Episode Summary: Why did Vladimir Putin decide to invade Ukraine in 2022? Barry Posen argues that Putin’s decision is consistent with the logic of preventive war. Increasing U.S. and NATO military cooperation with Ukraine likely convinced Putin that he did not have much time to forestall Ukraine’s NATO membership, which would shift the balance of power against Russia.
Guests: Barry R. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the MIT Security Studies Program, which he directed from 2006 to 2019.
International Security Article: Barry R. Posen, “Putin's Preventive War: The 2022 Invasion of Ukraine,” International Security, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Winter 2024/25), pp. 7–49, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00501.
Originally released on March 31, 2025
[00:00:00] Jeff Friedman: Hello everyone, and welcome to the International Security Podcast. We are produced by International Security, a quarterly journal edited at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and published by MIT Press.
Each episode of the podcast highlights a piece of research from the journal, drawing out its implications for understanding the theory and practice of international politics. I'm Jeff Friedman, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. Today our guest is Barry Posen. Barry is the Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT.
His recent International Security article is titled, “Putin's Preventive War: The 2022 Invasion of Ukraine.” The article argues that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was at least partly motivated by fears about looming shifts in the balance of power, particularly with respect to Kyiv building military ties to NATO.
Barry, thanks for joining today.
Let's just start off by setting the table a bit about what preventive war is and why the concept matters. As I mentioned a moment ago the basic logic of preventive war is that states fight in order to stave off looming shifts in the balance of power. Can you just give us some past examples of wars that seem to fit this logic pretty well?
[00:01:12] Barry Posen: Yeah. I cite a few examples in the paper when the Chinese crossed the Yalu during the Korean War, it seems largely to prevent the United States and its allies from settling in on the border. And the Chinese didn't know what mischief we would make there, but given that we had sided with the regime that they had just ousted, they had reason to suspect that we might make mischief from there.
So it seems like that was a preventive war or war in which preventive motives were strong, and we can't be a hundred percent sure that was the primary motive. Most historians believe that when the Israelis joined the British and the French in the Suez operation in 1956 that they joined for preventive reasons, because the Egyptians had just received a big shipment of Soviet weapons, but still hadn't had the time to really learn how to use them. So the Israelis figured, let's have at them before they get even stronger, we don't know what they're going to do with those capabilities. And then there's quite a significant number of people who believe that the American war against Iraq in 2003 was a preventive war. If you take seriously the statements of the then administration, they thought that Iraq might have a weapons of mass destruction program of some kind, and that at some future point Iraq would take advantage of that fact. And in their minds, they connected that to 9/11 and off they went. There's a big body opinion on that. And then I think there's, I’m not sure that would I would call it a consensus, but it seems like very many IR theorists, I think, would accept that Germany's motive in 1914 were significantly preventive. Dale Copeland has been most strongly identified with this; I think he makes a very strong case. So there are some examples and in general, people who like to sort of do large-N, the, they find a lot of wars in which preventative motives seem to be implicated.
[00:03:12] Jeff Friedman: And before we get a sense of how well those analogies fit the Ukraine case, give us a sense of why it matters. Why would we need to know whether or not Ukraine represents a preventive war? And what kind of implications might that have for policy making towards the conflict today?
[00:03:27] Barry Posen: Well, I think there's two reasons why you care. One is the general one, which is states are often not aware that they're shifting the balance of power against others or not aware that the others see it that way or don't believe it when the other tells them that's what they perceive. And most realists would say that, given the anarchical condition of international politics and the need for states to look after themselves, big looming shifts in the balance of power are going to motivate a lot of nervous behavior, even if they don't motivate a war.
So that's the big question because the United States has a lot of power in the world. There's a lot of different groups in the United States arguing for foreign policy activity all over the world. We're often trying to improve our position. And in international politics you can kind of expect that, but you should also expect that if you improve your position too much, there's going to be trouble.
