Donnacha Ó Beacháin

It's spending a huge proportion of its economy just to

to be what they call a porcupine or a hedgehog.

They know, of course, that they are not a threat to anybody else, but they want to, because they're an island, of course, and they're a good hundred kilometers plus off the coast of China, they want to give the impression to China that it would be very costly militarily for them to invade Taiwan.

But that costs a lot of money for the Taiwanese.

They have a demographic that's declining, one of the lowest birth rates in the world.

And that's, of course, a concern when your adversary is, you know, with India, the most populated region of the world.

So it's... I don't think that it's going to be necessarily linked to this war in the Middle East.

As I said, I think it's more...

connected, certainly this is how the Taiwanese see it, with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, because this is a clear attempt to acquire new territory.

I mean, the U.S.

is trying to, well, it's sometimes very unclear what the U.S.

is trying to do in Iran, and they revise their own objectives daily.

But if we are to take the other regimes at their word,

You know, the Russians are trying to acquire territory in Ukraine in a way that would say the United States is not trying to acquire in Iran.

But China is trying to acquire additional territory.

It is trying to acquire Taiwan.

How the war ends in Ukraine, I think, will have a bigger influence on China's calculations.

Because if Russia...

manages to come away from its full-scale invasion of Ukraine with additional territory, and of course the people who live in that territory, we can't forget that, it will send a signal, it will certainly create a precedent where you can revise borders by force and suffer minimal consequences to the regime, assuming the Kremlin survives and Putin survives.

That was never, of course,