On the other hand, what he

also sees is the Putin got away with it. He's still in power. Bizarrely enough to the extent that there's polling in Russia, the Russian people seem to have rallied to him. This conflict in some bizarre way seems almost have been good for Putin politically. And then General Minihan has a point. We're busy with presidential elections in 2024. We're busy with Ukraine. We're distracted in all kinds of ways. And Taiwan is going to have a presidential election in 2024. In which on current trends, it looks as though the independence party may do very well. Xi Jinping has a time window. He's a man in his 70s. His time is limited. The West is distracted. Taiwan is provocative. Maybe we move. Maybe we move. How do you weigh these? Possibilities.

You know, there's a secret here. I'm hoping the secret is, I don't know what Xi Jinping thinks. All right. And all the people who say they know what he thinks. They have no idea. They don't know either. Because this is a single person regime and people inside that regime don't know. One of the things that we've discovered from totalitarian regimes after they're gone is that the insiders didn't know either. Stalin

kept everybody guessing. They

were. Guys were guessing. They were practicing criminology. Let's remember that when the CIA went public, saying that Russia was going to attack Ukraine, it knew things that the number three person in Russia's Ministry of Defense didn't know. Because Putin had kept the circle really tight.