And then the specific reasons to care about it in this case is because I think it has something to do with the diplomacy of trying to settle the conflict. And if Russia's motives were strongly security motives, not entirely, but merely strongly security motives, then security solutions might be part of the war settlement.
So if you believe the kind of argument that I'm making here and that others have made about Russia's preventive incentives, then you probably have to accept that NATO membership is not going to be part of any negotiated settlement. If you want that outcome, you probably have to put the idea of a negotiated settlement aside and fight for it, which means you really have to beat the Russians badly, right?
So that would be a practical implication for the current situation of a finding that preventive motives loomed large, security motives loomed large in Russian thinking.
[00:05:30] Jeff Friedman: Okay, so let's get into the weeds about those motives. The central claim of the piece, as I mentioned earlier, is that you say Putin feared that Ukraine's membership in NATO would irretrievably shift the balance of power against Russia. And I wonder if you could say a bit about why that is. I mean, after all, there were already two NATO members, Estonia and Latvia, on Russia's border in 2022. During the war and directly as a result of the war, Finland joined NATO. So if the goal was to keep NATO off Russia's borders, I mean, in some sense the war seems to have backfired. So what is it exactly that Russia fears about Ukraine, specifically, joining the NATO alliance and why should we think of that as a major threat to them?
[00:06:13] Barry Posen: Yeah. Well, the fact that it backfired isn't really relevant to Putin's thinking. I mean, he could have conceivably anticipated that it might backfire. But I think they had a theory of the war that suggested to them that it probably wouldn't, because I think they thought they could win quickly.
A friend of mine likes to say that Putin's concern was not so much Ukraine in NATO, but NATO in Ukraine. And there's about 2,000 kilometers of land border, 300 kilometers of sea border spanning a huge swath of Russia, particularly the Black Sea Region, where the Russians have always been very neuralgic.
And I think Russia feared what kind of military leverage this might provide the NATO alliance, and this is often the way states think. They say, well, it could be used this way, it could used that way, another way. So, sure, yeah, the Baltic states got into NATO. The Russians clearly didn't like it, but they're small states without too much strategic depth. It's a few hundred kilometers of border. It's a bad place, I mean, don't get me wrong, I actually think the Russians probably are pretty neuralgic about the Baltics and I think some of their reasons might be the same reasons that they might be neuralgic about the Ukraine-Russia border. But the scale is so much greater, right.
And I think if we look carefully at it, NATO people are sort of, when they're feeling triumphal, they still pound their chest and say, oh, we turned the Baltic into a NATO lake, and that's great—turned it into a NATO lake. But you’re in the process of turning the Black Sea into a NATO lake.
So here you are, two very consequential bodies of water for Russia, and NATO’s turned them both into NATO lakes? I mean, this is not exactly going to elicit a happy thought out of the Russians.
[00:07:57] Jeff Friedman: And the article has some really interesting description about why the specific location of Ukraine is potentially problematic for threatening specific Russian assets. You mentioned the Black Sea, that's obviously a major one. What are some other reasons why Russia might be specifically concerned about NATO assets across its border in Ukraine?
[00:08:16] Barry Posen: Well, this has been a theme of Russian military writing since the Kosovo War. They were very fearful of the capability that the United States had produced to do, large, precise, deep, intelligence-driven attacks, aimed to shatter the command and control and intelligence systems of their adversaries before destroying their weapons or their capabilities in segments, severally, and if you marry that non-nuclear capability to the Russians’ perceptions of American strategic nuclear doctrine, which is, I think we all agree substantively, whether we agree with it as a policy, I think we agree empirically that American nuclear doctrine is, it's a damage limitation doctrine that includes a lot of weapons systems that work best if in any conflict they're used early or first. And that command and control has long been a preferred target for nuclear strikes because the idea of that is if you can sever the brain from the forces, you could then beat the forces up in detail before they have a chance to get their weapons off and destroy whatever it is that your nuclear attributes are going to destroy. Now this is all very esoteric and I would say that I'm not a devotee of counterforce strategies. Damage limitation, I think it's very hard to do. But all through the Cold War, we and the Russians thought this way, and there's every reason to believe that we still do think this way, and that the Russians probably think this way.
