had was not just what we now see as his overconfidence in how easy it would be to change the regime, but he didn't believe us when we said we would impose a lot of costs on him: support the Ukrainians, imposing costs, sanctions, a degree of international isolation. He just didn't believe any of that stuff.

Okay. You've already mentioned that you worked at the Pentagon. We worked together in 2021, 2022. You took some leave from Stanford to serve in the Strategy Office within the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

For our listeners, the Office of the Secretary of Defense is not literally the secretary's office; it's a huge, sprawling civilian bureaucracy that supports the Secretary. And Jim worked in the strategy shop. And specifically, you had an opportunity to work on the 2022 National Defense Strategy, which is an important intellectual and framing document for the Pentagon.

It's kind of a meta document that tries to translate the national security strategy into a defense strategy that can be operationalized by the Pentagon. I believe this was your first time working in government, and I'd love you to reflect on that experience a little bit. Because obviously you've spent all this time in the ivory tower. You're hugely influential in the field of international relations.

What impact did this experience of being in the bowels of the Pentagon for a year or so . . . what impact did it have in shaping your understanding about the policy process or maybe your thinking about international security more broadly?

Fearon: Well, the opportunity for that year was largely due to you. So I have you to thank for that. And it was an amazing experience and it was a great thing to do in mid- late-career to kind of shake things up. And I learned just a massive amount. I’d say I’m still . . . in terms of lessons, too many to count. I'm still really processing it all. I'm trying to clear off a bunch of various longstanding projects so I can start thinking more systematically and trying to write about that.

The experience didn't really end up changing my views about international politics. Although I've got a lot more good anecdotes, it didn't really change the way I teach “Intro IR” that much.

But it radically . . . I just learned a ton about how U.S. foreign policy and defense policy is made inside the machine. And that's just been fascinating. And that has affected . . . when I read the newspaper or read about what's going on in the world, it definitely informs how I understand a lot of stuff that I see happening.

We talk a ton about policy makers and policy making in our academic IR world. And not just political science in general. What did I think? Well, I didn't know. Maybe you go in and like you sit around a table with a bunch of policymakers and you go like, “Hmm, what should our policy be on this question?” You know? And it'll be a little bit like a seminar, maybe?

Occasionally I saw stuff that was a little bit like that. And maybe at levels that you experience more at higher levels, maybe that happens more. But that was like not the way it works at all, right?

Instead, it's like a gazillion meetings.with people from different offices, and offices within offices, and offices within offices within offices at a gazillion levels and across different agencies talking about, “How do we align?”

It turns out policymaking is basically all about aligning things, aligning things with other things. It's about coordination. You have a notion when we're talking about policy in the newspaper journalist sense, it's very simple, right? Is the policy going to be this or that? But in actuality: what's a policy? It's not one simple thing. It's like a million things. It's a million little decisions.

And you can’t, even when you say, if you’re the Undersecretary, “I think we should do this.” Well that goes down the chain, and then what comes back are like a million, “Well we can't do that because of this, or that causes this friction, or we can't do that because of this other thing.” So that was one thing that was really striking.

It's a world of silos. Silos and silos within silos. And we talk about silos as if they're bad, but the truth is that you have to have silos. The whole system's a silo. You've got State Department and you've got Homeland Security and you've got the Defense Department and Treasury. And you need specialists in these different areas, and expertise. And someone's going to be lead on this or that policy. But at the same time, once you create all these silos, they have to coordinate. And that’s what so much of policy was about. It was about all these meetings of aligning across and within silos.

Kahl: Totally. Whether it's policy percolating from the bottom up or you're trying to implement it from the top down, the vast majority of what people in the U.S. government do is try to align and coordinate their actions. Either align it to their preferences — like their organizational preferences or their individual preferences — or align it to a policy that they think is already set, while deconflicting with everybody else.

It's basically a hot mess. It's surprising, actually, that anything gets done.

I was thinking as you were talking: probably the most famous scholar-practitioner of all time is Henry Kissinger. And Kissinger once remarked about when he was back at Harvard as an academic, he learned things. He built up all this intellectual capital. And then he went into government and he spent it all down. Implying that he didn't really build up more intellectual capital inside government, that that happened outside of government.

My sense is that Kissinger was a brilliant guy, but that he's absolutely wrong about that. Every time I've served in government, my intellectual capital went up, including in domains that I had not been exposed to before. So, I do want to ask about whether your intellectual capital changed at all on some issues you thought deeply about.

In particular, during your time at the Pentagon, was there anything that you learned about the world or how DOD conducts its planning and operations that changed your understanding of contemporary deterrence challenges? Because after all, the national defense strategy that you work so hard on in the strategy office framed as its central challenge, sustaining and strengthening deterrence vis-a-vis potential adversaries with China and Russia kind of at the top of the pile. Given that you’ve thought a lot about deterrence as an academic, you then saw how people were debating it in these endless meetings on the inside: did it shape your thinking at all?

Fearon: Well, the overarching frame of the 2022 national defense strategy was integrated deterrence. And initially I was like, what does that mean? Do we need another deterrence concept?

But the more time I spent there, the more I thought actually, you know, that's right. The U.S. and its allies and partners have an amazing set of strengths, but you need to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. So now we're talking about silos not only within the U.S. government, but with allies and partners. There's a whole other set of very difficult coordination challenges.

It's incredibly challenging. I worked on implementation, as you know, until I left in September 2022, and I saw some stuff that happened after that, but my impression is that the agenda of integration had more successes inside the defense establishment than across agencies. And it seems like that coordinating across agencies was just really hard for all kinds of reasons.

But let me come back. You want to know about the intellectual capital. I didn't feel like I was spending down intellectual capital. I did think that, for example, in doing the national defense strategy, I was able to bring some stuff to the table conceptually from having studied and written about deterrence for quite a while.

But in terms of what I got, it goes to what we were just talking about being really struck by the scale and the organizational challenges. When you're coming from academics, or for that matter journalists, or for that matter really historians, there are all kinds of incentives to see and understand and also blinders to put things in very psychological terms.

So although I think psychology is hugely important, the experience made me think that we're over-emphasizing in a lot of ways, or we’re attributing things to psychological biases or this or that that are actually have more to do with organizational and career incentive things that are very difficult to to see from the outside.

Kahl: Yeah. I think in part that’s because it's like a nature-nurture question. Do our beliefs emerge from our experiences, in which case they are to some degree byproducts of our experience and to include it inside government.

I think your integrated deterrence point is interesting because a lot of critics of that defense said that integrated deterrence is just deterrence. Like deterrence is deterrence. In fact, you’re saying “integrated” because you want to actually slough off deterrence on other actors: the State Department or the Treasury Department, or our allies.

