Interview: Ian Easton
Conducted by Story Pennock
Below is an interview with Ian Easton. This was conducted in order to supplement an article on China’s potential invasion of Taiwan, which can be found on the ‘Articles page’. Happy reading!
Pennock: Can you talk about the research process that your team underwent to come to its conclusions? How does one study a hypothetical?
Easton: The best way to study what might happen in the future is to look at the past and assessments that have been done and plans that have been made in the past.
I looked at a lot of PLA writings - Chinese military writings - about how they sell the invasion of Taiwan and write about why they must conquer Taiwan. They talk about geostrategic, economic, and historical reasons.
Once I had a decent idea of the Chinese perspective, I looked at it from the American perspective. I tried to think through why Taiwan matters to us economically, technologically, and ideologically. I looked at the UN charter and the idea of the post-war order the US established after WWII; I looked at things like popular sovereignty and state sovereignty. We take them for granted, but it's like oxygen; you're in trouble as soon as it's gone!
There is an element to it that is very hypothetical; you have to use creative thinking and use a lot of if/then questions. If you're developing a scenario, there is no empirical evidence. We don't know what an invasion’s impact would look like; we can only speculate and do our best to make educated guesses.
We can look at why Taiwan matters today: it’s the 8th largest trading partner on a GDP basis. There is some empirical evidence that we can apply, but there is also a bit of creativity and guesswork you have to do.
Pennock: Can you share your three biggest findings that people must absolutely understand about the severity of this conflict?
Easton: It matters to every American because if Taiwan falls, there almost certainly will be a Great Depression in our country. The economic devastation will be beyond anything we've ever seen before in living memory, and it will undermine our economy and our freedoms.
The Internet as we know it would be dead. Taiwan is essential for the future of the Internet; for the Internet to remain free and open, we need to have Taiwan. We get over 90% of our chips from Taiwan, which is the centralized location for our advanced technological supply chains; because we do live in an Information Age, we do have an increasingly digital economy if that falls into the hands of an authoritarian regime like Beijing we no longer have freedom of speech in our country.
Unless we had some kind of Manhattan Project - like a moonshot to very quickly, indigenously replace all of that - that's not happening today. We're not ready for that, and there is no guarantee that that would be successful. And certainly, because the chip industry is so capitally intensive, it would be a nightmare to scrounge up trillions of dollars when your economy had just lost trillions of dollars. It would take maybe a decade to recover, and by that time, it would be too late; China could put a thumb on the scale, silence people, and control potential election results in our country.
It could undermine democracy in our country: if all of our communications are controlled by an authoritarian country and all of our highest companies are subject to limitless coercion and held hostage, we are also in a very dangerous position.
There are also other implications for conventional or nuclear war, but those are far removed from the average American. But there would likely be political instability, riots in the street spiking from mass violence.
Pennock: Can you expand upon the geopolitical impacts regionally and globally of the potential invasion?
Easton: The same applies globally; if China was successful, I think it would undermine our alliance networks and very likely undermine NATO and very reasonably undermine our alliances with Asia-pacific. Once that happens, then you have two things occurring:
Some countries will almost certainly fall into China's orbit and lose their own sovereignty as proxies; they won't be able to say no. For example, Beijing will tell them who to trade with, who not to trade with, and which electronics to use and which electronics not to use in all of their political infrastructure. This has already begun for weaker countries worldwide, and it would certainly destroy nations playing a balancing game between the US and China.
To maintain their sovereignty and action, other countries would have to militarize and develop their own weapons; there would be nuclear arms racing like nothing we've ever seen before. In the US, we saw a bipolar world between the US and the Soviets rather than other countries. Still, in this kind of Orwellian dog-on-dog world, you would see countries like Japan becoming very militaristic, and that would cause a lot of proliferation and heavy net countries engaged in arms racing. It would almost certainly lead to World War Three at some point.
This is the same way Germany was the center of all foreign policy in the cold war. What happened with the Berlin Wall and the iron curtain reverberated around the world, which, at the time, could have opened a hopeful future or Pandora's box.
Pennock: How can Americans help national security?
Easton: One basic way is to look around your house and make sure that you don't have TikTok, and if you do, you should get rid of it; that's only helping China's authoritarian government because it's taking all of your data, and the more data that it has, the richer and more powerful they'll be. Americans can get rid of Lenovo computers and IBM as well.
If you can't afford to get rid of it, don't, but make sure the next time you buy a major product, it's not made in China. That includes anything General Electric Home makes: smart ovens, driers, washing machines, and microwaves.
We've been so distracted by the wars in the Middle East, and we are just now getting smarter on these issues. But China's government is competing with us in a domain we have never had to fight in, and that's the economic and commercial domain. Spend your money on American electronics.
Pennock: How are we removing or how can the US remove weak spots in the Asia Pacific?
Easton: Sending special forces and marines to Taiwan in a low-key fashion to serve as intelligence collectors, liaisons, and advisors; increasing surveillance in the region and working more with other allies and partners, including Taiwan, to prepare for other potential scenarios.
Pennock: Would China sending troops to Taiwan affect the post-war order?
Easton: Yes, we tried to establish a world order in which countries would respect each other's borders and sovereignty. We lived in a world for 100000 years where invasions were the way of life, and it was miserable. After World War Two, there was finally a realization that we don't want to live in a world like that anymore; it was no longer legal to invade other countries and take over their territory and rule a vanquished population.
The Chinese can use any pretext they want, but according to my history books, invasions are a recipe for catastrophe.
The few times since 1945 when countries did invade their neighbors (North Korea to South Korea or North Vietnam to South Vietnam and Iraq invading Kuwait) in each of those instances there was a very strong reaction from the United States, and it was so strong and so effective for so long that we began to believe that war was no longer normal and it actually became taboo.
All countries have inherent value and what happens to one country matters to every other country, just as what happens to any human being matters to all human beings. Still, in terms of Ukraine's trade relationships with other countries, Ukraine doesn't directly impact many countries. However, there's still a massively strong reaction from the US and NATO allies because there is a realization that state sovereignty is essential and irreplaceable. We can't go back into a world where it's ok for Russia to invade its neighbors; if we do, we will be opening Pandora's box.
The more you feed an ambitious, hungry, expansionistic, one-party dictatorship, the more they take, and it never stops.
Story Pennock is a college student and co-founder of the Rosebud News. As her name would suggest, she loves telling stories and giving her unsolicited opinion about literature, history, and current events. Her pastimes include going to museums, reading, researching historical fashion, playing guitar, listening to Brit-pop and maintaining her Duo Lingo Italian/Turkish/Portuguese streak (just dont ask her to say anything other than nouns).