The war in Ukraine has provided its fair share of surprises. The Ukrainian army’s gritty resistance continues to surpass the expectations of military analysts in the West. The Russian army, which seemed so formidable on paper, has turned out to be a clunky, ineffective colossus with poor leadership at the top and little motivation at the bottom, its troops serving as cannon fodder in the Donbas.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, once thought of as a master strategist and savvy opportunist, has exposed himself as a mere mortal whose obsession with personal glory has both degraded his country’s geopolitical position—to take one example, NATO will soon have two additional members, one of which, Finland, shares a long border with Russia—and harmed its future prospects.
The war has deprived Russia of its most lucrative energy market, cut it off from Western banking services and technology, increased its dependence on China economically and politically, and exacerbated its demographic problems by prompting hundreds of thousands of its young people to flee the country, if they haven’t already been killed fighting.
What the U.S. government may or may not do in one region of the world tells us next to nothing about what it might do in another.
The one constant element in this slew of surprises has been the familiar claim that U.S. credibility is on the line and will rise or fall depending on the war’s result and that Ukraine must therefore be provided the weaponry it needs to prevail.
The logic underlying this assertion can be summarized as follows: If the United States does not stand firm against an adversary like Russia, some other rival, somewhere else, even one located far afield, will be emboldened to test the limits of America’s resolve. In short, every region is connected and every decision the United States makes will have global ramifications.
Invoking credibility has long been a favorite pastime for many foreign-policy luminaries in part because it provides a simple explanation for complicated international events that may lack a single answer. The obsession with credibility is hardly limited to the United States. The Soviet Union, for instance, partly justified its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan as a way to demonstrate its credibility to other Soviet-aligned governments and movements around the world. France’s president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, reportedly regarded France’s leadership role in the 2011 intervention against Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi as a way to shore up its reputation in the Arab world.
If international politics is all about maintaining credibility, then other factors that help us understand why leaders act the way they do—including individual psychology, the desire for prestige, or calculations related to the balance of power—can be ignored.
The war in Ukraine has occasioned much simplistic analysis along these lines. The examples are endless. Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt traced Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and opined that the Kremlin “took note” of Washington’s impatience and lack of staying power.
This January, Sen. Lindsey Graham asserted that Taiwan’s fate could actually hinge on the what happened on Ukraine’s battlefields. “If Putin gets away with this,” he warned, “there goes Taiwan.” Rep. Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, echoed this same point during a television appearance: “If Ukraine falls, Chairman Xi [Jinping] in China’s going to invade Taiwan.”
Not one of these claims is supported by solid evidence. In fact, there is a substantial amount of scholarship on the significance of credibility, and the findings lead to the opposite conclusion. For instance, in Calculating Credibility, a seminal work on the subject, Dartmouth University professor Daryl Press concludes that leaders assess a nation’s credibility on whether it has the interest and power to deliver on a threat—not on what it did in the past in a completely unrelated context.
In short, what the U.S. government may or may not do in one region of the world tells us next to nothing about what it might do in another. The U.S. decision to extricate itself from a failing two-decade war in Afghanistan may therefore prove of little value in predicting how it might react were Russia to attack Eastern Europe.
To believe otherwise is not only misplaced; it’s dangerous, because such reasoning could lead the U.S. government to make choices—like continuing a war that it cannot win or intervening in conflicts that are of scant consequence to U.S. interests—that waste its resources, all in the name of credibility.
Unfortunately, the United States has a tragic history of doing precisely that. The U.S. military was mired in a failing war in Vietnam partly due to the belief that calling it quits might induce the Soviet leadership to test American resolve in Europe, encourage adversaries around the world, and undermine U.S. alliances in Asia. Three decades later, the United States found itself stuck in yet another civil war, this time in Afghanistan, motivated in part by the conviction that allowing the Taliban to prevail would lead adversaries and competitors to doubt Washington’s staying power in the face of dogged resistance.
A more recent version of this logic was the prediction that pulling out of Afghanistan would lead allies everywhere to question the reliability of U.S. security assurances. Some NATO allies were either opposed to the U.S. withdrawal or dismayed by the manner in which Washington implemented it. Yet a year and a half later, those same allies clamor for an even deeper U.S. commitment to Europe. Their worries about Washington’s credibility have been pushed to the periphery.
Republican lawmakers aren’t the only ones who brandish the credibility thesis to burnish their hawkish credentials. Some Democratic legislators, such as Sen. Richard Blumenthal, have suggested that China may be sizing up the U.S. military’s behavior toward Ukraine as it plans for military action against Taiwan. China “is watching what we do in Ukraine,” Blumenthal said during a television interview last year. “That’s why we need to provide more humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and [impose] stronger sanctions.”
As Putin massed his troops along Ukraine’s border, one pundit warned that “China is watching. If Putin can invade Ukraine, Taiwan may be next.” A year into the invasion, experts at a prominent Washington think tank made the same argument—the United States must be unflinching in backing Kyiv lest its lack of steadiness convey weakness to Beijing and tempt the People’s Liberation Army to launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan.
These sweeping prognostications, unsupported by solid evidence, amount to wild, airy claims.
Consider Xi and Taiwan. Unification with Taiwan—peacefully, if possible; forcibly, if necessary—is doubtless one of the Chinese Communist Party’s highest priorities. Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang reiterated this on March 7 after an annual meeting of the National People’s Congress. But how likely is it that Xi would take such a momentous action, which attacking Taiwan would certainly be, based on what the United States does or does not do in Ukraine?
Chinese leaders’ decisions relating to Taiwan are far more likely to be influenced by the strength and durability of the U.S. military presence in East Asia.
Given the damage that an invasion of Taiwan could do to China’s own wealth and power, it’s not very likely. There can be no doubt that Beijing realizes that Chinese military casualties would be high and the risk of nuclear war substantial if the U.S. government rushed to Taiwan’s defense. Shock waves would course through the global economy: Global supply chains would be severely disrupted, stock values would plummet, interest rates and energy prices would skyrocket.
Chinese leaders’ decisions relating to Taiwan are far more likely to be influenced by the strength and durability of the U.S. military presence in East Asia, the capacity of Taiwan’s armed forces, and the degree to which the United States is increasing military cooperation with allies and partners, such as Japan, Australia, India, and Vietnam—countries that have a shared interest in balancing Chinese power.
Despite the military and economic costs, it is certainly possible that Xi might still order his military commanders to attack the island. But his choices will be shaped by other factors, chief among them his assessment of whether the military balance of power in East Asia favors China enough to take a gamble and whether China could prevail without having to fight a long, bloody war that would sap its military and economic strength.
Xi will also ponder whether the benefits of reunifying Taiwan with the Chinese mainland are worth the inevitable economic consequences associated with such a war; after all, China’s future as a great power, as well as the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy, depends on sustaining its trading relationships and economic success.
Today’s China is deeply connected to the global economy through investments, trade, energy prices, infrastructure projects, and complicated supply chains, all of which are critical to Chinese production and employment. Would Xi risk jeopardizing all of this for the sake of acquiring Taiwan, particularly now that Ukraine has demonstrated just how costly, not to mention unpredictable, wars of aggression can be?
The problems that Russia has run up against in Ukraine—not how resolute the United States proved to be in helping that country or how American leaders acted in some other unrelated crisis—will matter much more in determining Xi’s choices related to Taiwan.
Despite overwhelming evidence that balance-of-power dynamics in a particular context are the North Star of countries’ foreign-policy choices, the credibility thesis remains ubiquitous in American popular discourse. It won’t disappear overnight. Still, scholars should challenge its claims relentlessly in order to chip away at its influence.
