showcase the quality of our weapons? That would keep China at bay because you know it's not like it's the first time. Remember how well it worked in Afghanistan, right? When we were in Afghanistan China was like whoa, whoa, they're winning so hard in Afghanistan we'd better leave Taiwan alone. Right? You remember when that happened? Oh that didn't happen, right? Yeah that didn't happen. And you remember when we won in Vietnam and that caused China to say whoa, okay. That didn't happen either.

But does that sound like that's a strategy or a rationalization? Strategy. That's the way you would go about it? You'd start the war in two separate countries to show China not to take Taiwan? That would be like a real plan that real people would come up with? That plan? No. This is a rationalization for something that happened. I don't know why. I mean I don't know what he's thinking or what he wants. I can't read his mind. But there's no way that anybody ever sat in a room and said if we start this war with Ukraine or back it that's going to keep China out of trouble with us. No way there's the slightest chance that that was intentional.

All right. How about the other one? That we would halt Putin's vision of reestablishing the old Soviet Union. Is he making us think past the sale here? How do we know what Putin is thinking? What about the Peter Zeihan explanation which is that 100% of what Putin appears to be going after, has gone after and is going after are choke points which are quite obviously defensive necessities for Russia to control its territorial integrity. Now I don't know. Is Peter Zeihan right? I don't know. But you know he's not a politician. I don't know what influences he has. But those are completely different stories, aren't they?

If what Russia wants is to be protected for a thousand years in the future that gives you something to negotiate. How hard would it be for us to work out something that gives them territorial integrity without a war? It just feels like that's a pretty solvable problem. But if you're imagining that Putin has this vision which you know he does talk about it so it's not completely a ridiculous thing. He does talk about the greatness of Russia and that some things belong to him etc. So there's a little bit of that. I'm not sure that it's either Peter Zeihan's thing completely or that it's Romney's thing completely. It feels like it's probably a hybrid of wanting to have these choke points for their own defense plus wouldn't it be great if we had some of our prior glory. But it's possible that one of those is way more important, right?

So here's another way you could have gone about it. So the way they went about it is to start a war with Ukraine and Russia to warn Russia to deter everybody and China too. Here's another way you could have done it if Trump had been president. Two phone calls. That's the other way to do it. Two phone calls. One to Russia, one to China. Hey Russia, if you do this I can't even tell you how bad this is going to be for you. This will be so bad. There will be things you didn't even imagine were doable. We've got assets and resources that you have no idea. We would bring so much pain on you that you would regret this for the rest of your life, however long that is. You don't think that Trump could have scared the bejesus out of Putin at least to make him wait until Trump is gone? You know at least to buy you four more years or something, right? You don't think you could call China and say look here's the deal. We got our microchips on that island. You're not taking the island. That's the end of our conversation. Our microchips are there. It's vital. If you attack them you're attacking us. You're not taking it. It's just that's a hard no. And I'll say different things in public for you if you want me in public to say you know it's China's domestic problem. I'll do that. But if you put one troop on Taiwan your whole situation is going to collapse. You don't think he can sell that? The greatest salesperson and you know he's been called Trump's been called the greatest salesperson ever by somebody who knows sales. You don't think he can sell that? Two phone calls. Two phone calls. Yeah. Instead we made, we created a war with two third parties to handle Taiwan. Come on.

When you say oh come on I can't tell if you're talking to me or you're agreeing with me. Zeihan says it's collapsing. Oh I saw another rumor-slash-hypothesis about China collapsing. So you've heard everything about their population and the economy's got problems in 50 different ways. But there's one that I hadn't heard before. So they have this enormous dam. What is it, the Three Rivers Dam or something? And it's this massive dam. And Three Gorges. The Three Gorges Dam. Thank you. The Three Gorges Dam. Now I don't know that this is true. This is just a thing I saw on some YouTube video. That it's having structural problems and that they knew it would or at least some people knew it would when it was built. That it was never built as well as it should have been for the volume of water. And then if that dam ever broke it would actually take down China. Do you believe that? I mean that seems like hyperbole to me but apparently the amount of flooding would be so, it would be cataclysmic. You know it would be like Noah's Ark situation. And that there's no way that the country could take that size of a hit and the government still function and do what they need to do there because there are big cities down river. Now I'm not so sure about that. I think China could take a hit that size and it's a very capable country. I mean it would be a tragedy of almost unimaginable scale but and certainly don't want that to happen but it's out there. You know there's, I just don't think that we predict, we're not good at predicting the end of everything. We tend to be adaptable.

Please do this on X. I probably will but I don't know if I'll do it live actually. I just started looking i