And I think the way that we saw it was that it was a recognition of the reality that if deterrence is either about denying the adversary the ability to achieve their objectives, or credibly being able to threaten to impose costs in excess of what they might achieve through aggression, that you had to have the entire kit available to you to do that, which meant you had to deter across the domains of warfare: land, air, sea, undersea, space, cyberspace, information, all of those.

The military kind of, I think, understood that, although implementation-wise it wasn't great at it. You had to deter across our alliances for the point that you made, that the whole had to add up to more than the sum of its parts. And that's a really hard coordination problem.

But you also had to integrate across the instruments of national power so that you're not just threatening to do things militarily, but as we've we've seen in places like Ukraine and Iran, the military instrument hits certain limits on your ability to achieve national objectives if it's not in tight coordination with diplomacy and economic carrots and sticks and other things.

The Trump administration didn't use the term “integrated deterrence” in their most recent national defense strategy. My suspicion is that people are largely thinking about deterrence in similar ways.

Fearon: An example would be in the lead up and through the whole Ukraine experience, Treasury is brought in. It does all kinds of stuff and does all kinds of analysis on the whole sanction side in terms of actions. But getting coordination to use that experience or do advanced planning on some kind of parallel contingency in the Western Pacific; that's hard to do.

Kahl: Very hard to do. But, you know, interestingly . . . we threatened Putin with all the things we ended up doing: supporting the Ukrainians, imposing sanctions, trying to isolate Russia on the world stage, which worked for about a year and a half or two. It's since kind of fallen apart.

My own view is that if Putin had known the cost that would have been imposed on him, he probably wouldn't have launched the war. We told him what many of those costs were, he just didn't believe us. My assessment of Beijing is yes, if they ever make a move on Taiwan or Japan or the Philippines, in one of these disputed areas: South China Sea, East China Sea, or the Taiwan Strait.

They will not just be calculating whether their military operations would be successful or whether they could dissuade the United States from intervening, but they'll be calculating what the impact would be on China's economy, on their regime stability, on a whole host of issues that are not entirely military and have significant economic and diplomatic elements to them. So, I think it's just only sensible to try to bundle up the various deterrence messaging so that Beijing thinks not only would they face a long hard slog if they went after Taiwan, but they'd also face sanctions or disruptions to critical supply chains or economic isolation from key economies around the world and et cetera, et cetera.

I do want to talk a little bit more about China and deterrence and get your views. You wrote a very interesting article in Foreign Affairs last year about how to think through conventional deterrence with China. So, much more in the military domain. And I wonder if the prospect of China taking action against Taiwan or another U.S. ally or partner is one of the pathways in which you could get a massive global conflagration? How should we think about deterring that?

Fearon: So, this was an article in Foreign Affairs in May or June last year with Andrew Lim, who's a very smart, experienced civil servant in OSD policy.

The basic idea is like, how do you sustain and strengthen deterrence as the 2022 NDS said, in the Western Pacific? We argue that the U.S. needs to work towards what we call the conventional triad. So, more investment in precision-guided missiles and deeper munition stocks in that area. Basically missiles, bombers, and subs. So, bombers that can be used to launch long-range cruise missiles. That's a technology called palletized munitions, as you know.

One thing we were trying to draw attention to is that there are pretty big first strike incentives. So, if you get in a tense or a crisis situation, the PLA has a real premium on preventing the U.S. forces from getting in the fight. And they built a missile complex that, if they used it successfully, very quickly could make it impossible, or very, very difficult, or could be devastating for U.S. naval assets and fixed bases in the region, which are critical for any kind of U.S. military intervention.

The U.S. knows that, wants to protect its forces. It has potentially preemption incentives itself to attack and prevent these missiles, or the command and control systems that enable them, from working. The whole article is based on this kind of analogy to the nuclear history where Albert Wohlstetter and Thomas Schelling were arguing in the 50s that the U.S. needed to posture its nuclear forces in a way to assure a second strike.

They were worrying — probably worrying too much — that the Soviets could have an incentive to just . . . what do we call it? . . . do a splendid first strike, to make it impossible or largely impossible for the U.S. to retaliate.

So, we're arguing that the situation is similar at a conventional level in the Western Pacific. So you could increase both crisis stability, lower the risk of war, and also strengthen deterrence by building an assured, secure, conventional second strike.

Kahl: The article is fantastic. People should check it out.

One of the concerns you hear out of the Pentagon these days . . . not at the very top, but through the many leaks that get into the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and other outlets . . . is just how concerned the professional military is and the combatant commands are with how depleted our long-range munitions stockpiles and also our air defense and missile defense interceptor stockpiles are, in large part because of the conflict with Iran, which has spent through a lot of those munitions.

The not so dirty little secret in the Pentagon is we had lots of war plans. But if you executed any one of them with a degree of protraction, you basically made the other war plans very difficult to execute for some period of time.

And we're we're seeing that happen in real time and we've kind of gone all in with Iran. And I think a lot of people at the Pentagon are worried that that has undermined our deterrent vis-a-vis China and and Russia, because they know how depleted we are on some of these types of munitions.

I want to pivot now to your new job, the job you have graciously agreed to take on, which is the social science co-director of CISAC, the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

For our listeners who don't know about CISAC, it's one of the oldest centers, one of the founding centers of FSI at Stanford. And it's always had, from the very beginning, a social science co-director and a science co-director. Because from the very outset, it's been a center focused on the relationship between science and technology on the one hand and international security on the other, initially focused on nuclear weapons and arms control, and now with a much broader research agenda.

So first of all, thank you for taking on the job. You're the perfect person at this time.

What types of issues do you think CISAC in particular, and maybe security studies more broadly, needs to prioritize at this particular moment in world history and as we look to the future?

Fearon: I'm excited to do it. I'm looking forward to it. It's a great opportunity, and I'm fully expecting that being a center director will be more fun than being a department chair.

Taking kind of a big picture look here: Secretary Blinken used to like to say the post-Cold War is over, right? And I think he's right about that. We're living through a really big set of changes in the international system. Probably bigger and more fundamental than the changes I lived through as a grad student with the end of the Cold War. Really quite fundamental.

This is a whole bunch of dimensions, but definitely one of the biggest ones is that interstate conflict among major powers has just come roaring back. After twenty-five years or so, where a lot of the issues of focus in international security were things like civil war, transnational terrorism, insurgency, counterinsurgency, state building, peacekeeping operations, non-proliferation. Now, none of those things have gone away; it upsets me that civil war in particular, which has actually gotten quite a bit worse, has kind of just fallen off the radar screen.

But nonetheless, good reason to be concerned about major power conflict, which has come back very much, and with it, increased risk of nuclear war. We haven't seen so much risk of this since the hot days of the Cold War. But it's come back in a technological context that's really different from the Cold War.

And I think that's where studying, thinking about, conceptualizing, framing, intervening on, like, how to think about and what to do about major power conflict in this technologically changed and rapidly changing environment is what CISAC will be focused on. And that CISAC, being at Stanford, is the place to do this: to study AI and and AI and international security implications for conflict, cyber offense, cyber defense, cyber capabilities and and and their implications.

