Tracey Alloway

If China invaded Taiwan, there would be some sort of retaliation, maybe sanctions, something like that.

And because the CCP had built its legitimacy on the social compact with its population, which was basically, you know, we're in power and in exchange, you all hopefully get rich.

That was just untenable for Xi Jinping and other policymakers.

You don't hear that that much anymore.

And I wonder why that is.

Is it just because people feel that China has reached the level of economic development where like, okay, the legitimacy has been established in terms of the social compact?

Or is it because we had an example of Russia invading Ukraine and very obviously being willing to trade off that military action, even though it generated an enormous amount of economic pain for the country?

One of the arguments you make in the book is this idea that a US policy response can't just be about military power.

It has to be about economic power as well.

And you talk about this idea of avalanche decoupling, so sort of forming a grand alliance with other democracies to try to isolate China from the global economy.

And when I hear a term like avalanche decoupling, I kind of think like, well, in some respects, the US and maybe some other parts of the world have been trying to decouple from China for a long time with varied degrees of success.

What convinces you that something...

like that would be possible in a crisis moment, especially when we're talking about, again, grand alliances with democracies that maybe under the Trump administration, we don't seem to have the best of relations with at the moment.

Well, I was going to say on the plus side, if one of the elements of China deterrence is building a better custom system where we can actually track trans shipments, then maybe some of that work has been done.

It's better than building more nukes.

Yeah.

We started this conversation talking about the famous hypothetical blockades in geopolitics and international relations classrooms around the world.

What's your big takeaway from the Strait of Hormuz situation as it applies potentially to China and Taiwan?

All right.

On that cheerful note, Ike Freiman, thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts.