🔮 Dmitri Alperovitch: China Is Coming For Taiwan

It's ultimately a question of do you want to become a vassal state to China where China will say, 'You know what, we don't like what you're doing in the Middle East, we don't like what you're doing in Europe, we don't like even you're trying to push us out of the Panama Canal and force us to sell our port facilities there. You know what, we're going to cut off chips from being sold to your country.' Like that is the problem that you face when your strategic competitor, who ultimately wants, I believe, to become the world's dominant superpower, they think they have a historical right to it. Because throughout much of human history they were the most powerful country on the planet, the most populous, and it's only since the advent of the industrial revolution and then the opium wars and the century of humiliation, as they call it, when the West, and particularly the United Kingdom, eclipsed them, and then later on the United States. So they feel like they're just re-emerging to their rightful place and they want to push everyone around.

No, I don't. I think this was a screw-up. Look, Signal is actually used widely, for better or worse, within the government. Lots of government officials across all administrations have used it for quite some time. You know, I don't know if they've shared war plans allegedly on Signal before that might be new, but it's a very prevalent form of communication. And look, the current theory is that they were trying to add Jamieson Greer, who is the head of USTR, in charge of all trade, and would have a need to know obviously related to the economic impact of these military strikes, and they added the wrong JG, Jeff Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic. I mean, who hasn't had that happen to them?

Yeah, I posted this on X yesterday that the market price for exploits for Signal probably have just risen dramatically. It was always valuable, right? Lots of people use Signal, dissidents use Signal, journalists use Signal. So being able to compromise a device running Signal or the app itself was always quite valuable. But now that you know that you might have potential access to war plans and heads up on US government policy, the most powerful country on the planet, the most powerful people in that country using it for that type of operational coordination, well, that's even more interesting now.

Well, it's a little bit more of a complicated question. To actually develop an exploit for, let's say, the Signal iOS app that runs on your iPhone is a pretty high degree of sophistication, particularly if it's a remote execution exploit. So you're not already on the device trying to get into Signal, but you're trying to compromise it purely through observing traffic or being able to inject yourself into that traffic. That's pretty complex, a pretty high-end skill set. But there are some very sophisticated people that are building those types of exploits that are selling them. So if you know who to ask, you might be able to buy an off-the-shelf capability, and that dramatically lowers the bar. A great example of this was the NSO company out of Israel that developed some incredibly sophisticated exploits for zero-click exploitation of iPhones, which means that basically I send you a text, if I know your phone number, you don't even see the text. It gets intercepted at the operating system or even baseband layer, compromises the device. You have no idea that anything happened on the device, you don't see the text, you didn't have to click on anything, but the device is compromised and they have access to your geolocation, your camera, your microphone, data on the device, etc. To develop something like that costs millions of dollars, but once you develop it, as NSO did and others are doing, you can sell it still for a relatively high price because it's a high-end tool, but to all sorts of people. So they sold it to Mexican law enforcement, various governments in the Middle East, and others that would not have had the capability to do it themselves but now can purchase this as a subscription service, as a SaaS service, from NSO or others that are doing this.

I mean, this capability you would shell out at least a million dollars, if not more, and this is an ongoing subscription, it's not a one-off thing.

Not specifically for Signal, but typically when you buy a capability, it's not that specific. There is a feature set that they list, but it'll come probably along with ability to tap WhatsApp, ability to tap Signal, ability to tap iMessage. So you will get that as part of the package that you're paying at least a million, probably a year, if not more, as a subscription.

Well, it's likely both, because even if you compromise the iPhone, for example, through a zero-click vulnerability like I've just described, you still need to do more work to get into Signal. In iOS, they have protection between processes, so one process can't look at the memory and the data of another process. You have to do privilege escalation, you have to get into the app, you have to figure out how to read the data from that app. So there's more work to be done there, but it's part of that feature set. They're not going to just stop and say, 'Hey, we're now on the device, but we're not actually giving you the ability to tap the microphone or the camera or look at the Signal.' That's not very valuable, so you have to do that extra mile.