There's something of an underreported arms race going on in space. That's another thing I'd love to get more work going on. Space capabilities have become absolutely essential enablers for military operations of not just the U.S., but perhaps especially still the U.S.

Kahl: I'm super excited about all of that. I'm not excited about the world we live in; the world seems more turbulent and violent by the day. But as it relates to CISAC: CISAC's core mission of thinking about how academia can inform questions about nuclear deterrence and nuclear stability and arms control, that's back.

The salience of nuclear weapons is arguably higher than it's been in many decades. And then there are all these emerging technology areas: cyber, AI, space, undersea, in the not too distant future, quantum. And what's interesting about it is that they are all entangled with one another. AI and cyber are highly entangled. Cyber and space are highly entangled. Cyber and undersea are highly entangled. Quantum will be highly entangled with other domains as well, and all of them are entangled with nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence, nuclear command and control.

And so as you said, there's no place on earth to study all of these things, all of this intersectionality like CISAC. I'm super excited that you're going to take that on.

The last question I always ask our guests: so, Ezra Klein — one of my favorite podcasts — always asks his guests for three favorite books. And I'm always always impressed that non-academics, let alone academics, have time to read three books.

I have an easier question, which is: what is one article that you would recommend to our listeners to get a better understanding of contemporary international security challenges?

Fearon: So, my suggestion here is a little bit of a departure from what we've been talking about. It's not really hard on the military emerging tech, nuclear defense policy things, but more of a how to think about what's going on in the world.

I like a piece in Foreign Affairs by an IR political scientist named Seva Gunitsky and co-author Semuhi Sinanoglu. It's called “The Personalist Global Order: When Individual Whims Drive Great Power Policy.” And they make an argument that Trump and Xi Jinping to some extent, and Putin are. . . to understand how they're acting in foreign policy, it really helps to draw on this comparative politics.

People who study autocracy have a set of commonly used distinctions between types of autocracies. A personalist is in contrast to, like, a military dictator or a single party regime. Someone who governs by personal patron-client connections, often family-based, and views institutions as potential threats and tends to want to undermine them. And there's a bunch of patterns associated with personalist autocrats. There's a lot of erratic behavior.

In general, I think the IR field doesn’t pay enough attention to comparative politics, and this is a place where if you're looking to understand what's going on at the international level, it's a concept that's quite useful.

Kahl: It is a great article. And I also think where international relations can come to bear is in thinking about how these personalist systems become intertwined. The way in which Trump's network is intertwined with the networks in the Persian Gulf monarchies, for example. Great recommendation. Folks should go check it out if they haven't already.

Jim, thank you so much for joining us today.

Fearon: Thanks, Colin.

Kahl: You've been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what is happening in the world, and why.

TRANSCRIPT:

Kahl: You're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. I'm your host, Colin Kahl.

Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Eyck Freymann to discuss his terrific, timely, and thought-provoking new book, Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China. This is the book, proof of life. Eyck, congratulations for making it real.

Eyck is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, where he directs the Allied Coordination Working Group. He's also a non-resident research fellow at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, the Institute of Geoeconomics in Tokyo, and the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. In his book, Defending Taiwan, Eyck outlines a strategy to integrate U.S. military strength, economic leverage, technological leadership, and diplomatic influence into a single, coherent plan to prevent war across the Taiwan Strait.

He convincingly argues that America must work with allies to develop a bold new vision of technological and economic statecraft to address the growing risk that China will act aggressively to seize Taiwan and make plans to secure U.S. interests if deterrence fails.

Eyck, welcome to World Class.

Freymann: Thanks so much for having me on, Colin.

Kahl: Let's start with the basics. What inspired you to write this book and why should the average American listening to this podcast care about the fate of Taiwan? Is it the fact that Taiwan is a democracy? Is it its geography and the so-called first island chain? Is it the possible implications on our security commitments throughout the rest of Asia? Or is it about semiconductors and AI and supply chains? Like, why should Americans care about Taiwan?

Freymann: When I got into studying China as an undergraduate, the reason was that I thought China's interests were global. In my graduate studies—the work that turned into my first book— I looked at the Belt and Road Initiative: how China used money and deals for political influence around the world. And I went on the trail of this initiative from Sri Lanka to Tanzania to Greece, and ultimately to Greenland, where I wrote my PhD.

Kahl: So, you were studying Greenland before it was cool.

Freymann: I was, in fact, studying Greenland. And it was very cool, but more in the temperature way. Greenland's a terrific place to be. And I think we discovered increasingly why it matters in the context of China's Arctic strategy. But it just gives a sense of the scope and the scale of China's ambition.

China's interests do not stop with its region. China wants a full transformation of international order to serve its interests for what the party believes will be centuries or millennia of CCP rule. And it is being methodical because it thinks it's laying the groundwork for that. Taiwan happens to occupy this very particular place in the CCP's ontology because it's the unfinished business of their civil war and because it's fundamentally bound up with relations with the United States.

So I became interested in this during my graduate studies. The origins of the project was that I asked a friend of mine—a naval historian—just an encyclopedia of all things military—to give me the book that I should read to understand this issue: what the military balance looked like and how it was changing, what a war with China would actually involve and what it would take to win, and just how dire the situation actually was.

And he said, well, no book like that exists. I can send you a thousand articles. Thus began this collaboration to figure out the military aspects of this story.

But the more that I researched it, the more I realized this is not a purely military issue. In fact, the military analysis is the easy part. China has a whole battery of options for how they could move against Taiwan. But the really significant ones involve creating crisis scenarios that break U.S. resolve and shatter our alliance structure.

And the way that China thinks it can do that is pushing on where we are weakest, which is in the economic domain, our inability to take pain.

And this gets to the heart of why Taiwan matters. Taiwan matters most obviously because they make the chips. 90% of the world's advanced chips, 99% of the true cutting-edge Nvidia chips that train the advanced AI models.

Taiwan matters geographically because if China could ever use it as a forward base for its Navy, it could project power all around the region in a way that it really can't today because of the U.S. position in these islands that we call the First Island Chain.

But then the third reason, the most globally significant, is that the way China would move against Taiwan would set norms about how they are going to seek to achieve regional hegemony and eventually global hegemony,

And the thing to understand here is this is not a continental region. The Indo-Pacific is an archipelagic region. You have economies that are basically not energy secure, not food insecure, the most trade dependent economies in the world, and they make everything. Pretty much nothing significant in the world doesn't include some thing that has to be made in this region. And that means that the sinews of commerce, which are mostly private airlines, private shipping companies, operating through international airspace and international waters, these are the lifelines of this region.

And if China can take control of that without firing a shot, that is how they will eventually achieve world domination.

So the question of how China might move against Taiwan, if they move against Taiwan in a non-military way, really matters because of the precedent it would set and what the United States would reveal in how it responds.

