Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Today I invite emails debating any of the following subjects: war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, or natural resources. Read on for more context.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

After the television host Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News, he posted a video message to Twitter that quickly went viral. In it, he noted that, in his newfound “time off” he has observed that “most of the debates you see on television” are so stupid and irrelevant that, in five years, we won’t even remember we had them. “Trust me, as someone who's participated,” he added, which squares with my impression of his show––an assessment I feel comfortable making only because I have carefully documented its shoddy reasoning.

But then Carlson added: “The undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War. Civil liberties. Emerging science. Demographic change. Corporate power. Natural resources. When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues? It’s been a long time. Debates like that are not permitted in American media.” I disagree, and not just because I intend to air your perspectives on those very subjects.

Last March, this newsletter invited debate about the war in Ukraine and ran your responses. On the whole, The Atlantic––and most of the mainstream media––has published a lot more total articles from people who are supportive of Western aid for Ukraine, as I am, than contrary perspectives. But as you can see, this newsletter has made it a point to highlight the smartest writing I could find from different perspectives. If you look, you can find additional examples of contrasting perspectives from across the U.S. media: in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, National Review, Vox, and beyond. There are all sorts of plausible critiques of the way the American news media has covered Ukraine. But “debate is not permitted” is demonstrably false.

On civil liberties, which I’ve championed on scores of occasions in The Atlantic, the notion that debate isn’t permitted is likewise preposterous. Few issues are debated more than the parameters of free speech, abortion rights, gun rights, transgender rights, pandemic rights and restrictions, and more. “Emerging science” is a bit vague, but surely debates about mRNA-vaccine mandates and artificial intelligence count. The Atlantic has repeatedly published entries in ongoing debates about demographic change. I understand corporate power to be a perennial topic of debate in journalistic organizations. As for natural resources, I’ve recently read about subjects including climate change, gas stoves, Colorado River water supply, oil drilling and pipelines, and plastics pollution.

Again, there are all sorts of critiques of the media that are plausible, on those subjects and others, but the particular critique that Carlson actually prepared and uttered is demonstrably false, so I find it strange that so many people reacted to it by treating Carlson as if he is a truth-teller. Lots of people in the American media work much harder at avoiding the utterance of falsehoods.

How to Mark May 1?

The law professor Ilya Somin commemorates it every year in a highly nontraditional fashion, arguing that we all ought to treat the traditional workers holiday as Victims of Communism Day.

Here’s his case:

Since 2007, I have advocated using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. I outlined the rationale for this proposal (which was not my original idea) in my very first post on the subject: May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes' millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so …

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.

Meanwhile, at the World Socialist Web Site, David North published the speech he gave to open the International May Day Online Rally. His remarks included provocative statements about the war in Ukraine:

The present war in Ukraine and the escalating conflict with China are the manifestations, though on a much more advanced and complex level, of the global contradictions analyzed by Lenin more than a century ago. Far from being the sudden and unexpected outcome of Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion—as if the expansion of NATO 800 miles eastward since 1991 did not constitute a provocation against Russia—the war in Ukraine is the continuation and escalation of 30 years of continuous war waged by the United States. The essential aim of the unending series of conflicts has been to offset the protracted economic decline of US imperialism and to secure its global hegemony through military conquest.

In 1934, Leon Trotsky wrote that while German imperialism sought to “organize Europe,” it was the ambition of US imperialism to “organize the world.” Using language that seemed intended to confirm Trotsky’s analysis, Joe Biden, then a candidate for the presidency, wrote in April 2020: “The Biden foreign policy will place the United States back at the head of the table … the world does not organize itself.” But the United States confronts a world that does not necessarily want to be organized by the United States. The role of the dollar as the world reserve currency, the financial underpinning of American geo-political supremacy, is being increasingly challenged. The growing role of China as an economic and military competitor is viewed by Washington as an existential threat to American dominance.

