Scott Horton: belief

Transcript context

…That’s good. He’s right. He’s right in that. It’s a serious thing. And look, Pakistanis could give a nuke to Iran who are their friends, I think not the tightest of allies. I’m not saying I predict that, but there’s a danger of that. Now, when it comes to Eastern Asia, obviously there’s a concern about a Chinese threat to Taiwan, but nobody thinks China’s coming for South Korea or Japan. The question of Taiwan is one that’s very different because as the American president agreed with Mao Zedong years ago, Taiwan is part of China and eventually will be reunited, although we hope that’s not by force. Since then, they have essentially abandoned Marxism, although it’s still a one-party authoritarian state. But they’ve essentially abandoned Marxism, adopted markets. At least to the degree that they’ve been able to afford to now build up a giant naval force that is capable of retaking Taiwan. And so I think the way to prevent that is not from making a bunch of threats and setting examples in other places about how tough we are, but to negotiate with the Chinese and the Taiwanese. And figure out a way to reunite the two in a peaceful way in order to prevent that war from breaking out. Because in fact, we don’t really have the naval and air capability to defend Taiwan. We could lose a lot of guys trying and probably kill a lot of Chinese trying. But in the end, they’d probably take Taiwan anyway. And we’d have lost a bunch of ships and planes for nothing. So we can negotiate an end to that. And then even if America just withdrew from the region, we could still negotiate long-term agreements between China, Japan, South Korea, and whoever. There’s no reason to think that everyone would make a mad scramble to a bomb to protect them the moment they are out from under America’s nuclear umbrella and so forth. And the fact of the matter is that the greatest threat to the status quo as far as the nuclear powers go, probably is what just happened. America and Israel launching this war against a non-nuclear weapon state as a member in good standing of this treaty, throws the whole, as they call it, the liberal rules-based world order into question. If these rules repeatedly always apply to everyone else, but very often not to us, then are they really the law? Or this is just the will of men in Washington, D.C.? And how long do we expect the rest of the world to go ahead and abide by that? If a deal is a deal until we decide, as Bill Clinton said, to wake up one morning and decide that we don’t like it anymore and change it. That was a phrase from the Founding Act of ’97. Maybe we’ll wake up one morning and decide that we all want to do something else entirely. Is that your Bill Clinton impression?…

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