This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor. Here's John Batchelor.

Taiwan, threatened by the People's Republic of China, in specific the People's Liberation Army Navy.

The threats are real, and yet there are exercises for the

PLA Navy to demonstrate its power. This is a stark illustration of a new book,

Embracing Communist China, America's Greatest Strategic Failure. I welcome Captain James Finnell,

United States Navy retired, and his colleague Bradley Thayer, who published this book

in time for us to reverse our errors, but not much time. Gentlemen, good evening to you.

Thank you very much. Jim, I begin with you because these last weeks there's been expectation that China

will demonstrate once again its aggression by, in some fashion, buzzing or sailing by or dominating

Taiwan waters between the mainland and Taiwan or east of Taiwan. And we're watching that as we speak. Is this expected these days? And is the expectation teaching us anything? Good evening to you, Jim. Well, good evening, John and Brad. And, well, what we just saw through the night was the Chinese announced that they are going to conduct two days of exercises, which they have labeled Joint Sword 2024 Alpha.

You recall last year, Joint Sword 2023 was the first time that the Chinese announced this military operations around Taiwan.

They conducted such operations after Nancy Pelosi's visit in August of 22. So we've had

August of 2022, where they did operations intensively around Taiwan firing ballistic missiles,

then in April of

2023, and now we have this exercise, which is for two days, and they've announced the

closure areas that are very, very close to Taiwan inside the contiguous zone, which is inside

24 nautical miles of the main island of Taiwan, five closure areas, in addition to other closure areas for the offshore islands of Kim Min and Matsu and a couple of other smaller islands right off the mainland.

So what we are seeing now is another demonstration, and this is coming right after the inauguration of the new

president of Taiwan, uh, lie, president lie of the Democratic Progressive Party. So what you have is a,

uh, you know, basically the Chinese are saying that president lies, inauguration speech equated

Taiwan as a nation and separated

Taiwan and China as two distinct separate nations, and therefore that was a separatist move

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