Well, look, Donald Trump is transactional. He came out of business, he wasn't in politics to begin with, and he views everything as a deal to be had. As he looks at things, where do I have the maximum amount of leverage? I have the maximum amount of leverage over people that I've been subsidizing, Europe for example, over decades. And I have the least leverage over someone like Russia, that is an adversarial country that I've already sanctioned to the hilt, and I don't have a lot more leverage. So if I want to make a deal with Russia, I probably have to concede a lot more to them than I do to their appearance that are more dependent on me. I think that's part of their thinking, that we want to do deals, and it's a lot easier to do deals from a position of strength with the people that you know don't have much leverage over us, at least they're seeing it that way. So the old model that we've had for decades with prior presidents is that this is sort of a values-based relationship with Europeans. We're democratic countries interested in various freedoms and promotion of those freedoms. I think they put much less stock into that and are purely looking at what is the value we can extract from this relationship today. What have you done for me lately? Which is a very kind of business transactional view of the world again. I'm not criticizing or approving it, it's just the way they're thinking about it, which is definitely different from what we've had since roughly 1945.

Well, first of all, it depends on what it means 'Trump is gone.' Trump may be gone, but is the MAGA ideology going to be gone? It may not be. So if JD Vance is elected as a successor, you probably will have a continuation of that policy. But look, the reality is, I think you can disagree or agree with Donald Trump, but a lot of what he says there is fundamental truth in it. It is an absolute truth that the Europeans have been free-riding and have not been investing in their defense. Who's been saying that? Barack Obama and Joe Biden, long before Donald Trump. Even under Bush, this was an issue that was being brought up at the latest stages of Bush with regards to trade. He's not wrong that China in particular has been taking complete advantage of us. Some of the tariffs, the United States has the lowest tariffs in the world of any major developed economy, even compared to some of our partners like in Europe. So there is a truth that he's trying to address. You can disagree on whether the way he's going about it is right or wrong, antagonizing and so forth. But even immigration, no one's disagreeing that the border has been a disaster and that illegal immigration has been out of control. Should we be deporting people to El Salvador prisons or not without due process? You could argue about whether that's good or bad, but the issue is there, and he's trying to address it in the way that he thinks is best.