You start marrying conventional and nuclear together all along this 2,000-kilometer border, oftentimes close to important Russian strategic missile early warning radars. And you can see why there's some private briefing in the Kremlin that says, yeah, boss, this situation could be horrific for us. So, that's the logic I try and reconstruct.
I don't think any of it requires a lot of leap of faith to take seriously. I think what many people would say is for them, it's a leap of faith to take seriously that anyone is actually concerned that their adversaries would mount a nuclear first strike. But that is clearly not how states think.
[00:10:36] Jeff Friedman: Even if Putin had reasons to be concerned that Ukraine would eventually join NATO, why do you think he chose to go to war when he did so? So for example, I mean, to my knowledge there was little sign that Ukraine was about to join the alliance anytime soon. There was no membership action program established for Ukraine despite Kyiv requesting that.
So why do we think that there was an urgency surrounding this? Did Putin have reasons to suspect that NATO membership for Ukraine was imminent or even in the absence of NATO membership, was he concerned about developing military relationship between the alliance and Kyiv?
[00:11:12] Barry Posen: Well first I think one of the things that I try and excavate in the piece is this whole membership action plan notion. And because the Ukrainians were for many years obsessed with getting a membership action plan, and many of their partisans and allies in the West were interested in getting them a membership action plan, because NATO used membership action plan as a way to prepare former Warsaw Pact members for membership in the alliance, an idea formed out there that as long as there was no member membership action plan, the Russians had nothing to worry about. What I do in the piece is sort of look at what is entailed at a membership action plan, and then look at all the other relationships that NATO had evolved with Ukraine over the proceeding 10 or 15 years, and show that for all intents and purposes, everything that was associated with a membership action plan had been done or was being done.
So what Putin had to worry about was that the decision to bring Ukraine into NATO was really an afternoon's work. That's what he had to worry about. So that's in the large. Now at the more micro or tactical level, the tactical might not be the right word, but at the everyday level of military relations, over the proceeding several years, basically since 2014, since the Russian annexation of Crimea and the combat that ensued, NATO's practical relationship, military relationship with Ukraine is becoming ever closer. And some of that even accelerated in the last year or two before the war.
Now, do I have an intuition about what it was that was the straw that broke the camel’s back? I don't, but I do think that there was an accretion of connections and capability, and I think we have to take seriously that Biden's director of the national intelligence, Avril Hanes, has said publicly in several places that Putin saw just how much Ukraine's military capabilities were improving.
So if she's willing to say that publicly, then I think we should take very seriously that Putin did see this and that it was important. And I think if we ever get a really high-resolution history of the first six months of the Ukraine-Russian War, we will probably see that the intensity of assistance that the West was able to provide really grew out of the foundations that have been laid in the previous several years.
[00:13:56] Jeff Friedman: Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned the Hanes quote. I was struck in reading the article—there's several quotes you have from high-ranking officials indicating that the United States saw this as a potential concern. I'll just highlight a few for the listeners. US Ambassador to Russia William Burns says in 2008, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite. I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine and NATO as other anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” Then you've got Fiona Hill, an intelligence officer on Russia, saying, “Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke preemptive Russian military action.”
So, I mean, clearly there's a sense that this is a concern. I wonder if you could just evaluate a little bit more first the magnitude of this threat. I mean, it's one thing to say that Russia views Ukraine's relationship with NATO as a threat. But the question is whether it rises to the level of threat that would justify what we saw. I mean, there's an attack against a country of 40 million people. It's the size of Texas. There's obviously major military downsides, strategic downsides to doing this. In your view, does the size of the threat that Ukraine's relationship to NATO posed, does that align with the scale of the threats that normally we think of as things that trigger preventive wars?
