JD Vance

But striking that balance is something I think the president's very focused on.

I'm certainly very focused on.

And we've now got a much better approach now than we have in a long time in this country.

Yeah, it's a very interesting question and I don't want to predict the future too much here.

It's always a fraught business, especially in politics.

You know, one of the things that's interesting, a foreign leader came to me relatively recently, this is actually last week, small country but very important country strategically, very good ally of the United States, and basically pitched me on creating a NATO alternative outside of Europe

but where countries that were aligned with the United States built on the same technology stack.

There was a shared access to technology, shared access to certain weaponry and so forth.

And he was like, we really want to be part of Team America, but there isn't even an existing infrastructure that would allow us to be Team America.

And I had never thought about it in that way.

I haven't even talked to the president yet about it, but it's interesting that world leaders are coming and saying, this is how we're thinking about the future.

And the technology piece of it's a very critical angle, because as you guys probably appreciate, I assume the audience appreciates, is that sometimes when you build with Chinese firms or Chinese technology, it seems like a pretty good deal, right?

Larry Summers once had this famous quote that in Africa, when developing countries talk to the United States and talk to

China, the Americans show up with a moral lecture and the Chinese show up with a bag of money.

Well, the bag of money, obviously, I prefer that to the moral lecture, but you realize that bag of money sometimes comes with debt servitude.

It sometimes comes with a sort of neocolonial control of the host country.

What a lot of nations are realizing is they're not just showing up with a bag of money, and we'd much rather be on Team America, but it does require much more forward leadership.

And the Biden administration, I don't know what it was.

but there was just this deep-seated fear of the future.

I'm sure it was motivated by having a president who didn't necessarily know where he was from day to day, but there was such a deep-seated... Easy on the elder abuse.