So look, I spent a lot of time on this issue of Ukraine. I've gone there, I talk regularly to folks in Ukrainian government about this, and I've been telling them for well over a year that regardless of how the election was going to play out in November of 2024, the age of unlimited check writing in terms of military aid to Ukraine was over. That was obvious last year when Congress could barely pass a $60 billion package to Ukraine. And I told them then, 'Use it wisely because it's the last package.' If Kamala Harris had gotten elected, she wouldn't have been able to get anything through Congress. If Donald Trump today changes his policy in Ukraine and says, 'I actually want to supply them with more military aid beyond what has been approved in that package,' which there's probably about three or four billion dollars left in that package, he wouldn't be able to get it through Congress because the Republican party is opposed to it. And frankly, I was even hearing last year from Democrats who voted for the package but were basically saying, 'How long are we going to keep writing these checks? The appetite is gone. What is the goal here? We have plenty of things we want to spend this on domestically.' So I think there is too much of a focus on what Donald Trump wants or doesn't want and too little appreciation of the reality of where this is headed. What I've been telling Ukraine is, you got to start thinking a year ago, long before Donald Trump was elected, about how you're going to handle the cutoff of American military aid. I didn't necessarily predict that we would consider cutting off intelligence support and some of these other things that Donald Trump temporarily did, but at least on military aid, it was obvious to me that this was coming to an end. And then the second part of this is, what is your strategy for victory? I've been pretty aggressive with them since about late 2022, early 2023, of what is your concept of victory? Okay, great, you've won the battle of Kyiv, you prevented the overrun of your country, you've recaptured massive amount of territory in the Kharkiv region during that counteroffensive in the fall of 2022, you've retaken Kherson, one of your largest cities. Now what? And they put all their eggs in that counteroffensive basket, which by the way, I believe they should have a right to do. They've earned that right through their blood and sacrifices, but I was very skeptical of it succeeding, in part because I was closely watching the Russian buildup in the south, the fortifications and the minefields that they had built, but also the lack of training and capability development on the Ukrainian forces. And I was very skeptical that this would work. Kharkiv was, I hate to say it this way, the words might be wrong, but kind of an accidental victory. The Russians were caught unawares, the Ukrainians succeeded well beyond their wildest expectations when they were able to drive almost without opposition and recapture most of that territory. Kherson was a much tougher fight. They fought it for months, and ultimately the reason why they were able to capture Kherson city, which if you recall is on the right side of the Dnieper River, cut off from most of the Russian occupied territories on the other side of the river, the logistics were unsustainable for them. It was only a matter of time before they would withdraw. But even with those contested logistics, with the bridges over the river being basically decimated by Ukrainian strikes, it took them months to withdraw before the Ukrainians were able to really push them out. And they withdrew in orderly fashion without losing that contingent of forces. There were fears in Russia that they would get surrounded and a huge number of their forces would get captured. That did not happen. So I was looking at all that and saying the chance of this counteroffensive are pretty low, but they've earned the right to try. Let's see what happens. But I was also asking them, what is your concept of victory? Let's assume this counteroffensive in the summer of '23 would have been a huge success and they would have accomplished the objective, which was to get to the Sea of Azov and potentially get long-range strike capabilities in range of Crimea. Then what? And let's assume I would even concede to them that let's say you even take Crimea. I didn't think they would take it or be able to take it, but let's say you do. And let's say you even capture all the territory back, even going down to 2014 levels, everything that the Russians had taken from you in the last eight years, you get it all back. Why would the war end? Would Putin suddenly say, 'Well, you know, I've lost that territory, okay, now I'm going home and surrendering'? No. The only thing that does is just move the front line, and it doesn't actually end the war. The war ends when Putin decides it's over, either because he's achieved his objectives or because he's realized that they can no longer be achieved and the cost is too high. So I've always had this problem of how do you strategically win this war by just taking territory? It never made any sense to me. And of course, the counteroffensive didn't succeed. It failed. And then it made even less sense of, well, what are you trying to do now? You don't actually have a strategy for victory. And it became clear to me in the summer of '23 that this is now fundamentally a war of attrition that neither side has the offensive capacity to accomplish the objectives. Ukraine doesn't have the offensive