News

As policymakers and analysts evaluate the war in Europe for insights that might be applicable to Asia, they are reaching three early conclusions: It should serve as a cautionary tale for China, a model for Taiwan, and a playbook for the United States. But what if the conflict yields a more ominous set of lessons — lessons that Beijing could use to seize the island democracy?

Many observers have become more skeptical that China would launch an assault on its “wayward province” after seeing Russia struggle on the battlefield and suffer an economic backlash. Some have become more optimistic that Taiwan could defend its de facto sovereignty as Ukraine imposes heavy costs on invading forces. And others have become more confident that the United States can rely on “integrated deterrence” to manage the threat of Chinese aggression, which was beginning to appear close at hand.

Yet the war in Europe might instead convince Chinese leaders to double down on efforts to shatter Taiwan’s will to resist should deterrence break down. Indeed, Russian failures and Ukrainian successes to date might incentivize China to issue threats and use force earlier to make U.S. military intervention less likely and Taiwanese capitulation more so.

Eric and Eliot host British author and historian Andrew Roberts and discuss his revisionist account of King George III and how a good man was nonetheless the monarch under whom the American colonies were lost.

On today’s episode, Steve speaks with Eric Edelman, a member of the U.S. foreign service for 28 years who served as a U.S. ambassador, a national security adviser to the vice president, and an under secretary of defense. They discuss Vladimir Putin and his strategy going into the invasion of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to Congress, and finish with the latest on the Iran deal.

Russian President Vladimir Putin likely never thought he would have to admit that conscripts had been used in Ukraine — and, yet, the Russian government had to do just that.

Conscription is a sensitive topic in Russia, and their use by the Kremlin indicates the degree to which the country’s leaders believed they could keep the cost of the war hidden from the domestic populace. But now that their deployment is public, what does Russia’s continued use of conscripts say about the war and the future course the conflict may take?

Mystery guest host (Bill Kristol) joins Eric for a discussion with Johns Hopkins SAIS Professor Hal Brands about his new book the Twilight Struggle. They discuss the lessons of America's cold war strategic competition with the USSR for today's era of strategic competition with China and Russia—the role of strategy, economic competition, political warfare, and more.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sees advanced technology as one of the keys to victory in its challenge to global order in this century. CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping has pronounced that the world is on the precipice of a “fourth industrial revolution” centered upon artificial intelligence and autonomous technology. China is mobilizing every sector of society to contribute to the state’s grand technological ambitions in its long-term struggle against the United States. 

Nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of military affairs. China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is racing to integrate futuristic technologies into its historically less-advanced military. The PLA has coalesced around a new organizing concept for how it thinks that advanced technologies will affect warfare in this century. “Intelligentization” represents China’s vision for a new revolution in military affairs. This little-known new concept is driving the PLA’s modernization efforts and signals the expansive ambitions the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has in challenging American military dominance globally.