{"id":19612,"date":"2015-04-09T14:30:37","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T04:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=19612"},"modified":"2015-04-09T14:42:09","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T04:42:09","slug":"stuck-in-the-middle-of-u","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/stuck-in-the-middle-of-u\/","title":{"rendered":"Stuck in the middle of U"},"content":{"rendered":"
It’s good to see that the ‘Option J’ paper Ben Schreer and I wrote<\/a> is generating responses. Hugh White<\/a> and Sam Bateman<\/a> raise concerns about a closer relationship with Japan: both of them argue that it’s possible to get too close to Japan in a security sense, leading to unwanted outcomes, and that a submarine deal would do that. Both of them think there’s more in a sub deal for Japan than for Australia. And both argue\u2014Sam explicitly and Hugh implicitly\u2014that we should be less active in trying to maintain a liberal democratic order in the Asia\u2013Pacific.<\/p>\n We’ll concede one point: of course it’s possible for two countries to get too closely entangled, where one is inexorably drawn into the other’s bad judgement and misadventure. (WW1 comes to mind.) But it’s also possible to do too little, and the notion of an ‘inverted U curve’, is a useful tool for this discussion. Basically, it’s a model of phenomena in which both small and large values of an input parameter produces low outputs, but intermediate inputs produce a larger effect. Think about a therapeutic drug: at low doses it won’t have much effect at all but at high doses it’ll do more harm than good, or even be fatal. In between there’s a dosage that produces the best clinical outcomes. Here\u2019s a schematic:<\/p>\n