Noel King

You know, millions of Uyghur arrested, imprisoned, put in camps, forced into labor.

But it's a very practical relationship.

They see themselves as having shared interests, both commercial and geopolitical.

They see themselves as both opposed to the United States.

And in particular, I think China sees Iran as a fellow victim of the current world order.

Okay, so China has its reasons to be united, allied with Iran, and China is watching this war play out very carefully because it is trying to learn a couple of things, including what the U.S.

military can and presumably can't do.

What is it learning about our military strengths and weaknesses?

I would say the main thing they're looking at is really the question of production chains and the ability to replenish munitions, which seems to be even weaker than people thought.

And people have been warning about this for many years.

They were designed to be essentially craft produce or bespoke produce, like you'd buy them on Etsy or something.

They were not designed for mass production.

The primary challenge we see in the research we've done with the U.S.

industrial base is that it is not adequately prepared for the security landscape that now exists.

In a major regional conflict, such as a U.S.

war with China in the Taiwan Straits, the U.S.

would exceed in that war the current stockpile of the Department of Defense.

But one of the American characteristics of light has been to take these warnings and write a million think tank pieces about them and not actually do anything to fix it.

And that's in contrast with China.

China had a bunch of strategic weaknesses in the 2010s, which it really then went and fixed, like domesticated its own supply chains, looked for new suppliers, all this kind of thing.