Kahl: I want to dig into that a lot because you have a lot to say about that. But I want to double click on one thing that you didn't mention in your litany of reasons why Americans should care about Taiwan, which is it's an island of 23 million people. And it's one of the most vibrant democracies in the world, frankly. Is that also something that Americans should care about that, China does not do to Taiwan what China did to Hong Kong, which is to snuff out a vibrant democracy and the world just kind of moves on?

Freymann: It’s absolutely a U.S. interest. The U.S. has a principled position on this. We don't take a stake in Taiwan's status, so we don't have a position on what that is. This is for Taipei and Beijing to work out by themselves. But we don't want it resolved by force or coercion, and any resolution has to be democratically acceptable to the people of Taiwan. Why? Because of the precedent that it sets for the broader region, not just for Taiwan itself.

Obviously, given what we have seen in Ukraine and elsewhere, Taiwan is a vulnerable democracy under threat from an authoritarian superpower. Allowing them to be extinguished would be a very bad precedent. But we cared about Taiwan before they were a democracy. And if something happened and Taiwan ceased to be a democracy, we would still care about Taiwan.

And at a moment where support for democracy worldwide is increasingly politicized, I'm emphasizing these three other material interests because these are things that everyone from the most progressive Democrats to the most fire-breathing MAGA Republicans can all agree on.

Kahl: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, look: you've already established that China has perennial interests in Taiwan because it's difficult for the CCP and for President Xi Jinping in particular, to imagine achieving their goals for national rejuvenation and greatness without reabsorbing Taiwan.

And you've established that there are perennial U.S. interests that are both material and values based.

I now want to talk a little bit about the infamous 2027 timeline. So my understanding of how this originated was during testimony by Phil Davidson, who was an Admiral and the Commander of Indo-Pacific Command back in 2021, who basically said that China could make a move in the next five years. And then I think Bill Burns, who was the Director of the CIA, clarified a year later that 2027 was a potential period we should be focused on for the prospect of invasion of the mainland on the island of Taiwan.

Talk a little bit about that 2027 date, because it's almost established this kind mythological status in some circles. And I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about that date. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Freymann: Completely agree. The date 2027 has been overplayed. The date that matters most is 2049. That's the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China. And Xi Jinping will be 96. So he probably thinks that he'll be around, but who knows. That is the deadline he has set for achieving national rejuvenation, which is his all around vision for putting China at the forefront of essentially every human endeavor.

The line I like to use is he wants China to win every gold medal at the Olympics and every silver and every bronze. This is not just about foreign policy. This is about technological supremacy, ethnic harmony, cultural flourishing. It's the works.

And Taiwan fits into this story because historically speaking, the division of China is a thorn in the side of the CCP. Taiwan being a free, vibrant, technologically advanced society right across the water, is living proof that the CCP is not the ‘end of history’ for the people of China, that there's an alternative version of China that is actually better in pretty much every way to live in.

So there's a whole bunch of reasons why taking Taiwan in a way that humbles the United States and pushes the United States out of the region could supercharge China's pathway towards achieving the rest of national rejuvenation.

But 2027, as Xi Jinping has described it, is just an intermediate date. For him personally, it's a significant year because there's a party Congress in 2027. He'll be up for a fourth term, which I think he's overwhelmingly likely to get. But it's a date that he's ascribed as a readiness deadline in a number of different domains, not just military.

We knew before Admiral Davidson's statements that China had set 2027 as what they call a “building goal” for the PLA. It was also a goal for various technological and economic benchmarks. And the question is, what exactly does this building goal mean? The way that I interpreted the Davidson testimony is we have some intel that suggests Xi Jinping said, this means build the capability to take and hold Taiwan.

And it was always dubious whether China would get that capability by 2027, just because so much has to go right to make an amphibious operation work. And I think now that we're coming up against that date, most of the military analysts I talked to think they're not quite ready yet. They've come a long way, but there's still some gaps in their force structure that they would really like to fill.

But I think the way to think about it is we are nearing an inflection point where Xi Jinping feels confident enough in his own armed forces that he can start taking more risk. Which means we're entering a new chapter in this competition in the gray zone. And these military capabilities matter. They shape the dynamics of crisis even if they're not actually used.

Kahl: So I think that's really important and I want to drill down on this a little bit because you know my understanding when when I worked at the Pentagon was that 2027 was basically a deadline for his generals to report back that they could do this if he ordered that they should do this. But in part he was lighting a fire under them because he didn't think they could do it, that he doesn't have a lot of faith in his military. We've seen almost an endless series of purges that speak to the fact that she does not completely trust his military [and] thinks a lot of them are corrupt.

And so again, I think the 2027 date has been a little misinterpreted. I also, though, think it was useful in our own system to light a fire under us about the urgency of this issue, even if it wasn't 2027.

Freymann: Anyone who's ever taught undergraduates knows sometimes you just need a deadline.

Kahl: Yeah, but then they always email you three minutes after the deadline to ask for an extension.

I do I want to drill down on whether events in the past couple years outside of China may be affecting Xi Jinping's thinking a little bit. So obviously, in 2022 you get the all out invasion of Ukraine by Russia. On the day of the invasion, Russia looked on paper like the second best military in the world. They certainly had a lot of combat experience in places like Georgia and Ukraine in 2014 and Syria and elsewhere.

And yet a day later, they barely looked like the second best military in Ukraine. And I think what that illustrated is real war is real hard. Meanwhile, this year you've seen the Maduro raid, you know, that's an ally of Beijing. You've seen the Iran war, which has had mixed results strategically, but it's been pretty devastating militarily to the Iranians, a close partner of China.

So when Xi Jinping looks at these wars, do you think he draws the conclusion that war is easier or harder? And does that put more time on his clock?

Freymann: This is ultimately a speculative exercise. I wish we had a Being John Malkovich view into Xi Jinping's head.

Kahl: I mean, for all you know, the NSA does, but we can't talk about that.

Freymann: Yeah, those are secret capabilities. Maybe Claude Mythos will solve that one for us.

I think lacking that, lowly, unclear Stanford scholars like me have to read the tea leaves from the open sources.

Clearly, the U.S. decision to burn 25 to 40 % of our long range precision munitions and considerably more of our air defense interceptors in Iran was not the most enlightened decision from the perspective of deterring China over Taiwan. But I think it's significant that we paused there and we didn't burn the rest.

I also think that as the character of warfare is evolving and unmanned systems—which you can make in quantity very cheaply—continue to proliferate and get more sophisticated, Taiwan's options for defending itself Improve.

And when you think about what is involved in taking tens of thousands of men across the strait . . . which, granted, is only one of several scenarios for how China can move against Taiwan. They can cyber attack Taiwan, they can bombard Taiwan, they can blockade Taiwan.

