Donnacha Ó Beacháin

He is, you know, a gambler and he has gambled over the years, but he's kind of, he has been up until, you might say, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and

I wouldn't say a cautious gambler, but a gambler who knew how much he could bite off.

So Chechnya was, of course, his first war.

It was relatively manageable.

It was popular at home.

And then, of course, you had the intervention in Georgia in 2008, which, again, was a five-day war.

It was popular at home, achieved his strategic objectives, minimal cost.

You had Crimea, of course, in 2014.

and the stimulation of conflict in the Donbass region.

Again, it was considered a success from his perspective.

There was minimal response or repercussions from the West.

So the lesson he learned is that this kind of gamble paid off.

And as I said, he went a step too far, of course, as he now knows, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

But China...

tends to be different in that respect.

And I think what we see with the Chinese objectives with Taiwan is that they are suffocating Taiwan.

It's a slow strangulation of them politically, diplomatically, economically, militarily.

I mean, they are testing them continuously with these military exercises.

I mean, Taiwan is a country of 20 million people.

Geographically, it's smaller than Ireland.