capacity to take back its territory and end the war, and the Russians don't have the offensive capacity to take over Ukraine in the way they want to. And now you grind each other out, sort of World War I style. And in a war of attrition, the way you win it ultimately, if you don't have the ability to generate enough force to change the dynamics, which neither side does, is by outlasting the enemy. So what I thought the Ukrainians should do is figure out, if you're truly committed to victory here and you don't want to concede to Russian maximalist demands, which remain maximalist from Putin, we can talk about what those are and why I think peace in the near term is unlikely. But if you don't want to do that, then the right way to think about this is you're going to fight a very long war. It could take five years, it could take ten years, it could take twenty years, until the Russians are exhausted and they decide to leave, like they left Afghanistan, like we left Vietnam, like we left Afghanistan. That's how you defeat great powers. You exhaust them. And you advertise to them, not that this thing will be over by Christmas, as Zelenskyy had done with his counteroffensive, but that it will take as long as it takes. We're going to fight for generations if that's what's needed, but we're not going to surrender our territory, we're not going to surrender our sovereignty. We're going to do whatever is necessary to win, which was the mindset of the North Vietnamese, the mindset of the Mujahideen, the mindset of the Taliban. That's how they beat those great powers, including us. So that's your option. It's a horrible option. It means further destruction of the country, unimaginable losses, all of that. But the other option is effective surrender. And there were never any other options. And all this flirtation, which was incredibly frustrating, with NATO membership, with no-fly zones that NATO would supposedly establish over Ukraine, or security guarantees, none of that was ever real. It was all fairy tale, because no one was ever going to come to Ukraine's defense and fight Russia on their behalf. No one is willing to do that today, no one's willing to do that in the future. You're having this insane conversation right now in London and Paris and to some extent even Germany of how many troops they're all going to send when the war is over. Well, first of all, who knows when the war is going to be over? And two, what are those troops going to be doing? Are you going to send those troops and are you going to get the support of your population to send those troops to fight Russia in case it reinvades? Who's up for that? Or are they just going to be there hanging out in the bars, and the minute that Russia starts mobilizing again, they're going to flee the country, as all of them did in '22? My bet is on the latter. Because if you want to fight Russia, if you want to defend Ukrainian sovereignty and the concept of territorial integrity and all that, the right time to do it is now. I'm sure Ukrainians would welcome you. Go right ahead, go to the Donbas and fight Russia. No one wants to do that. No one's going to be willing to do that in the future. So the only ones that have to fight Russians, if they want to, are the Ukrainians. And this is going to be incredible sacrifices if they're willing to do it. They don't actually need America for this. This is kind of coming back around to Trump. To do a defensive battle, an attritional battle where you're not focused on retaking territory, you're focused on holding the line, using drone strikes which they mostly manufacture themselves, so they just need cash for that which the Europeans can supply, using artillery for suppression fires and mortars which the Europeans increasingly can provide, they've ramped up their production significantly, particularly Rheinmetall in Germany, using small arms and grenade launchers and minefields, mines Ukrainians are able to manufacture. So most of that, the Europeans, if they decide to really commit to this, can provide to Ukraine without American support. There are a few gaps. The biggest one is probably in the air defense space with Patriot systems defending against Russian ballistic missiles. There is an equivalent system that the French supposedly have called Aster. They've deployed it to Ukraine recently, it hasn't performed very well. Maybe it can be improved. Or worst case scenario, the Europeans maybe could go to Trump and say, 'Look, I know you want to be done with Ukraine. We are stepping in, doing exactly what you wanted. We are going to commit to provide military aid to them without a penny of American taxpayer dollars going to this country anymore. But what we need you to do is sell us your Patriot interceptors. We'll pay for them, market price. You'll make money on this. Everyone is happy.' I think he'd say yes to that. So there is a way to do this, but commit to a long war to ultimately defeat the Russians, if the Ukrainians and the Europeans are willing to do so, and if they sort of finally appreciate that Donald Trump is done. He has no interest in Ukraine, he has no interest in this war, he has no interest in asking Congress to pay for it. And it feels a little bit like your girlfriend has just broken up with you and is dating a new guy, a shirtless guy maybe, and you keep begging her to take you back. She's already moved on. That's done. Go out and meet a new girl. Germany, France, UK, Poland, etc., and make that relationship work. That's what you should be focused on.