But if they actually want to take and hold the island, what does it involve? They have to put tens of thousands of men on the ground, which means they need a beachhead or an airhead. It's very hard to deliver a significant number of people by air, as we saw in Ukraine, because it's just so easy to take down planes and helicopters with cheap things like stingers.

And the alternative— amphibious ships across the strait—they got lots of them, but Taiwan basically knows what the harbors and ports are that would be attacked. And it's relatively cheap with surface drones, underwater drones, aerial drones, naval mines, to make the Taiwan Strait a sort of hellscape.

Now there's so many questions. This question of would Taiwan fight? There's also a question of how resilient Taiwan's command and control infrastructure would be if it was bombarded for days on end. But if I'm China and I'm thinking about all of the things that have to go right in sequence for an amphibious invasion to go well.

When I consider these tail risk scenarios in which my guys are stuck in urban combat in Taipei . . . you walk through the streets of Taipei, you can see this is not a nice place to engage in urban combat. And you ask, how long will I have to resupply them? How many more transits across the strait will I need to do to deliver them food and medical and vehicles and fuel?

There are scenarios in which the opening campaign seems to be going well, and then it turns because China has these troops on the beaches who then get massacred. These scenarios, you can simulate them in all these ways, but ultimately no one knows. It's just much easier and simpler and more attractive to take the prize for free if you can.

And that is why the argument of the book is we can't take our eye off these military scenarios. They matter. But Taiwan's fate is more likely to be decided by a crisis than a war. And we got to deter the crisis, not just the war, because the crisis is bad. The crisis presents us with decisions that we are not currently set up or prepared to make. And how do you deter the crisis? You need a concept for deterring Xi Jinping in the gray zone, which right now is where the real action is.

Kahl: So I want to come back to that. I do think you made a really important point. If I'm Xi Jinping, on the one hand the United States burned through years worth of production of the critical munitions necessary to fight a war with China over Taiwan: long range strike capabilities like the new Prism missile or or JASM, advanced air defense interceptors for that, Patriot, and others. Not to mention relocating assets from the Indo-Pacific and all of the rest.

So on one level, the U.S. deterrence posture is inarguably weaker  in the Indo-Pacific and across the Taiwan Strait today than it was before the war with Iran.

On the other hand, I think both the war in Ukraine and the war in Iran show that even very powerful actors can be stymied by asymmetric approaches, especially using large numbers of attritable munitions. So, think of cheap missiles, especially cheap drones.

And that's, I think, a good news story for Taiwan and for the reasons that you point out. So I do think that's relevant. And I think it goes to this point the invasion is the riskiest outcome. I've participated in war games on Taiwan in the unclassified and classified settings, and they almost all culminate with whether China gets a lodgement, right? They get to the beaches.

And I think what you just compellingly argued is that, they don't just have to get to the beach once. They have to get to the beach every day with food and fuel and men, and then they have to crawl through the jungles and the mountains and occupy cities. It's a big deal. So if Xi’s going to do this, I'm convinced it's much more likely that he's going to do it through some squeeze—a quarantine, a blockade, a customs regime.

So walk through what you see as the non-amphibious invasion. If the Chinese don't do D-Day, what do they do?

Freymann: Well, the option that has drawn most attention for decades is blockade. And the reason is we've known for 130 years that you can blockade very easily with dumb mines. You seed them in the water and then no one wants to navigate through. And we're seeing this now in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran doesn't have a navy, they don't have an Air Force, they supposedly don't have any missile launchers, they don't have leadership that's willing to show their faces, and yet, they can shut down the flow of commerce through the strait.

And the United States can offer insurance to these vessels. The American president can tweet, show some guts. But these people don't want to die. And so they can make a rational calculation that it's not worth it. At some point, maybe that will change. But clearing mines is very difficult.

So, if China just wants to do a scorched earth medieval style siege, that option is on the table. And we have to take it seriously because if Xi Jinping persuades himself that this is an ugly but assured forced checkmate, he might be tempted by other options because he thinks, well, this is a guaranteed fallback plan. So I take the scenario seriously in the book because you have to show Xi Jinping that it is not assured victory.

And breaking out that blockade would be nasty. It would almost certainly involve large-scale strategic bombing inside mainland China. It would involve the risk of nuclear escalation. The challenge of resupplying Taiwan's population would be orders of magnitude harder than resupplying Berlin during the Berlin airlift of 1948-49. But it is still something that we should work on that I am sure the Pentagon has very detailed operational plans for, because you have to show China that we could do this if we had to while deterring nuclear escalation.

Kahl: What do you make though . . . so, there's the blockade or a scorched earth. But one lesson from the Strait of Hormuz is you can create the psychological risk that ships that get too close to Taiwan could be at risk. But you would also just impose a customs regime, right? That requires every ship coming in and out of Taiwan to check in on the mainland first.

And it wouldn't be putting mines in the water. It wouldn't be putting missiles onto the island of Taiwan. It would simply be to assert China's sovereignty over the island through a kind of lawfare and coercive means. What do you think of the customs possibility?

Freymann: Well, that's exactly right. And this is the scenario that I think is the most likely and dangerous. And I hope that we can dig into it. But the reason I talk about blockade first is that a lawfare customs quarantine thing: it's a completely different beast.

The reason that a blockade is an unattractive first move is that it has a lot of the disadvantages of war for China, but none of the advantages. It's not clear that Taiwan just surrenders overnight and it puts the Americans and the allies on notice that something extreme is happening. It's a totally barbaric humanitarian disaster. It's an act of war against the civilian population of Taiwan. And it causes our gargantuan global financial crisis because all of a sudden it's not just Taiwan. No shipper is going to get covered to go anywhere near Taiwan.

So all of the supply lines in and out of South Korea, Japan, mainland China, everything gets busted. So China creates this shock. It's horrible. It's economically disruptive. And then the rest of the world lines up behind the United States and says, well, we have to make them cut it out.

The reason that the quarantine scenario is attractive for China is it doesn't do any of that stuff. It doesn't break supply chains on day one. It doesn't trigger a financial market panic necessarily on day one. China just says, “We're just enforcing our existing customs law. We're not saying you can't deliver to Taiwan. We're just saying you have to come through a mainland port.”

The goal is: establish the principle without disruption. And then if the Americans accept it, they're checkmated. Because in the long run, China then can make the character of Taiwan's exchanges with the outside world a subject of gray zone pressure, and they can squeeze that dial all the way to black. And that is how China gets Taiwan's fabs intact. That's how they seize control of the engine of the AI revolution without the Americans destroying it.

Now the Americans always have the option of escalating it up into a war or disabling the fabs: blowing them up, cyber attacking them, what have you. Like the U.S. has this capability. But the decision to do that is really significant. The decision to do that is essentially a big red button on the president's desk that says the financial crisis that ends my presidency.

And what China's banking on is that we will just choose option A and allow Taiwan to slip away while pretending that nothing meaningful has changed so that we're totally screwed in the long run because we lose AI, but we avoid this really acute short-term crisis and the politicians get to kick the can.

