Eyck Freymann

But basically, according to these age-old traditions, we don't have an explicit military-to-military relationship with Taiwan.

Certain levels of senior US officials aren't supposed to go to Taiwan.

And as China has...

proceeded with this boa constrictor strategy, we have, it has been disclosed, sent more trainers to Taiwan to help them develop their forces.

And that kind of thing, pushing back in another domain,

uh, to help Taiwan defend itself, improve the confidence of the people of Taiwan.

That's kind of the best we can do.

And there's a whole bunch of stuff we can do.

Energy partnerships, technology partnerships, giving visas to Taiwanese, more direct flights.

There's a whole lot of stuff that we can do that can stabilize an overall balance, but we have to threaten China.

If you push harder in the gray zone, we will push harder too.

The, um,

Absolutely.

And I think that's another reason not to invade.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And this raises a really important point about public opinion that is missed in surveys that gets back to the point you asked earlier about why would the American people go for this?

Why would an American president go for this?

And the answer – I'm a historian, so I think about these things as sort of path dependencies.

That's how I'm trained.