I was at like 80% back in kind of mid-December when I made that call. Towards end of January, February, I was at like 95. The weekend before the war, I was at 99. I was actually at Munich Security Conference. Zelenskyy, if you recall, flew in there from Kyiv. I was actually convinced the war would start that weekend because I'm like, 'This is a perfect opportunity. The leader's out of the country, you start the war, prevent him from going back easily, do a decapitation strike on the rest of that infrastructure.' He waited for whatever reason, Putin did, and began it four days later. But I remember I was having all these incredulous conversations with German officials and others at the security conference. It's this confab of diplomats, foreign ministers, defense ministers. And all the Europeans were completely convinced that this was a bluff, this wasn't going to happen. I'm like, 'You guys are delusional. This is absolutely happening. This is happening probably this weekend, if not in the next few days.' And they were just totally missing it.

Well, so a couple things. So they actually, just as we're recording this on Tuesday, the US and the Ukrainians have just met in Riyadh. By the way, it's interesting that all these conversations are happening in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is not the shortest place between Ukraine and the United States, but it's interesting that they're injecting themselves into it. They've agreed to a partial ceasefire in the maritime domain to basically halt strikes on the Russian Black Sea fleet if they reciprocate against Ukrainian civilian shipping and stay out of the western Black Sea. And they've agreed to immediately hold deeper strikes on energy targets, which Putin has allegedly agreed to as well, even though we haven't seen any results on the ground from that. So I think good chance that that type of ceasefire could hold for at least a while. And then there's a discussion about a 30-day full-on ceasefire, which I think better than 50% chance you could get to, primarily because, and I posted this on X as well, Putin is now seeing a much bigger prize than just Ukraine, which he's still very much interested in and he's not backing off of his original objectives for domination of Ukraine. But he's now seeing an opportunity to strategically upend the entire relationship with the United States, something that not only has he wanted for a long time, like every Soviet leader back to Stalin had wanted. Back in 1945, in February of 1945, you had this summit in Yalta between FDR, Stalin, and Churchill, and Stalin was effectively offering a deal of, 'Let's divide the world into our spheres of influence. I'll have mine, you have yours, and everything will be copacetic.' FDR really wasn't very interested, because I think he was seeing American power, ability to both economically and militarily, was much more powerful than the Soviet Union. We were still in the midst of providing weapons to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease, they were helping them on the Eastern Front, economically obviously we were one of the few economies in the world that wasn't decimated during World War II. For all those reasons, he was not actually interested in the deal. I'm interested in trying to liberate as much of Europe as possible and prevent you from dominating. Stalin actually wanted full American withdrawal from Europe, not just Eastern Europe. The demands were big, and this was rejected ultimately. But every leader since then, Brezhnev offered the same to Kissinger and Nixon in the '70s: 'Let's just run the world together.' And Putin now sees an opportunity to actually get something like that done, where he sees that Trump is not interested in Europe. So he could, I don't think Trump will give him Europe, but if the United States leaves NATO or even withdraws forces from Europe, withdrawing from NATO, that changes dramatically Russia's strategic position on the continent. He sees opportunities to collaborate with America in the Middle East, in the Arctic, and elsewhere. So that's a huge prize that has now been put on the table for him that he doesn't want to jeopardize by just angering Trump, rejecting things out of hand. And a 30-day ceasefire is a small price to pay. It won't dramatically change things on the ground for him. He could always break it and blame it on the Ukrainians, orchestrate some sort of 'Oh, they violated some provision of the ceasefire, and now it's gone.' Now even with those terms, he's setting conditions for it. The answer to the 30-day proposal was not 'no' from him, but 'yes, but.' And he's saying, 'Well, what about military aid to Ukraine?' And by the way, the argument he's probably going to make to Trump is, 'Why would you provide military aid to Ukraine when there's a ceasefire and we're working towards peace? That makes no sense. Why would you spend taxpayer dollars on that? Just cut that off and push the Europeans to cut that off to the extent you can.' 'What about mobilization of personnel in Ukraine? We don't want their army to get bigger and be better trained during that 30 days.' So he's pushing for that. Ultimately, if they hold the line, I think Putin would actually concede on most of these points because again, 30 days is not a big price to pay. So that's why I'm probably at like 65% that you could get a ceasefire done in the next few months, a 30-day ceasefire. The fact that it would lead to some sort of peace deal, I think is very, very low. I mean, the situation actually is remarkably similar to the situation in the Middle East with Gaza and Hamas. You got a ceasefire, it didn't last. Everyone knew it wouldn't last because neither side, Hamas or Israel, was interested in ending the war yet, or at least on the conditions that were agreed to in the ceasefire. And you will have the same situation, I think, play out in Russia.

No, I don't think that. Look, for the US to leave NATO, Trump has to see some benefit from it. And right now, I think there's nothing but downsides. And it's much better to use it as a leverage point, the threat of leaving NATO, to push the Europeans to do more than actually leaving it. So I think there's enough people in the administration, Waltz, Rubio, and others, that will say this doesn't really make sense for us to leave it. So he didn't leave it the first term. Maybe he'll leave it sometime in the second term, but I'm not sure it's going to happen anytime soon.