Kahl: I think it's a real risk and one of the things that's hardest to deal with. So let's talk the solution set, which is essentially the last 60% of your book.

Back in 2022, when I was working at the Pentagon as the undersecretary for policy, we wrote the 2022 National Defense Strategy. At the heart of that document was this idea of integrated deterrence. Integrated deterrence meant a lot of things: integrating across the domains of conflict, but also integrating across the instruments available to the U.S. government, not just military, economic, diplomatic, technological, integrating across our allies and partners since that's kind of our ace in the hole globally, and integrating across the spectrum of conflict, recognizing you are trying to deter from the gray zone to nuclear war. That's a lot.

We were criticized by hawks in Congress and elsewhere for essentially offloading the idea of deterrence—which is traditionally thought of as a military instrument and predominantly as a punishment instrument—offloading that to civilian agencies like the State Department or Treasury or Commerce or others to use other tools so that we could lower the defense budget or something by offloading it to civilians.

My view was always, it was, “Yes, and . . .” The military had to be robustly capable of deterring and prevailing if deterrence failed, but you also needed to supplement that military deterrence with economic and diplomatic measures, which I think is squarely where your book lands.

So, walk our listeners through how you think of integrated deterrence and especially how you think about integrating these non-military instruments—political, economic—into deterring the types of scenarios you've been talking about.

Freymann: Well, first of all, Colin, this is why I'm so thrilled to be on this podcast, because as I describe in the book, your concept of integrated deterrent is the inspiration for what this is trying to do. Obviously, we didn't achieve the aspiration as fully as we might have in the Biden administration. And then in the Trump administration, we are essentially gutting the interagency process. We're antagonizing our allies. We're doing the opposite of whatever integrated strategy is.

But I think what you say is absolutely right. China has an integrated strategy for Taiwan and to achieve national rejuvenation generally. They link together every tool of their national power— their control of supply chains, technology, diplomacy, information operations and propaganda, the military, everything. It's organized towards a specific set of goals. And that gives us that gives them carrots and sticks to use against other countries and us.

We need to do the same thing or we are going to be outmaneuvered because we will not be able to muster the tools of our national power to push back effectively. And by the way, because we will never be able to beat the CCP and how we organize ourselves, we need allied scale to do a lot of this stuff in response. That is very much the spirit of the book. Before we talk about the pillars, though I'm happy to get into them.

My question for you would be, what did you learn over the course of the Biden administration? Is this just a pipe dream? Is it impossible based on how the U.S. interagency is set up to do integrated deterrence? Or is this the kind of thing that we could theoretically do if we had political leadership that was determined to do it?

Kahl: First of all, whose podcast is this, man? But I would just say this. The jury is still out. I think in the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there were a lot of efforts to try to convince Putin that there would not just be military costs in the sense of helping Ukraine defend itself, but there would be economic and political costs to the Russians.

Obviously, that attempt to show that there was a wide range of costs that would be significant, also thwart his ability to achieve his objectives. It didn't succeed. Putin invaded the country.

On the other hand, I think if Putin knew what was coming in retrospect and looked back and says, look, four plus years on suffered a million casualties because of all the support we provided the Ukrainians. Russia was, at least for a period of time, significantly isolated from a big chunk of the world economically and also pushed into the arms of China and in weird ways made Russia dependent on countries like North Korea and Iran. Russia was basically unplugged from the West buying a significant amount of oil and gas from them, I don't think he would have done it. So I think the jury is still out about whether it is possible.

Xi Jinping, though, has seen all of those things, right? And so  my own view on China is Xi Jinping's theory of rejuvenation requires China to be thoroughly integrated into the world. And you can hold that at risk in some ways. And I take a lot of the substance of your book as pushing in that direction as well. So why don't you let our readers pull back the curtain and let them know a little bit about how you see the pieces of deterrence fitting together.

Freymann: Great. Let me dig into it. The reason that I ask this is I want to know if it's a pipe dream to think that these things can ever be done in combination. But here's basically what I think we should do in each of the domains. In the political diplomatic domain, we need to manage China, engage Taiwan, and establish our core coalition.

What does that mean for managing China? Keep the One China policy, but communicate to China that just because we have strategic ambiguity as to what we would do if they attacked, we're not going to stand idly by as they push in the gray zone. If they push in the gray zone, we will push back proportionately, in a manner that we think is proportionate, in a domain of our choosing to maintain an overall stable situation. And if we get wind of a potential big move on Taiwan, in the same that we had advance notice of Putin moving on Ukraine, we shouldn't say that we're going to wait until they fire the first shot to reveal what our action is. We should reserve the right to act preemptively. And that's all within the format of our existing One China policy. It's just changing how we communicate it.

Kahl: I think you'd call it structured ambiguity instead of just strategic ambiguity.

Freymann: I call this structured ambiguity. It's the same substance, but it's a new way of communicating our existing policy. Just to remind China that when they push in the gray zone, they are hollowing out their commitments to us under the three communiques. And those communiques are the political foundation of our relationship. And they should understand that there's risk associated with doing that.

With engaging Taiwan, you just have to show the people of Taiwan that we understand that they're a democracy under threat and that we stand with them. And that includes respecting the right of the people of Taiwan to make their own choices, which means not picking favorites in Taiwan elections, being willing to work with whoever they work with, supporting them with technology partnerships, energy partnerships, people-to-people exchanges, just being present for Taiwan.

And then the core coalition is making a statement that we have allies that have skin in the game too. Japan, obviously. They now say publicly it's existential for them. The Australians, it's arguably existential for too. If there's any kind of crisis over Taiwan that results in financial flows or trade in and out of China being messed up, I mean, that's a financial crisis in the UK because HSBC and Standard Chartered, the two biggest UK banks essentially . . . that is their bread and butter.

Then Canada, who obviously we've been abusing lately, Canada has skin in the game as well, because we are one big economy with Canada. And if we have to decouple from China, in whole or in part, for any reason, they are going to be collateral damage or they're going to be a country that gains opportunities from working with us.

So we need to bring this coalition together, start treating these partners with the respect that they reserve, and then do what we can to communicate with a common voice what we would do. If we had in the events to do something big and economic, we would have to work with this core coalition because the Europeans, they make these decisions by consensus. So it's less predictable what they would do.

Kahl: Before you go on to the economic, though, I want to ask you to go one layer deeper on the alliances piece. Because one of the things we saw early on in Ukraine was actually it wasn't just the North Atlantic community responding to Russia. It was actually a coalition of advanced liberal democracies in Europe, in North America, and in Asia, imposing costs on the Russians.

And I think my sense is that Beijing worries very much about a similar coalition being aligned against a raid against them. But to say the least, the status of our alliances right now . . . not so hot. what do you think? And I think they're probably better in Asia than they are in Europe in terms of the health of our alliances. But how much of the need to build this political coalition has been complicated by recent tensions with our allies?