Imperialism is objectionable but to me that premise leads to a starkly different conclusion: that the imperial ambitions of Russia and China ought to be resisted and that insofar as NATO or the United States helps Ukraine or Taiwan, we are reducing the likelihood of imperial conquest, not engaging in it.

More to Come on Trans Issues

Another batch of responses from readers should be coming soon. (If you missed the first batch, they’re here.) In the meantime, here’s a question from the Up for Debate reader Paul, who writes:

I have come to understand and accept that the concept of “gender” is largely a social construct, is not synonymous with “sex,” and indeed is not dependent upon or related to sex in any objective way. This notion—that gender and sex are independent attributes—is, I think, one of the ideas that is fundamental to understanding and accepting transgender people. For many young people, this idea seems simple and self-evident. Yet, for anyone who has lived any length of time in a culture where, for centuries, these two words held virtually identical meanings, separating them can be a real struggle.

It is with that thought in mind—the acceptance of the fundamental difference between gender and sex—that I approach the issue of transgender people participating in competitive sport with the following sincere question: Are sports competitions divided by gender or are they divided by sex? If sports are divided by sex, then it follows logically that gender should have nothing to do with the discussion. That is, it follows that transgender people should only participate in sports along with those of their same birth sex. On the other hand, if sports participation is divided along gender lines, then everyone of the same gender (obviously, by definition this must include transgender people) should be invited to participate, regardless of sex. Is there more evidence that sports are arranged as a competition between those of the same sex, or those of the same gender?

Provocation of the Week

At Hold That Thought, Sarah Haider writes that for a long time, she assumed that “with no material incentives in one direction or another, people will think more freely. A world in which no one has to worry about where their paycheck will come will be a world in which people are more likely to be courageous, and tell the truth more openly. And of course, it is obvious how financial incentives can distort truth-telling. This is, of course, the justification for academic tenure.”

Now she wonders if tenure may actually pave the way for more conformity. She explains:

First and foremost, it is not the case that free people will necessarily speak truthfully. No matter the romantic notions we like to hold about ourselves, humans do not deeply desire to “speak the truth”. There are more beautiful things to say, things that make us feel good about ourselves and our respective tribes, things that grant us hope and moral strength and personal significance—truth, meanwhile, is insufferably inconvenient, occasionally ugly, and insensitive to our feelings. But lies, by their very nature, can be as beautiful and emotionally satisfying as our imaginations will allow them.

Unfortunately, some degree of fidelity to reality is often required to prosper, and so occasionally we must choose truth. But that degree is dependent on our environments: lies are a luxury which some can afford more than others. Material freedom isn’t just the freedom to tell the truth, it is the freedom to tell lies and get away with it. As I’ve noted before, the lack of economic pressures can clear the way for independent thinking, but they can also remove crucial “skin in the game” that might keep one tethered to reality.

I suspect that on the whole, tenure might simply make more room for social pressures to pull with fewer impediments. If keeping your job is no longer a concern, you will not be “concern-free”. Your mind will be more occupied instead by luxury concerns, like winning and maintaining the esteem of your peers. (And in fact, we do see this playing out at universities. Professors are more protected from the pressures of the outside world due to tenure, yet they are uniquely subservient to the politics within their local university environment.) …

Academics actively shape their own environments. They grant students their doctorates, they help hire other faculty, they elect their department chairs. When an idea becomes prominent in academia, the structure of the environment selects for more of the same … When you are forced to coexist with the enemy, you develop norms which allow both parties to function with as much freedom and fairness as possible. Ideologically mixed groups will, in other words, tend to emphasize objective process because they do not agree on ends. This environment is fairly conducive to the pursuit of truth.

More uniform groups, on the other hand, will tend to abandon process—rushing instead towards the end they are predisposed to believe is true and willing to use dubious means to get there. This creates a hostile environment for dissenting members, and over time, there will be less of them and more uniformity, which will inevitably lead to an even more hostile environment for dissent. When a majority ideology develops, it is likely only to increase in influence, and when it is sufficiently powerful, it can begin competing with reality itself.

