A Bloomberg report claims that a newly appointed Defense Department official has argued for “Removing American military forces [in the South China Sea] in exchange for fewer Beijing-owned coast guards patrolling the area.”
John Andrew Byers, a history professor, who was sworn in this week as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia, is reported to be a “lonely-but-not-alone advocate for moving away from the prepare-for-war-with-China attitude of the Biden Administration (and many on the Republican side),” according to a report in “Friday Every Day.” Byers co-authored an article in the American Conservative last September, and a follow-up academic paper, which argued that it would be smarter to move away from such a war, even if it could be won. “We live in a nuclear world. Secure second-strike capabilities make great-power conquest impossible without global annihilation. A second Trump administration should embrace a Cold Peace with China, exercising foreign policy restraint—one guided by a narrow definition of the national interest, economic nationalism, and penchant for viewing world politics in geo-economic rather than geo-strategic terms. If he remains true to his instincts, he will be a leader of his time.”
Byers and Randall L. Schweller wrote in their September article that the U.S. and China “are more geopolitical rivals than full-fledged adversaries. They both have more to gain by maintaining deep economic ties than by severing them.” He advised the second Trump administration against waging a “severe trade war.” He added that “when conflicts of interest are more imagined than real, as is the case with current U.S.-China relations, the path to peace is not to demonstrate resolve and a willingness to fight but to wind down the escalation of mutual distrust by means of empathy for the other’s need for security and reassurance of one’s own benign intentions. In practice, America should abandon belligerent military initiatives targeted at China and, instead, hedge against the China threat by adopting a ‘readiness’ strategy that emphasizes research and development, professional training, and organizational planning, such that U.S. military capabilities can be quickly expanded later if necessary.”
