I'm John Batch, with Brad Thayer and James Finnell.

Jim, your book Embracing Communist China, America's greatest strategic failure, has recommendations about what is to be done.

We come to this one, which is war fighting.

Proliferation.

Now, my interpretation of that is the Japanese are a turnkey away from being a nuclear power, perhaps the same for Seoul for the Republic of Korea.

We can name others, but those two are obvious. Is the lack of Team B, does that mean that they're not thinking about this, that this is an

outlier to Washington to turn our allies into assets when it comes to China's routine, strategic

forces threat, routine.

You saw that with Vladimir Putin spread as threatening strategic forces in

Ukraine China a Beijing Moscow she Putin both came together with the 7,000 word statement in

which they said a nuclear war should never be taught never be fought we all got the message

so proliferation is that an answer right now,

Jim? It has to be, John, because of that strategic mismatch that has occurred. You know, we talk a lot

about the cross-straight environment, about the status quo. But China has basically obliterated the

status quo over the last 35 years in the conventional

arena. And in this last three years under the Biden administration, China has put 350

ICBM silos out in central and western China and build up their nuclear arsenal with

improvements like to the JL3 on their ballistic missile submarines that have a

12,000 kilometer range that can range most of the conus in the United States. So we're in a situation

right now that if we wanted to defend Taiwan as we watch this joint sword exercise unfold,

we're going to be in a tough position to do that. And so we need to change the calculus

in Beijing. And in Washington, it's true. I mean, I think people that are so enmeshed and

...