I retain hope that tenure does more good than harm but encourage faculty members who enjoy it to exhibit more courage to dissent from any orthodoxies of thought they regard as questionable.

Ever since the defeat of Japan in World War II nearly 80 years ago, the United States has been the preeminent military power in East Asia. Today China is on the verge of matching or even eclipsing the U.S. military’s presence in the region, having marshaled its newly acquired wealth and technological prowess to expand the scale and capabilities of its armed forces.

The military balance between the U.S. and China in Asia is “very delicate and trending in an unfavorable direction in this decade for the U.S. and its allies,” Elbridge Colby, a co-founder of the Marathon Initiative, a policy-research organization, and a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense, told me. “We should regard ourselves in a dead-heat race against an incredibly formidable competitor and take nothing for granted.”

The implications for American security and global influence are immense. The U.S. has not confronted a potential adversary that is so close a peer in military strength or industrial capacity since the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991, and has not actually fought one since it battled the Axis powers in World War II. As China’s relationship with Russia deepens, Washington must also worry about fighting two nuclear powers simultaneously on opposite sides of the world.

A few years ago, the possibility that the U.S. and China could come to blows in the near term seemed far-fetched. That is no longer the case, as tensions have been rising over the status of Taiwan. A leaked memo recently grabbed headlines with a quote from Michael Minihan, a U.S. Air Force general, arguing that war with China could erupt in 2025. Hopefully, such predictions will remain hypothetical, because a war with China would be a catastrophe for both sides, win or lose.

[Read: Biden looks east]

But war is not the only concern. American military dominance in the western Pacific has underpinned the American economic and security system in East Asia. A shifting balance of military power in the region could strain American alliances by raising doubts about Washington’s ability or willingness to protect its Pacific partners. Washington would then struggle to sustain the region’s liberal order against intensifying Chinese pressure.

Beijing may be counting on exactly this. Sam Roggeveen, a former senior strategic analyst at Australia’s top intelligence agency, says that China’s leaders are banking on the United States to “eventually reduce its commitment to its allies in Asia, and at that point China will have a force available … to exploit that gap, and China itself becomes the dominant power.”

China’s ascent as a military power is therefore concerning not only because of the near-term risk of conflict over Taiwan, but also because it raises fundamental questions about America’s role in the region and the world. As China’s military might mounts, Washington will need to commit ever greater resources to maintain American primacy. The balance of power in the Pacific will, in the end, be determined as much by political will as by weapons systems. Will the U.S. have the fortitude to preserve its leadership in Asia? Or will it lose out to a more determined China?

The fact that Washington faces such a dilemma is an unfortunate irony. China has arguably been the biggest beneficiary of the U.S. security system in Asia, which ensured the regional stability that made possible the income-boosting flows of trade and investment that propelled the country’s economic miracle.

Today, however, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping claims that China’s model of modernization is an alternative to “Westernization,” not a prime example of its benefits. Chinese leaders have come to see the chain of American bases and alliances in the region as a cage containing the country’s rightful rise into Asia’s premier power. (In a sense, Beijing feels the same way Washington would if a potential adversary had troops stationed in Canada and Mexico.)

That’s why China’s top leaders routinely affirm the attainment of a “world class” military as a key pillar of the nation’s great “rejuvenation,” or the restoration of its historic wealth and power. And China has invested heavily in building such a military. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Beijing’s military budget reached $219 billion in 2022, more than double what it was a decade earlier (though it is still less than a third of U.S. spending during the same year). With that investment, China has undertaken what Colby asserted is “an unprecedented, historic military buildup that is the largest since the Cold War, possibly since the Second World War.”

China’s navy has already overtaken its American counterpart to become the world’s largest by number of ships. According to the Pentagon’s latest assessment of China’s military, the Chinese air force—the world’s third-largest—“is rapidly catching up to Western air forces and continues to modernize with the delivery of domestically built aircraft,” including a bomber that will enhance its ability to use nuclear weapons. As of 2021, Beijing was constructing three fields with at least 300 new intercontinental-ballistic-missile silos, while its efforts to upgrade the country’s nuclear capabilities “exceed previous modernization attempts in both scale and complexity,” according to the report. The Pentagon projects that China will expand its warhead stockpile from some 400 today to 1,500 by 2035.

