John Mearsheimer

You don't want them dominating the waters of East Asia.

You want to bottle them up again inside the first island chain.

And you can only do that if you control Taiwan.

If you don't control Taiwan, they get out into the Philippine Sea, into the Pacific and the Western Pacific and cause all sorts of problems.

Absolutely.

Well, what you want to do is you want to make sure that you deter...

China from invading Taiwan.

You want to avoid a war.

You and I are in complete agreement on that.

We don't want a war, but we want to contain China.

We do not want to let China dominate Asia.

That's what the Americans are principally concerned with here.

And it's what China's neighbors are principally concerned with.

This includes the Japanese, the South Koreans, the Filipinos.

Australians and the Taiwanese.

They don't want and we don't want China to dominate the region.

So we have to contain it.

But at the same time, and this should be music to your ears, we not only want to contain it, we want to make sure we don't end up in a shooting match with the Chinese because this could be disastrous.

So you have to have a very smart policy.

You have to build powerful military forces and you have to make sure you don't do anything that's provocative.