Retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery

No, but China's definitely trying to flex that they're a big country and Japan's a medium-sized country and try to hold them accountable.

Look, China worries about, can we coerce Taiwan into rejoining us on their own?

One of the things they know makes it harder is if allies and partners of

Taiwan demonstrate a willingness to fight alongside Taiwan.

So, that's why they criticize the United States every time we do an arms sale to Taiwan.

They criticize us every time we have a major exercise with the Taiwan forces, which isn't frequent.

Similarly, the Japanese prime minister

said out loud what many Japanese senior leaders since Prime Minister Abe left office some five years, six years ago.

She said out loud what they all said in private, which is that a Chinese attack on Taiwan is an existential threat to the security of Japan.

I think the Japanese understand that if China were to successfully reintegrate Taiwan coercively, in other words, there was a failure of the United States to respond under the Taiwan Relations Act or we responded too late or we had initial casualties and we backed off, whatever the reason,

if there was some kind of Chinese success, the rest of the Northeast, China would then look at Japan and Korea as future vassal states.

They would extend their perceived hegemonic or regional power umbrella to include those two countries.

Right now, they clearly fall under

the US security umbrella with actual treaties between us and Japan and between us and Korea that we would defend you against any attack.

And their economic

security, they align with their national security.

So with the United States, both countries have very aggressive direct investment in trade policies towards the United States.

In other words, to make sure they keep us entangled with them.

And President Trump has amplified that with his trade negotiations, really pushing foreign direct investment by those two countries, Japan and Korea in the United States.

So the whole idea is we're aggressively entangled.