“To get to the question, what the United States wants, the United States does not know what it wants. We're in a moment right now where to state the obvious, the old consensus has come apart. I think that memo first landed with Trump's election in 2016.”
“There was a statement that we were going to be disinvesting in this region and reinvesting more in this region. But essentially, there was very little in terms of specifics about where and how we were actually going to disinvest in order to focus on the regions that really matter to us.”
“If we prioritize the Indo-Pacific and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, even if we're going to come at it as the NDS uses the language of not wanting to humiliate China, not wanting to dominate China, but instead back up our position and our interests in the regions with a credible deterrence, that's going to take a hefty amount of resourcing and that's going to mean that we're going to need our allies and other theaters in particular to take on more of the burden.”
“One is there's been a 40% increase since 2024 in the extent to which the American public has friendly, a sort of friendly disposition towards China. It's now at around 53%. I mean, this is an extraordinary figure.”
“China has excess capacity in solar panels and also makes pretty good batteries that are fairly cheap. Maybe we can think about creatively what China could bring to the table in terms of solving some of those issues and what the governance strategies would be for extracting some kind of learning out of that investment if it were to come.”
“Nobody is more confused than America's allies about what the United States wants. And this is especially the case when it comes to China. I've sat in a lot of meetings recently where Europeans have said, what does the United States expect of us in our relationship with China?”
“One of those core national interests is re-establishing deterrence by denial on the first island chain in the Indo-Pacific, in order for us to have, you know, basically hopefully a credible conversation with China that's backed up by the appropriate, you know, use of force if we need to use it, you know, to basically make the Taiwan scenario for the Chinese so unpalatable that they won't want to go.”
“Part of the challenge has been that Americans have become so, I think, understandably cynical about the ability of government and politics to produce real change that they see it now just as an area for culture war. That has been a problem specifically in foreign policy as well.”
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