Or how do we get a sense of just how deeply Putin might have seen this as threatening Russian interests?
[00:15:19] Barry Posen: Yeah. Well, before we go any further, I want to object to the term “justify,” which has certain connotations. I'm not trying to justify, I'm trying to explain.
And just look at the examples that I cited that produced preventive wars in the past. Do any of those seem larger, require bigger leaps of imagination than the considerations that we've been talking about in the last few minutes? I don't really see it. I mean, in general, we should understand that there's a funny relationship between, say, the small-r realist tradition in diplomatic history and practice, which sees preventive war as being a fairly predictable thing, and at the same time the kind of advice of sage practitioners that, basically towards the end of their careers will often say, preventive war is really not such a great idea. So, there's an obvious tension there.
And that's because wars, not to be flippant, it's a sporting proposition. And in modern times you're taking some big risks. And indeed any war is, so, you're asking, what kind of a factor is this? And I think in most of the cases where you see preventive war being launched, there's a weighty change in the balance of power that's implicated in the preventer’s decision-making.
That said, you always—from your position of being at the end of your career of making trouble in international politics, and saying preventive war is a bad idea, you suddenly remember all the other things you might have tried, right? You might have tried diplomacy, you might have tried spending more on defense. You might have tried this, you might've tried that, right? And so there may be some chemistry that's required at the last minute to tip you over into the decision for war because it is such a big decision. I assume war decisions are always going to be somewhat complicated, right? So, to quote, our colleague, John Mearsheimer, in his early work, he talks about, there has to be a plan and the plan has to look kind of tempting to the decision-maker, right? And the decision-makers kind of want tempting plans. So they're pushing their advisors to find a plan, a plausible plan for quick, cheap victory. And in each case there's always some gimmick. I shouldn't say in each case, but in many cases there's always some gimmick. For the Israelis, the gimmick was in 1956, they're fighting with the British and the French. What could be better? For the Chinese, the gimmick is that we woefully underestimate them and they try and find ways to make a whole set of surprises work in their favor, and they do, and they know that they're working. For the Americans, it's just, we are America, they're Iraq, we fought them before. I mean, my goodness, how hard can this be?
And for Putin, I think it was what appears to us to be a kind of a rococo plan in which there would be a kind of a commando, an intelligence-driven coup d’état in Kyiv, a coup de main, as military people like to say, followed by a change of government. And I'm guessing that people will someday excavate the intelligence relations and what they saw and who lied to whom about whose stooge would stand up at the event of the coup. I'm sure there's a very interesting story there. Now, whether he had gone to his intelligence people to say, give me a plan—and by the way, these plans look like the type of invasions of Czechoslovkia or Afghanistan that happened in the Cold War, so would've seemed familiar to Putin, right? If he'd gone to them, said, give a plan, and they said, yeah, there is no plan, well, maybe he would have gone to the military, “You give me a plan.” And the military might have given him a very different plan from the plan that they implemented here with the rest of their forces was simply to wander across the border and expect people to cooperate. It doesn't look like there was a true operational military plan, right?
Maybe there would've been one and maybe Putin would've been tempted by it. And maybe it would've worked better. Or maybe they'd have said, nah, it's not, this is just too, for all the good we've done in the last few years of recovering the military, we need another five years. Maybe that's what they would've said.
I don't know. So that thing, that bit of decision making that tips you over, it could be a combination of things, but what we can say here about preventive motives is: I've used this term in other places, how high up on Putin's security agenda did Ukraine become? And all these factors, and I talk about it, pushed it very high on his security agenda, right?
And that's not necessarily a place you want any problem to be if you'd like to manage it in another way.
[00:20:18] Jeff Friedman: I think that's a good way of zooming out to see how the preventive war thesis fits with other explanations for why Russia invaded Ukraine. And of course, you mentioned these don't necessarily have to be substitutes. They can be compliments that, the idea that the preventive war motive puts this issue on Putin's agenda and then other factors might enable or push it over the top makes good sense in principle.
