Donnacha Ó Beacháin

always clear.

We've seen, of course, it's now forgotten the Prigozhan Rebellion of June 2023, when it seemed during that momentous Saturday that the Kremlin was going to be overwhelmed by this invading force coming from the south.

War is always dangerous for dictatorships.

It's a point they often make because, you know, democracies generally have a certain consensus about

when they go to war.

That's where Trump is a bit of an outlier, by the way.

He didn't get kind of an electoral mandate of any kind for this war.

And he certainly didn't go fighting in Iran with the majority of Americans behind him.

Opinion polls demonstrate that.

But for dictatorships, they're particularly dangerous, as the Argentinians discovered when they attacked the Malvinas, the Falkland Islands in 1982.

The regime collapsed when they suffered military defeat.

Because

When a dictatorship loses a war, it loses also that perception that it has a monopoly, of course, of power, which is an essential ingredient for any dictatorship.

And that's why I think the Chinese would be cautious.

They will wait until, as I said, Taiwan looks extraordinarily vulnerable after they've been weakened by a thousand cuts.

Russia made the gamble with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

It's already suffering as a result, but the regime is still intact.

But Donald Trump...

You know, he seems to have the only thing that's, you know, because I know he has a policy against diversity and equality and inclusion.

The only thing that seems to be inclusive about him is the range of countries he's willing to consider applying pressure to and intimidating in one form or another.