Technologically, too, the Chinese have been steadily whittling away at American advantages. Eric Heginbotham, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for International Studies, wrote to me that China has made a priority of developing missiles to target ships and aircraft that fly faster and farther than similar U.S. weapons, such as land-launched ballistic missiles. Though China’s advantage is small, he added that “the bottom line is that we are engaged in a near peer or peer competition, and we are unlikely to dominate in all areas” of missile systems. The U.S. intelligence community was flabbergasted after China tested a high-tech hypersonic missile in 2021.

[Jonah Blank: China’s troubling new military strategy is coming into view]

The Chinese are amassing this force in the exact theater where war is most likely to break out—in maritime East Asia, probably around Taiwan—which is also not far from their home base. That location gives Beijing a substantial advantage. China does not (yet) project military power globally. Its interests, and its military assets, are largely concentrated in East Asia. By contrast, the U.S., as a global superpower with commitments all over the world, keeps only a portion of its military forces in Asia. In the event of a war, says John Culver, a retired CIA analyst who once served as Washington’s top intelligence officer for East Asia, “for the U.S., the game is to move what it doesn’t have in the theater and to get it there to be relevant to the fight, whereas China starts with this hypothetical war in your front yard.”

The United States faced a similar situation in the Pacific during World War II, when the Navy had to project power far from home and deep into hostile territory. Chinese strategists have prepared to counter just such a projection of force, or, at the very least, to raise its cost. China has developed advanced missile systems, for instance, that can smash U.S. bases in the region and target American aircraft carriers steaming across the Pacific at great distances from the Chinese mainland, potentially putting them out of action before they can make a difference in the fight.

Of course, hardware alone, even if crammed with technology, doesn’t automatically convey a military advantage. And it is difficult to really know how effectively Chinese generals and soldiers would deploy and operate the new weaponry. The People’s Liberation Army hasn’t fought a war since China attacked Vietnam in 1979 (and even then, its performance was hardly overwhelming). Xi began a significant reform of the PLA in late 2015 aimed at improving its ability to stage large-scale joint operations with its varied branches. In theory, this program would make the PLA a more formidable fighting force. But Culver cautions that Beijing is only about halfway through this process, and therefore “you kind of still have your pants around your ankles if you’re the PLA.”

Still, China’s military expansion has completely altered the rules of war in East Asia. “Back in the mid-1990s, when we had a Taiwan Strait crisis, all we had to do is show up with one or two carrier strike groups, and China had no answer to that,” Culver told me. “China now has many answers to that.”

For now, the U.S. may still have an edge. The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies recently conducted an extensive war game and concluded that in most scenarios, the U.S., with the help of Japan, was able to repel a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan. But not easily. “This defense,” the report reads, “came at high cost. The United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of servicemembers.”

In real life, such losses would take years to replace, Mark Cancian, a CSIS senior adviser and co-author of the study, told me. “During that time, the United States would be weakened,” he said. The war “would have repercussions for U.S. defense strategy and security strategy for many years.”

Defeating China in such a conflict may not get any easier either. Cancian noted that “if current trends continue, the Chinese would be in a stronger position in 10 years than they are today.”

[David Frum: China is a paper dragon]

Washington policy makers are clear-eyed on this threat. The Biden administration, in its new national-security strategy, identified China as “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it” and pledged to “continue prioritizing investments in a combat credible military that deters aggression against our allies and partners in the region.”

Some security analysts worry that Washington’s response remains short on urgency. “We are moving in the right direction but too slowly and with inadequate scale,” Colby told me. “I personally think there is a tremendous discounting of what China is capable of.” Culver said that “we’re only now starting to do the kind of investments that we really need, and it probably won’t take full effect until the mid-2030s and beyond. We need to regain the advantages we usually have.” Unless the Biden administration makes the investments its strategy entails, Cancian told me, “at some point you are bluffing.”

