Eyck Freymann

But what I learned in the process of doing this book is that China has this formidable toolkit for blending economic power with its geopolitical objectives.

And Taiwan was clearly emerging during COVID as the AI story was heating up as this monumental issue in the structure of the world economy, not just for the old reasons that we care about Taiwan, which is largely about geography.

So it seemed to me reading about this, China had more ships, more planes, more missiles, more drones.

What was I missing?

Why is the United States not completely outmatched?

So I started this project with a friend of mine named Harry Halem, who's a superstar naval historian.

And I asked him, what's the book I should read to understand what a U.S.-China war over Taiwan would be like, what it would take to win, and then what of those things the U.S.

can do or can't do?

And he said, well, the book doesn't exist.

I can give you hundreds of articles, hundreds of people to follow on Twitter, but no one thing to read.

And so it became this collaboration between two historians who

One focused on the economics, one focused on the military to put the pieces together.

And as I did so, I began to discover there's huge gaps in our knowledge of this problem.

This is the most complex, multidisciplinary, multifunctional foreign policy problem that American statecraft has ever faced because it's a military problem.

It's also an industrial problem.

It's a technology policy problem.

It's a diplomatic problem, a real one, a complex one.

for how we deal with China, with Taiwan, and with the rest of the world.

And then finally, it's an economic problem.

It's a question of global economic order.