Freymann: It has not gotten easier in the last 18 months. And I think we should brace for it to get worse. But we have common interests, these five countries that I named, essentially the big Anglo countries plus Japan, we have a common interest in deterring this crisis. And then if the crisis happens, we have a common interest in dealing with it effectively, working together.

And we have other allies with skin in the game too. I don't mean to leave out South Korea, the Philippines, but these countries, for political reasons and because of their vulnerability to China's economic coercion, they are very close to the core, but they may choose, depending on the circumstances, not to be the core of the core. And that's okay.

When we're thinking about coalition building, we need to be more flexible than saying you're in the tent or you're out. We need to understand this as essentially a group of concentric circles or overlapping Venn diagrams, where different countries might collaborate on different things. And that is essentially a call to expand the viewpoint from just treaty allies to partners too. And we can get to this and talk, we talk about economic deterrence.

Kahl: Yeah, let's turn to that. So you've talked about the political piece. There's a U.S.-China piece, a U.S.-Taiwan piece, and a U.S.-allies piece. What are the other aspects of integrated deterrence in your thinking?

Freymann: Well, there's conventional military deterrence, which is the standard deterrence by denial. Show them you could defeat the invasion of the blockade. And that means replenishing our magazines of these long-range precision munitions, air defenses. Air defense is critical for Taiwan. Making sure the right stuff is forward deployed in the region, including all of the fuel and the spare parts. Because our logistics chain would struggle in any kind of protracted fight. The distances are huge. It's a tyranny of distance.

Helping to build up the supply chains for stuff like drones. Revitalizing our submarine industrial base. It sounds like a lot and is a lot, it's a few hundred billion dollars over five years. And we've already bought about half of it. So on this issue in particular, at least, the Trump administration is doing reasonably well with the big exception, obviously, of spending down all these munitions in Iran.

Kahl: But know, the value of $1.5 trillion to try to make up for lost time.

Freymann: If they get even a much smaller version of their defense budget, that takes us a lot of the way there towards getting the conventional force in a position to sustain deterrence into the 2030s.

The nuclear side is trickier because strategic deterrence is no longer just about nuclear mutually assured destruction. Our nuclear forces depend on a command, control and communication system that extends to space.

ground stations that can be cyber attacked. And that means the resilience of our space architectures, our resilience to cyber, our offensive cyber. This matters hugely for this mutually assured destruction dynamic that looms in the background of any potential crisis or fight. And AI plays a role in this. And we don't really understand how. But as we see with this new Claude Mythos model, maybe AI very quickly could totally disrupt the cyber balance in a way that could be favorable to us, but also potentially unfavorable.

And I don't come down with a clear position, but I think we need to study this. In the short term, we need to stay as far ahead in AI as we can. And then we need to be open-minded about what some kind of arms control or more stable strategic balance might look like in the future, because AI, we don't really understand yet, but it will play a role.

Kahl: You used a really important word, which you heard a lot in the Pentagon in the last administration because it was in the National Defense Strategy. You hear less about it now. And that term is resilience, which is not a terribly sexy concept, but actually quite important to deterrence as it relates to China, because their entire theory of victory over the United States is to paralyze the networks that undergird the American way of war. Undersea cables, constellations in outer space cyber networks, critical infrastructure in the homeland that supports power projection. And so a lot of, think you're right to kind of emphasize that part of strategic deterrence succeeding is convincing China that they can't paralyze either our conventional or nuclear forces.

Freymann: So what is strategic deterrence? I define it as fundamentally a threat to the survival of another state or regime. And in a world where the CCP is increasingly paranoid, AI is increasingly useful for propaganda information operations, China's population has been kept isolated, not knowing about the world.

If you can potentially bust the great firewall and deliver messages about the corruption of the party and Tiananmen Square and all this other stuff to the people of the PRC, you could potentially deliver a devastating threat to the survival of the CCP and you don't have to nuke anyone and you don't have to shut down any critical infrastructure. But if I'm the ministry of state security, I'm very concerned about that.

And all this is to say, what strategic deterrence involves is expanding across domains in ways that we are only beginning to understand, and AI is deeply tied up with it. And potentially that's useful for us, but potentially it's also destabilizing. And I'm sort of kicking the can on this because there's only so much we can say at this particular point in time. But it does matter.

Kahl: Let's talk about two of the chapters in the book really drill down on the economic statecraft associated with integrated deterrence. You want to flesh that out a bit for our listeners?

Freymann: So there's a temptation to think of economic deterrence as an extension of strategic deterrence. The U.S. and China are so economically intertwined that if we shut down that relationship, it's like an economic nuke. And that is how I think members of Congress have thought about it. There was legislation called the Stand with Taiwan Act that would have imposed these crippling across the board sanctions.

I think that that basically doesn't work. Yes, there's some really, really extreme scenarios in which we could plausibly do that. But in the crisis scenarios that I think are most plausible, I don't think that option is strategically attractive or politically available.

And what's dangerous is that we don't seem to have an affirmative economic contingency plan. If we get into a crisis and the president says, “Give me options that don't blow up the world economy,” and the president's advisors say, “I'm sorry, sir, we haven't done our homework.” That seems like a big problem because then the only option left on the table is just capitulate.

And then if China learns that it can extort us by threatening us with economic breakdown, then they can do it again. So we need an affirmative vision for a post-rupture economic order on the table, plausible, discussed, something that in a crisis situation might plausibly be of interest to both Democrats and Republicans and a bunch of other countries, and which is structured to be flexible so that the details can be worked out in the event, because obviously you can't work out the details in advance.

And the framework that I talk about is called avalanche decoupling. The basic idea of avalanche decoupling is it's just fantasy to imagine that you can decouple from China all at once like a light switch. It's just fantasy. We tried that on Liberation Day.

Kahl: Avalanche decoupling for our listeners: massive secondary sanctions, cutting off all trade, cutting off all imports of components for critical technologies, those things?.

Freymann: Exactly. And we tried a version of this on Liberation Day. The president is like, a hundred percent tariffs on China. And then the stock market crashes and then the bond market crashes. And then various captains of industry call up and say, Mr. President, you have to reverse this or we're done for. And then within a week, the president is like, lol, JK, I'm rolling it back.We're making a truce. And that reveals to everyone, including to China . . .

Kahl: Then he later threatened to do it again and China calls his bluff by putting export controls on on rare earths and he and chickened out again

Freymann: And then we see another version of this in Hormuz, where Iran takes 20% of global oil offline, and now the United States is suing for peace and essentially abandoning all of its grand designs of regime change or ending Iran's right to enrich. The U.S. is on the back foot and it's because it can't take even a small amount of economic pressure.