Well, first of all, it's what you just said: that it matters a lot more to us. Ukraine never did. President Biden at the time, back even in December of 2021 when people started talking about potential of invasion, ruled out preemptively the idea that any American forces would ever be sent to defend Ukraine. He had actually done the opposite during his tenure on Taiwan. On five occasions when reporters had asked him if he would defend Taiwan or some variant of that question, he had said yes. Five times. Now, every time he would do this, the staff would walk it back, but five times, that's a lot of times to confirm this. So that I think is an indication of how much Taiwan matters. And we've had, of course, a deep history of engagement in Taiwan, certainly since 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war on the mainland and fled to Taiwan. We actually protected them against Mao's attempts to invade in the '50s. We had a military defense treaty and an obligation to defend them until 1979. We had military troops on Taiwan. We've had none of that with Ukraine. So that history is not there. There's an appreciation from strategic thinkers in this country for many decades of the importance of Taiwan, before a single chip was even manufactured anywhere in the world. Namely, General Douglas MacArthur in 1950 said this is an unsinkable aircraft carrier, Taiwan. And we even considered in 1944 invading Taiwan when at the time it was occupied by the Japanese. It was a plan that was put together two months after D-Day called Operation Causeway for the invasion of Formosa, as Taiwan was called at the time. This is how serious we were about this island. And then of course now the situation is even more amplified because of two things: semiconductors and the importance of semiconductors to the global economy. No digital good can be made without semiconductors. There's a saying that chips are the new oil. I hate that phrase because oil has alternatives. There's no replacement for chips. So they're actually way more important than oil. And then the second piece, and Taiwan of course produces not just 90% of all advanced chips as people often say, but actually 40% of all chips period. So just a huge market share, by far the largest of any other country, which is not going away anytime soon despite all the noise about the CHIPS Act, which is important about preserving really the semiconductor manufacturing base in this country and growing it a little bit, but it was not going to challenge Taiwan anytime soon. TSMC has built one fab in Arizona, and it just announced three more fabs with this hundred billion dollar investment. TSMC is building one fab a year in Taiwan for the next decade. And by the way, the footprint already that exists there is just the largest in the world. So there's just no way in which in the next decade Taiwan is not an enormous player in the space. And losing Taiwan would be economically devastating if those fabs are destroyed in the course of war or if China just takes them, if Taiwan surrenders and now has enormous leverage over the entire world and the United States in particular. And then the second element of this is the rise of China and the strategic competitor that China has become. I believe we're in a new Cold War, as I argue in my book, with China that is very similar on almost every level to the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And Taiwan is actually the cork that keeps China bottled up. The geography is really important. In the book, I have this map that looks at the depth of the waters all around Chinese shores, and you see that the dilemma that China has is that the depth of the waters is very shallow all around the coast, from East China Sea to South China Sea. In the Taiwan Strait, for example, it's only 300 feet, too shallow to even put a submarine in without it being easily detected. But on the other side of Taiwan and that whole first island chain, as it's called, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, the depth of the waters is much deeper, 12,000 feet right off the coast of the eastern coast of Taiwan and goes even further down from there. So allowing China to control Taiwan allows it to escape from this containment that it sees itself in, this arc of containment of US military bases and allies from South Korea to Japan to Philippines and Taiwan, and now actually turn the tables on America and push the American forces out of the region. Because now they would be endangering our lines of communication to Japan, Philippines, and Korea, and potentially push us all the way back to Hawaii. So very, very strategic for China. And obviously would allow China to rise enormously in terms of its power and prestige, first and foremost in the region itself in Asia, where you have almost 40% of the world's GDP, most of the economic growth, most of the supply chains, and so forth. You add on top of that the chips issue, and you can see how Taiwan is very, very different from Ukraine in terms of importance to the United States.

Well, it's a great question, and it assumes that everything is hunky-dory today, which it's not. For example, we have an enormous dependency on China in one particular strategic area today, which is critical minerals, rare earths, processed rare earths, as well as other critical minerals, where China dominates processing and refining across a whole slew of minerals, not every single one but many of them. And they're using that as a weapon against us today. They're cutting off supplies of gallium and germanium in opposition to what we are doing in East Asia, both tariffs as well as supplies of weapons to Taiwan and so forth. And the greater their power becomes, the more they're going to be willing to use that weapon against us and push us around, not just in the region but everywhere around the world. So it's ultimately a question of do you want to become a vassal state to China, where China will say, 'You know what, we don't like what you're doing in the Middle East, we don't like what you're doing in Europe, we don't like even you're trying to push us out of the Panama Canal and force us to sell our port facilities there. You know what, we're going to cut off chips from being sold to your country.' Like that is the problem that you face when your strategic competitor, who ultimately wants, I believe, to become the world's dominant superpower, they think they have a historical right to it. Because throughout much of human history they were the most powerful country on the planet, the most populous, and it's only since the advent of the industrial revolution and then the opium wars and the century of humiliation, as they call it, when the West, and particularly the United Kingdom, eclipsed them, and then later on the United States. So they feel like they're just re-emerging to their rightful place and they want to push everyone around. And by the way, they're doing this to smaller countries today. They're doing this to Taiwan, they're doing this to Japan, they're doing it to Australia. Remember Australia had the goal in 2020 to say, 'Maybe we should have an investigation into the origins of COVID.' How dare they? Maybe it was a lab leak, let's just investigate. They weren't even suggesting that it was, which I think now you see more and more potential evidence that it was a lab leak, but they were just saying, 'Why don't we investigate?' What did China do? It cut off imports of barley and wines and lobster and all sorts of things in an attempt to damage the Australian economy and bully them around. They do this constantly. They've done it to Lithuania, they've done it to so many countries around the world. So do you want this happening to America, where now we're going to be asking, 'Oh my god, what does China think of this?' on any issue, not just what happens with Taiwan or in Asia, but anything that we would like to do economically, militarily, you name it. Now China is going to have the sort of Damocles over us. Is that something you're interested in doing?