The paper engages a number of rival explanations for why the war was fought. So for example, you talk a bit about ideas about Putin's personal psychology. You talk a bit about common explanations for how Russian nationalism has a particular obsession with dominating Ukraine or reconciling Ukrainians and Russians.
Now you're very clear in your essay that you're not trying to assign explicit causal weight to one of these arguments relative to the others. Could you just say a bit why you don't think those other explanations hold up on their own? What is it that you feel like these other ideas don't explain, that the preventive war thesis helps to fill in the gaps on?
[00:21:22] Barry Posen: Well, I have found the causal chains to be to be murky. So, one argument is that Putin didn't like a liberal democracy on his doorstep, a big successful liberal democracy, because he somehow perceived his own position at home to be fragile. It's not obvious that his position at home was fragile, actually. It seems to be pretty strong. And at the moment, at that moment, it wasn't obvious that Ukraine's liberal democracy was thriving, right? So it just, the values of the variables don't align correctly for that argument.
Some people tried out the preventive war argument, I mean the diversionary war argument: He has a problems at home, so he is going to solve them abroad. I don't see the problems at home, and I don't particularly see the deductive logic for diversionary war theory. I mean, I think there's an allied theory you could make that has more logic. But that allied theory does not suggest you want a war. I would call it cohesionary conflict, which is you want to tell your people if there are threats everywhere, so you can justify tight control at home. But you need those threats to be alive to continue to make that justification. You don't want to go out and solve them, so then you don't have an argument. But I think in some ways the argument that has had the most legs in one form or another, because I think it's a shapeshifter, is that Putin and many people in the Russian establishment just see Ukraine as a natural part of Russia, rue the loss of Ukraine in a deep and emotional sense, tie it to their notion of Russian grandeur and to Russian nationalism, right? This is a potent argument. And I think it would be surprising if the Russians weren't particularly nationalistic, and I think to claim that Russian nationalism doesn't have a sharp-elbowed quality on its periphery would also be ahistorical. But the thing that jumps out at me is the non-events. In other words, for Russian nationalism to be a big motive, it should be a kind of a permanent sort of ache in the Russian belly and they should be looking to get rid of that ache when the conditions are conducive, right?
So. I look at 2014 when they managed to stir up a lot of trouble in Donetsk and Luhansk, and even from time to time when their local proxies had trouble putting their own military forces in, the Ukrainian military was in parlous shape. And Western actors retrospectively say that to some extent we cooked up a lot of dust around this Minsk agreement just to buy time because we were afraid that Putin, if Putin did his worst, that would be the end.
So here's a moment of great juicy opportunity if you are a kind of a congenital, aggressive national imperialist, to just grab that piece of fruit and get it back. And they don't take it. They don't take it. So this is like the dog that didn't bark, right. And to me it's a very important non-event. And I think, to a lesser extent, you have a similar non-event when Trump was being impeached for his strange machinations in Ukraine. Now that overlapped with Covid, so it would've been harder to launch a military operation. But Putin is meant to be this horrible person. Why would he care about Covid among his troops or in Ukraine or anywhere else? We continued to fight in 1918 during the influenza, right? So I could imagine him saying, “Hey, this is kind of a good moment. True, I mean, Ukrainians have really angered the Trump administration. Trump's kind of angry at everyone. He's sort of back-footed. His relations with his allies aren't particularly good right now. He said rude things about them, let's finish the job.”
So there's opportunity too, and he doesn't take that one either. And then I think there's a kind of opportunity, not opportunity three, but process here, right? Which I didn't talk about much in the paper, but there's a long period of Russian coercive diplomacy before this war in which they're trying to get some of what they want by agreement.
Now what they're asking is some cases is very grandiose and they were never going to get it, but the one thing that's noteworthy is that they did ask for assurances that there never would be any Ukrainian membership in NATO. And the Biden administration's diplomatic response, NATO's diplomatic response offered nothing to the Russians on that point.
