Eyck Freymann

And then you are accepting the consequences of holding us to account.

But it's really on us.

Okay, I'm going to agree wholeheartedly with half of your question and challenge the premise of the other.

Okay.

So for the last 50 years, really for the last 70 years, we have maintained deterrence.

Since Mao first gave his generals the instruction to consider the invasion of Taiwan in 1950, we have deterred aggression.

We have kept the peace in the region through what we call the strategy of denial, which is just showing we're militarily stronger

We don't even have to use nukes to do it.

If China moves against Taiwan, we can defeat their ability to put men on the beaches and to take the island.

Well, that was obvious through 2000.

So with the war games that you cite, I wouldn't put any stock at all on those.

Basically, war games are not crystal balls.

They're not simulations of what's going to happen.

They're games to explore what one side or the other might do in specific situations and expand your imagination.

So I recently took part in a war game where I was playing China, and nukes were involved.

Yeah, nukes are involved in every one of them, it seems like.

They do the best they can to make them realistic, but there's a whole lot of assumptions.

You say we want to do and shoot at the following ships, and you either sink them or you don't.

But that's just a computer model in the best case.

Right.