"The Case for “Avalanche Decoupling” From China" - by CWP alum Eyck Freymann
As tensions rise in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, U.S. efforts to deter Chinese aggression suffer from a fundamental credibility problem. The United States has conventional and strategic tools to deter Beijing, including the threat of punishing economic sanctions. But China is much too big and integrated into the global trading system to expel it from the world economy overnight. A sudden economic break between Beijing and Washington would be devastating for the United States and catastrophic for the rest of the world. Financial panic and supply chain disruptions would fracture the international economic order and undermine U.S. leadership. China might calculate that the United States would be unwilling to take such risks—or that even if it tried, the rest of the world would resist U.S. pressure to choose between the two powers.
Punishing Beijing for unprovoked aggression would be essential to maintaining U.S. credibility and leverage, but it would have to be balanced with U.S. interests. These include preserving macroeconomic and financial stability, dollar hegemony, and a functional and rules-based international trading system, as well as breaking U.S. and allied dependence on the Chinese market. Even in an extreme crisis scenario—for example, if Beijing attacked U.S. bases in East Asia during an invasion of Taiwan—attempting a total and immediate economic decoupling from China would be a costly and dangerous gamble. It would subordinate all other U.S. interests to a punishment strategy that might not even work.
Planning for Dramatic U.S. Action in a Crisis Will Make One Less Likely
Eyck Freymann and Hugo Bromley - January 29, 2025
Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also a non-resident research fellow at the China Maritime Studies Institute at the US Naval War College.
A diplomatic historian and China specialist by training, Dr. Freymann has created work spanning the fields of political economy, climate policy, and national security. His first book, One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World, was published by Harvard University Press in 2021. His essays on China and other current affairs topics have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic. As a reporter and columnist for The Wire China, he is also the author of “The Warming War,” a series of investigative reports about the role of climate change in the US-China rivalry. He is currently working on two book projects: one about the geopolitics of climate and the other about the defense of Taiwan.
Dr. Freymann was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at the Belfer Center's Arctic Initiative and the Columbia–Harvard China and the World Program. He holds a doctorate in China studies from Balliol College, University of Oxford; master’s degrees in China studies from Harvard University and St Edmunds College, University of Cambridge; and a bachelor’s in East Asian history from Harvard College.
Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/daramsri-100727/ & https://pixabay.com/users/jacky73490-6485205/