So I think that the nationalism explanation as a direct explanation of Putin's decision-making doesn't work very well. As a background condition that made Ukraine a neuralgic issue for Russia, I think it probably could be expected to be such a thing. And did it perhaps color subjectively his views of the war? I can't rule that out. But you know, what I'm trying to do in this paper is take arguments about things that NATO did and things that the Russians may have seen that have to do with Russian security and put them together in one comprehensive whole, and look at them in light of what preventive war theory would predict for the case, to show that this looks a lot like a phenomenon we have seen a lot in international politics, and for which we have a strong theoretical explanation.
[00:27:01] Jeff Friedman: You mentioned at the top of our discussion how one of the reasons why sorting out this debate matters is that if one wants to figure out how to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, it's important to know what the combatants’ war aims are. There's another part of the article at the end where you say that one of the reasons why your argument is significant is it suggests the West bears at least some political responsibility for the war.
And I wonder if you could just flesh out what that means and why it's relevant and in particular how that would shape the approach that the West might take towards the war in the coming months or years.
[00:27:36] Barry Posen: Well, I'm trying to make a kind of a—it's a complicated point for a realist to make, right. When I say political responsibility, what I'm saying here is that we in the West, NATO, the United States, over many years, did things that scratched a wound for the Russians, created concerns. We did it in the face of warnings, not just from the Russians, but from Russia experts in our own camp, intelligence people in our own camp. We moved forward despite warnings, despite an understanding of the risks we were taking. Now, the Ukrainians, to some extent, wanted this, but that didn't mean we had to encourage it, right?
So when this blows up in our face, there's some element of what Colin Powell used to call the Pottery Barn Rule that applies, which is if you break it, you own it. Now, I don't think, I never liked the way that was translated into a policy implication, which is, and therefore you had to stay in the same shattered country for 20 years trying to rebuild it.
And I don't think that it means we have to stay in the same really destructive, and, I think, a kind of indecisive war that we are bound to support or have been supporting, I think that the Democrats would've continued to support. I don't think it means that, but what I think it means is that Western leaders have to make a coherent effort to bring this thing to some kind of a close. And this is especially true given that we don't, we in the West have not developed a theory of victory for the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians have had a theory of victory and some of their partisans in the West have had a theory of victory. And that theory of victory involves either, involves give the Ukrainians whatever they ask for from point of military technology, and don't worry about whether they can operate it, or whether the Russians will react in an extremely negative way to it that we might not want, just give it to them, or go into the war ourselves, which is even more sporting, right? Neither of these two nostrums seem very practicable, so if they're not, then what we're left with is just feeding the meter on an attrition war that we hope the Ukrainians can somehow win despite being outnumbered by three or four to one demographically, or put our own shoulder to the wheel to try and bring a thing to an end, which means that we may have to pay some people off, make some compromises, eat some crow, accept some prestige losses, right? To try and undo the damage that to some extent we helped cause, right. Now that's not a legal claim. In international law, the Russians are the guilty party. In terms of a moral claim, it's not really a moral claim, right? The Russians have egregiously done horrible things. It's a weird kind of realist practitioner's ethical claim, right? That basically says if you want a stable world order, you have to work to create it. And that doesn't just mean demanding that everyone look like you and act like you and be like you. It means dealing with reality as it is.
[00:31:18] Jeff Friedman: Yeah, and I think the, I mean, one of the reasons why it just seems so important to assign causal weight to each hypothesis in this debate relative to each other is, I mean, among many reasons, is because it really does give one a sense of exactly how much that sort of pragmatic ethic comes into play for thinking about the war's end.
And I think the piece does a nice job of helping readers to figure that out for themselves. Let me ask you just a last question, Barry. If we expand our focus beyond Ukraine, what kind of lessons do you think this analysis has for thinking about US foreign policy more generally?
I think you mentioned at the start of the conversation that you made a point about how foreign policy–makers don't often understand the degree to which their actions might trigger a kind of preventive war logic or response or fear from their adversaries. Do you see that as a generalizable lesson for the United States?