But an effective response to China is not just a matter of budgets and bombs. To determine what type of force to deploy in the region, American leaders need to define what kind of power the U.S. can, or wants to, be in the future. “Part of the problem is the phrase ‘military balance,’” Stephen Biddle, a defense-policy specialist at Columbia, told me. There is no generic balance of forces that implies an absolute advantage. Rather, military strength depends on how well a force is suited to its mission. And as to what the U.S. mission should be in East Asia, Biddle said, “There is a big debate going on in the United States over this issue, and I don’t think it is resolved yet.”

Much will depend on what Washington is willing to spend on its military in East Asia. As China’s military capabilities advance, the United States will have to commit ever greater resources to countering them. The political benefit of retaining a decisive military advantage over China would have to be weighed against the mounting expense. Colby, in his recent book, The Strategy of Denial, wrote that “the economic costs could be crippling, seriously stressing the U.S. economy, the ultimate source of America’s military strength.” And even if the U.S. spent what it could, the Chinese government has ample room to follow suit. Though the Chinese military budget has grown, it remains below the global average at the equivalent of 1.2 percent of national output, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“In the Cold War, the United States could spend the Soviet Union into the ground in an arms race because our economy was bigger than theirs and it was growing faster than theirs, and we knew that they couldn’t keep up,” Biddle said. “That’s not true with China. They can keep up if they want to.”

And they almost certainly do. Roggeveen says there is “an imbalance of resolve” between the U.S. and China. East Asia is more important to China than it is to the United States on account of its proximity, and China wants a status there “that at the moment is still denied to it by the U.S.,” Roggeveen told me. “I think China is going to fight harder to get that status than the United States is prepared to fight to keep it.”

The costs and risks led Colby to conclude in his book that “even though U.S. military dominance over China is certainly desirable, it is simply no longer attainable.” Instead, he recommends that the U.S. stress “denial,” which “does not require dominance, only the ability to prevent the adversary from achieving its objectives.” In this case, “success for China is to subordinate the targeted state: defeat is to fail to do so.” Similarly, Roggeveen suggested that the U.S. and its allies should “focus on capabilities that can nullify China” and make “maritime Asia too dangerous for the massive Chinese surface fleet,” which would entail beefing up submarines and aviation.

Like it or not, the changing military equation seems destined to create an East Asia that is vastly different from the one that has existed for decades. The region would be split into zones, with a no-man’s-land between them, etched into the waters of the Pacific.

“We’re headed to a likely future of competing spheres of influence,” Biddle said: “a world where the Chinese will have a sphere of influence in which it becomes very expensive for the United States to enter,” but “the United States and its allies will also have spheres of influence … that are cost-prohibitive for the Chinese to enter in a sustained kind of way. You’ll have a more differentiated pattern of power and influence in the region in which there isn’t just one hegemon who can go anywhere they want and do whatever they want.”

From an American perspective, such an outcome would not be ideal. The U.S. would be less able to use the threat of military force to coerce Beijing to alter its policies or behavior. But the spheres-of-influence scenario is also not inevitable. China can comfortably sustain its military expansion only if its economy continues to strengthen—and this trajectory is by no means assured, because the country faces serious obstacles to its growth and technological advance. Meanwhile, if the U.S. stays the course and makes wise strategic decisions, it can still achieve its chief aims in East Asia, which include deterring possible Chinese aggression and maintaining its alliances and security order in the region. Even a regionally powerful China would, in that case, be contained.

What the changing military situation in Asia highlights most of all is the continuing transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world, with all its new risks to American power and interests. Such a shift does not automatically mean that U.S. power will decline. But it does require new U.S. commitments.

China last year briefly suspended talks with the U.S. on climate, security and other areas in response to a visit to Taiwan by then-U.S. House ...