Chad Scott

You were talking about the competition we had with places like South Korea, Japan, etc.

One of the bigger events that's going to take place here soon is this upcoming summit between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

It's going to take place, I believe, on May 14th.

What do you hope this summit produces when it comes to U.S.-China relations, whether that is reducing tensions perhaps in the South China Sea, lowering the

potential temperature over Taiwan, or even perhaps maybe getting some support from China when it comes to Iran or dealing with Russia and Ukraine and ending those wars?

Or do you just hope it focuses on some other aspect like trade or something like that?

And then just kind of secondly, what do you actually expect will happen?

So you have what you hope will happen and then what do you expect will happen?

Because obviously the current administration's policies.

You talk about how often...

Republicans will do something and the Democrats do not like that it happened, but then Democrats will do the very same thing.

And then Republicans, then it's just a flip flop back and forth.

One of the things that I'm seeing right now, especially in your realm is the Obama administration is,

During his term, he cut the permanent army brigade combat team presence in Europe in half, going from four brigades to two.

And he removed roughly 7,000 to 10,000 soldiers when that was happening.

And he shifted, not to his credit, he did shift to rotational deployments to places like Poland.

I was actually there when that happened.

Now we're seeing the Trump administration pursue another major reduction, roughly 5,000 troops being drawn down from Europe.

At a time when Russia remains at war with Ukraine and, frankly, NATO is under pressure to increase its readiness, how do you compare those two decisions, Obama's decision to reduce versus Trump's decision?

We always try to end on a positive note because it seems like we always are kind of talking, especially in the times we are with the administration, the darker situations.