Antagonizing Other Major Powers Is a Choice

None of this was inevitable, but it was all entirely foreseeable.

Richard Haass seems determined not to understand why the Chinese government has been acting the way it has:

But the focus on Pelosi’s visit is misplaced. The important question is why China responded not just by denouncing the trip, but with import and export bans, cyberattacks, and military exercises that represented a major escalation over anything it had previously done to punish and intimidate Taiwan.

None of this was inevitable. The Chinese leadership had options. It could have ignored or downplayed Pelosi’s visit. What we saw was a reaction – more accurately, an overreaction – of choice.

Whenever another government reacts badly to something that the U.S. does, we hear a lot from American analysts and pundits about how the other government has agency and could have chosen to do something other than what it did. Yes, every government has agency and is responsible for what it does. This is not a useful or insightful observation. Most of the time, when someone emphasizes the agency of another state it is done to diminish or deny the role that the U.S. has had in contributing to the destabilizing dynamic between the two.

The curious thing about this is that the people that emphasize the agency of other actors are usually uninterested in understanding how the other actors see the world. They invoke the agency of others not to have a more fully-rounded understanding of the causes of the problem, but rather to push all of the blame onto the other side and to exonerate their own. Instead of practicing strategic empathy to see the world through the eyes of the other actors to better understand them, this emphasis on the others’ agency is a way of letting yourself and your government off the hook for contributing to the mess.

Yes, the Chinese government chose to react harshly to the visit, just as it said it would before the visit happened. Then they followed through on their warning after it happened. The Chinese government reacted as it did because it wanted to signal clearly that they think that the U.S. and Taiwan had overstepped and there would be consequences for both of them for doing so. Many people in Washington don’t want to hear that, and so we end up with lots of analysts going out of their way to miss the point.