First, the logic works in reverse, too. If they are trying to pull us into a confrontation that they believe benefits them, allowing them to do so also demonstrates a tool for controlling the US that others will be motivated to use, and is also escalatory.

The problem is that we only think in personal, school yard fight terms. We’re act sad though each country has a singular, logically operating decision making process. In reality, international actors are much more like natural phenomena, like mold growth or rabbit populations.

I’m not saying the school yard logic is baseless. When the US flinches, that definitely affects how Xi Jinping assesses our willingness to respond with force to a recapture of Taiwan, for instance. But: whether he decides to do that is not based primarily on whether he thinks the country as a whole has balls or not. It’s based on a combination of benefits and draw backs.

So in the long run, if we wanted to prevent unification by force, we’re far better off engineering conditions that make unification a bad deal, even if we look weak rather than make it appealing enough to go to war even if we seem likely to destabilize the whole world over it