How Taiwan Became the World's Most Perilous Geopolitical Chokepoint
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2026
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has highlighted the potential for long-running theoretical chokepoints to turn into reality, with dramatic results for both geopolitics and the global economy. But the hypothetical scenario that policymakers have arguably been losing the most sleep over for decades is the prospect of a major conflict between China and Taiwan. So how likely is it, and what would such a conflict actually look like? On this episode, we speak with Eyck Freymann, author of the new book, Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War With China, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. We discuss Xi Jinping's strategy, whether Taiwan's "silicon shield" of semiconductor manufacturing can last forever, the state of Taiwan's domestic politics, and what the US can do to deter such a conflict.
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Transcript
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| 0:35.0 | Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts Radio News. News. |
| 0:49.3 | Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 0:50.7 | And I'm Joe Wisenthall. |
| 0:53.7 | Joe, up until recently, very recently. |
| 0:54.0 | Yeah. |
| 0:59.6 | I would say there are, or were, two hypothetical blockades that kind of loomed large in the minds of geopolitical strategists everywhere. |
| 1:02.2 | And the first was, of course, Iran blockading the Strait of Ormuse. |
| 1:06.1 | That's clearly not a hypothetical anymore. |
| 1:08.6 | It's actually happened. |
| 1:09.6 | It's reality. |
| 1:10.5 | And we've been doing a lot of |
| 1:11.6 | episodes about it. And so the big hypothetical blockade that we're left with to ponder is China potentially |
| 1:19.9 | doing something with Taiwan. Definitely. And you know, the only thing I would actually flip them |
... |
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