Richard Bush and Michael O’Hanlon offer the following guidelines “that should inform Chinese and American leaders if they found themselves in the early stages of a military conflict” over Taiwan in their forthcoming book, A War Like No Other: The Truth About China’s Challenge to America:

• Not to expand the geographic scope of any U.S.-PRC fight beyond Taiwan’s immediate vicinity, with a particular effort to avoid attacks on mainland China, Japan, and Guam (or the territorial waters surrounding them).
• Not to escalate to general conventional war (with possible attacks on command and control sites or other facilities near Beijing, Honolulu, San Diego, and so on).
• Not to fire (even conventionally) upon the other major power’s nuclear forces.
• Not to ready nuclear weapons for use.
• Not to use nuclear weapons in any way, even against ships or isolated land bases or (via high-altidude bursts) against electronics.

As should be clear from the nature of the discussion, the authors, despite the title, don’t actually believe that China’s “challenge to America” is especially profound. Rather, they worry that China might “challenge” America by seeking to exercize de facto control over the entire extent of China’s de jure territory.

UPDATE: I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to try to preserve Taiwanese autonomy from the PRC, which is certainly a complicated issue (see here for the case for abandonmnet). Nevertheless, this simply isn’t an instance of a Chinese challenge to America (we derive no tangible benefits whatsoever from Taiwanese autonomy). There’s a Chinese challenge to Taiwan and the possibility of an American challenge to Beijing on behalf of Taiwan.

My previous effort at Québec-blogging got bogged down in a discussion of conquering Atlantic Canada, so I didn’t get to return to my core point which was not to be an apologist for the Parti Québécois but simply to note that the ADQ, not the PQ, is the worst of the province’s three parties. I stand with John on this:

It’s so rare for Canadian politics to make it out of the Canadian-blogging ghetto, so let me grasp this moment while I can… I have to say, I’m not nearly as optimistic as Scott Lemieux when he says “Ah, you always have to like it when the ethnic nationalist secessionists finish third.” The ADQ — the party that pushed the overtly-secessionist Parti Quebecois in to third place — is actually chock full of ethnic nationalists (and plenty of other nasty characters besides) and has more than one secessionist in its ranks, though I’m not sure if any one member actually combines both sides. In contrast, the PQ in this election was actually led by a gay man whose aim was to try and present a more multicultural, tolerant view of Quebec’s traditionally racist separatist movement.* He lost votes to a party with a candidate who denied the Rwandan Genocide took place. So yes, ethnic nationalism in Quebec — from which the secessionist impulse flows — did very well this week, at the expense of a more progressive vision of Quebec society.

Right.

Readers alerted me to this Zbigniew Brzezinski appearance on The Daily Show which I found both amusing and informative, like a fake news segment should be.

His arguments are by no means entirely original, but they’re ones that have gotten stunningly little purchase within the realm of establishment figures who get taken seriously by politicians looking for advisors, staff, etc. A former National Security Advisor ought to carry some weight and credibility in this town, but to a shocking extent the mere possession of relevant credentials and good ideas doesn’t actually get you very far in terms of being able to influence the establishment in question.

Greg Sargent does some worthy pushback against the growing media spin that Barack Obama may be “all style and no substance.” The grain of truth that this lie is spun out of is, of course, that as of March 28, 2007 Barack Obama does not have anything resembling a detailed plan for national health care policy. Sargent notes that he has, however, given two major speeches on foreign policy issues.

I would also note that the education section of his issues page contains two substantive and somewhat distinctive policy ideas along with a fairly commonplace-for-a-Democrat higher ed proposal. Obama’s “health for hybrids” plan is certainly a policy idea. Obama’s been working on the Senate on some dull homeland security topics and while one hopes that nobody ever gets credit for having sponsored the legislation that made a terrorist attack on a chemical plant something that killed dozens rather than thousands, I’m glad someone’s minding this topic.

Returning to health care, the relevant section of his website is thin on what you’d traditionally call health care policies. To fill it out, they had to shoehorn in something about fighting the problem of AIDS in the developed world and of protecting children from lead poisoning. Those are, however, real issues and Obama has real policies on them. Meanwhile, for the core health topics let’s just note that it’s late March 2007; all of the candidates have some issue-areas they haven’t yet addressed.

I hadn’t realized that Zbigniew Brzezinski had a new book out. It did, however, spark a great David Ignatius column noting that “Brzezinski was right about Iraq, warning early and emphatically of the dangers of an American invasion at a time when most foreign policy pundits (including this one) were, with whatever quibbles, supporting President Bush’s decision to go to war.”

Brzezinski paid a price for being outspoken — he was excluded from some of the inner circles frequented by former national security advisers who don’t rock the boat. In this respect, Brzezinski’s cranky outsider status served him well (and the uber-insider status of his life rival, Henry Kissinger, proved something of a hindrance for the former secretary of state). So on matters of foreign policy, we should listen especially carefully to what Brzezinski has to say.

James Lindsay is somewhat less impressed but still offers some serious praise. “What Second Chance does offer is a wise insight that should guide any effort to fashion a strategy to restore American leadership . . . if the United States is to avoid becoming the target of their resentment, its foreign policy must be seen as serving their interests as well as its own. That means exercising self-restraint rather than pressing every advantage that comes to a superpower; it means listening to others and not just working to preserve our own peace and prosperity but helping others to build their own.”

Britain steps up the pressure on Iran and releases some fairly convincing evidence for the claim that its sailors were in Iraqi waters when the Iranians seized them. I’ve learned, of course, to treat these sort of official claims with some skepticism, but that applies to Iran’s counter-claims as well, so I don’t really know where it leaves you.

For a while, I was of the “let’s stop coddling Musharraf and get serious about democracy!” school of thought with regard to Pakistan. Then that came to seem a little silly and naive to me. More recently, my internal pendulum is swinging the other way. Blake Hounshell has an article on this that, I think, nicely spells out the biggest problem here:

[Rep. Gary] Ackerman worries that if Musharraf is forced out, be it by politicking military generals or via genuine elections, the United States will be left friendless. Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a visiting scholar at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, has a different concern. With the United States being seen as supporting Musharraf’s actions, “any anti-Musharraf agitation also takes on an anti-American shape,” even among groups not especially opposed to U.S. policies in the past.

Of course it’s both/and, not either/or. And this, really, is what went awry in Iran. Having decided that any alternative to the Shah was likely to be worse for us than the Shah, we backed the Shah, which had the effect of making us even more dependent on the Shah as we had no other points of entry into Iran and all other political currents became increasingly hostile to the United States. But nothing lasts forever. America’s policy to Pakistan can’t just be one man; and especially not when unvarnished support for that man cuts us off from any ability to work with other potential leaders — some of whom are essentially destined to become more important in the future. We don’t even really need to support democracy, as such, though democracy is a good thing. The point, rather, is that we need to orient our Pakistan policy around Pakistani policies — enduring ways in which we’d like Pakistan to help us, and enduring ways in which we are prepared to help Pakistan in exchange rather than around transient personalities.