Does it tell us anything about how the United States should conduct its affairs in other parts of the world?
[00:32:14] Barry Posen: Well, I think it's a lesson that small-r realists have been trying to suggest in their writings about statecraft for a long time. Mostly realists are accused of focusing on states’ perception of threat and their reactions to threat and their willingness to, the need prudentially to prepare yourself against threats.
But there's another kind of prudence that you need in an anarchical system, which is maybe you don't want to look too strong, maybe you don't want to look too fierce. Maybe you want to imagine how others see you. This is embedded in sort of the logic of the security dilemma, which is a more modern statement of the problem. Don't fare too well, right?
Because others also are looking to their own security. So the rule of prudence cuts both ways. One must be prudent about defending oneself and looking out at the world and being aware of threats. One must also be prudent about the problems one might pose for others. Right, now, all great powers, this advice has been given to all great powers. They often fail to follow it. If they followed it more, maybe we as international relations theorists would have less horrible stuff to study.
In United States, it has mattered more, I believe, or should have mattered more in the post–Cold War world because the United States was so incredibly strong relative to others for so many years. I would say the first 10, 15 years in the post–Cold War world, the United States’ power really dwarfed that of others, right? Things began to change with China's rise and Russia getting off the mat. But that comes a little bit later, right? And you combine that with sort of the heady wine of American exceptionalism, which has a big element of liberal order, liberalism, in it.
And we basically think of ourselves as the good guys. and no one should be afraid of us. At the same time our writ runs wherever we think the good-guy writ needs to run. And we assume that we're self-insured because we live here and they live there and it's our PGMs that are going down the chimneys of other countries, not their PGMs that are going down the chimneys of ours.
So we always assume, without even thinking about it, that if anything goes wrong, we have plenty of insurance because we have plenty of power. And some of the facts of the case have changed, right? America's relative power has changed a bit, and that's one reason to be more concerned. But the second is that old habits die hard, right?
So, as America tries to shift its attention to Asia and tries to, in its eyes, shore up defensive positions in Asia, we should be aware that in the process of shoring up defensive positions, we may appear in a different light to China. And there are some issues that are very problematical for both of us.
Taiwan's very problematical for both of us and we have a kind of propensity to make Taiwan the Berlin of the new Cold War with China. But the difference here is that we never intimated that we thought Berlin belonged to the Soviet Union, and in our negotiations with China, which regulized our relations with them and turned them to an ally against the Soviets at the end of the war, we more or less accepted the One China principle.
What we didn't accept was any particular way to solve the One China problem, or who would be the solver, but we did accept, I think China experts would say, the idea that there's one. Well, this already creates a kind of complicated problem, and we know that the Chinese Communist Party really legitimates itself on the basis of nationalism and the restoration of lands lost in the period of unequal treaties.
Well, this is very volatile stuff. And the last thing we want to intimate, however much we would like to secure Taiwan, is that we're going to secure Taiwan so much that Taiwanese independence is simply going to be a fact of life, an unalterable fact of life forever. The Chinese get that idea that we are in that business, I have a fear that a different kind of preventive war motive could arise, but still a preventive war motive. And that's like kind of the little lesson that I close with in the piece.
[00:36:59] Jeff Friedman: Yeah, the last line of the piece is, “It would be best if there was no retrospective article ever written on China's preventive war over Taiwan.” And I think we can all agree that statement is true. Thank you, Barry.
Thank you for being here and thanks to everyone for listening to the International Security Podcast produced by International Security, a quarterly journal at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, published by MIT Press. If you like the conversation, please take a moment to rate and review us or to share us on social media as that helps other people find the show. I'm Jeff Friedman. The executive editor of International Security is Jacqueline L Hazelton. Our producer is Monica Achen. Our associate producer and technical director is Benn Craig. Thanks again to our guest, Barry Posen. See you next time.