So if we imagine scenarios where it's not politically available to make an already bad situation vastly worse. But China has revealed that this is an abusive relationship and they're going to use our economic dependencies to squeeze and coerce us.

What do we do? Well, basically there's two things you can do. One is you can cushion the short term blow with large scale fiscal and monetary action, like we did at the beginning of COVID, coordinated with as many other countries as possible, essentially help the world economy through the crisis rather than having the world go into depression and it's our fault.

So China's doing this to the world, but we're bailing you out. And then set in motion a process that will break your critical dependencies as fast as reasonably possible, and then leave the non-critical stuff to do later, if ever. In other words, it means not maxing out on punishment of China, but focusing on our own economic interests first. And then hopefully punishing China over time as a side effect.

And the way you do this in avalanche decoupling is with a tariff or a quota that moves. Let's take the example of drones and drone parts. Right now, the United States cannot make a drone without buying parts from China. And that's crazy. It's crazy.

But what are we supposed to do? Because if we say, starting tomorrow, you can't import drone parts from China, then we can't make more drones. The only way to do it is to phase it out, to say, on X date, we will no longer buy drones from China, or there's a tariff that is going to move up in a consistent way, or a quota that will move down in a consistent way, and then by date, it will be effectively impossible to buy from China. You'll have to buy it from some safe country.

I think we can do a version of that now for like the 1% of our trade with China that is most critical, the drones, the medicines, that kind of stuff. And you can do it in a way you coordinate with allies because the French and the Japanese, they don't want to be dependent on China for this stuff either. If you can do that now, then you have a proof of concept that if a crisis happens and we need to do it for 20% of our trade with China or 50% or 70%, that that option is available and that we know how we would do it.

Kahl: My experience, and maybe this is my bias, because I've worked at the Pentagon so many times, but I also worked at a White House, and I worked around a White House that tried to integrate around interagency planning. And it remains true that even in a White House that has a lot of process and really brings the interagency together, mostly you're reacting to crises. You're not doing break glass, day one planning for these things.

The only place that does that is the Pentagon. And I think what you're seeing in a place, in a situation like Iran is that the military piece of things, like what targets to hit, how to hit them, how to generate effects, is pretty remarkable, actually, because the military is really good at planning and executing that type of stuff.

But all the other stuff fell by the wayside. The diplomatic plan, the plan to deal with the economic second and third order effects, the diplomacy in the region with our allies. It's not a critique one way or another necessarily is just of of this war—people can make up their own minds about that.

But it's just to say when we don't bring all instruments together and plan around them ahead of time, it's hard and that that's not gonna happen naturally at places like Treasury and the State Department and Commerce and Energy. That's gonna be something that requires the White House to bring people together, knock heads, and keep people in windowless rooms for as long as it takes to create the type of playbook that you were talking about.

Freymann: That's been my experience. I started briefing this stuff around the interagency and on the Hill in 2024 because the House China Select Committee had done this report and they had found the United States . . . they wrote this in the report, quote, “The United States lacks a contingency plan for the economic and financial effects of a conflict with China.”

This is December, 2023. And I read that and I was appalled. I said, “What do mean there was no plan?” Surely somewhere in Treasury, is a plan. No, there's no one office in Treasury that's responsible. Took it around the Hill, briefed it to everyone from the most progressive Dems to the MAGA Republicans. Everyone's like, yeah, of course there should be a plan.

But it's too big. It's no one's job because it's too big. And also it just gets to the difference in approach to military folks versus economic folks. Economists don't do contingency planning. It's not their thing.

So what is the purpose of what I'm doing here? It's an outsider putting something on paper. Well, I think it's helpful to start talking about these things now. We have to start having this conversation now, because in the event, we're going to find out that we don't have a plan, but maybe we'll have what the president once beautifully termed a concept of a plan. The broad outlines or the principles that would describe what it is that we're trying to achieve, what it is that we're trying to avoid, and how we aim to achieve that.

And if we put this down on paper and we start to convene conversations about it among allies, between Democrats and Republicans in an informal way, just say, imagine that our relationship with China turns openly abusive and we decide we have to start getting divorced. And yeah, divorce sucks, divorce is expensive, but divorce is also sometimes necessary and it's an opportunity. And you're imagining life on the other side.

Let's think from a blank sheet of paper. What do we want the global economy to look like as we are divorcing China? If we have the opportunity to rethink or reverse some of these mistakes that we made in the last forty years of outsourcing all these jobs, letting China steal all our IP, and we get to start again, how would we do it? That's an opportunity. And that's potentially something that politicians could sell to the American people to say, listen, we made some mistakes, now we're going to pay for those mistakes. But it's going to work out better in the end.

There's a brighter future at the end of this, where maybe we'll bring more good jobs home that we had lost. Maybe we'll become less vulnerable to coercion. Maybe we'll make a better, safer, more secure and prosperous world. And it's not an easy sell, but then the other options are not that good either. But at least it's something to start from in a crisis. So we're not starting from nothing.

Kahl: I think it's a really important point and maybe one we’ll conclude the conversation on. It’s a the very different context, but the Biden administration spent four months between when the intelligence was coming in that the Russians intended to invade Ukraine and the actual invasion and spent that four months doing an extraordinary amount of interagency work on the day one playbook for what would happen if the invasion actually happens: how the sanctions would be implemented, how we would deal with getting security assistance into Ukraine, how we would deal with the economic fallout.

And we didn't get it all right. I think we didn't do enough on things like food security that ended up being a big problem. But I know how hard it is, even when you have the intelligence that says something really bad is about to happen. The China piece is way harder, both because the problem is bigger and because we aren't going to be compelled by four months of warning, and that may not be enough.

So I think you're clarion a call in the book, which everybody should go read, for that thinking to happen as far in advance as possible and to start talking about it so that China knows that we're thinking about it and therefore hopefully is deterred by the fact that we have a plan.

All right, everybody's supposed to go read your book. But at the end of World Class, we ask all of our guests to name one article that people should go out and read if they want to understand the world.

So do you have a recommendation for our listeners?

Freymann: Yeah, there's a new piece out from Evan Medeiros, former Asia director on the National Security Council. It's called “A New Era of U.S.-China Interaction from Competing to Racing.” And I would urge everyone to read it. It's a very important piece.

Medeiros' argument is that the trade war that escalated in 2025 between the U.S. and China has created a new chapter in U.S.-China relations where essentially the two countries are are racing to de-risk from one another, to reduce their vulnerabilities in case the really acute crisis happens again. And China is thinking much more seriously, and they're working much more aggressively to break those dependencies than we are.

And we need to get serious and recognize what race we're running, otherwise we're going to get caught behind.

Kahl: Well, Eyck, I think that's a great place to end. First of all, thanks for writing such an important book on such an important topic at such an important time. I hope it does well. I hope our listeners go out and check it out. Thanks, Eyck.

Freymann: Thanks, Colin.

Kahl: You've been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe to Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on what's happening in the world and why.