Brent Sadler

And there's a lot of reasons why that is inescapable if the Chinese decide to do it.

Namely, there's 50,000 to 80,000 American citizens that will start to be killed the first day that the Chinese go

know start kinetic operations and bombing so it'll become politically unavoidable uh in order for that to happen successfully from the chinese military planning perspective it's not simply the control of the taiwan strait it's also control of the southern approaches through the south china sea in order to protect their vast southern coastline from american attack that could interdict and basically

overwhelm and destroy their invasion attempt from Taiwan.

So the South China Sea is a realm for military conflict, but right now in this new kind of Cold War era that we're in, you've got a lot of fungibility.

You've got allies, treaty ally, the Philippines,

A mutual defense treaty that the United States has.

So if the Chinese attack the Philippines, we're at war.

We don't have that with the others, but Vietnam is kind of an important player.

They've grown much closer to the United States as our interests pushing back on China and the South China Sea align.

The same is true with Malaysia.

that needs to go out further for economic reasons for oil exploration.

Their federal budget is dependent on those revenue streams, but the Chinese are stymieing it.

So eventually the Malaysians know they've got to go into the so-called nine-dash line if they're going to stay economically viable.

And so they also see that the opportunity is pushing them or their interest is pushing them

for a more forceful stand against the Chinese.

And Beijing's taken note.

So the tensions are picking up.

I would say we're getting to not a breaking point, but we're going to have a question point, a deciding point here in the summer, I think.

Yeah, so for the Chinese Communist Party, it's about legitimacy to their people.