 Hi, I'm Scott Kastner, I'm a professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. I was at the U.S. Institute of Peace today to give a talk on U.S.-China-Taiwan relations. The relationship across the Taiwan Strait is contentious in large part because at stake is an underlying sovereignty dispute, right? And so it's something that concerns kind of the core interests of the different stakeholders. It's a dispute that goes back to the end of the Chinese Civil War when the Chinese Communist Party prevailed and set up the People's Republic of China and the Nationalist Party retreated to the island of Taiwan with their government, the Republic of China. Initially for years this was a dispute that kind of centered on which of these governments was the rightful government of all of China, both claimed to be. But in more recent years, as Taiwan democratized, this kind of question of whether Taiwan should be thought of as Chinese has become more openly debated within Taiwan, even as the PRC continues to kind of view Taiwan as largely unfinished business from the Chinese Civil War and view Taiwan as a place that must be unified with China. This question kind of involves the United States in large part because the United States has a long-standing security relationship with Taiwan. The U.S. was allies with the Republic of China government during World War II. It provided aid to the nationalist government during the Civil War and ravine in the Taiwan Strait after the ROC government retreated to the island of Taiwan and entered into a formal alliance treaty with the ROC government in the 1950s. Even though the U.S. doesn't have an alliance treaty with Taiwan anymore, it continues to maintain kind of extensive technically unofficial security ties with the island. So my view is that a war in the Taiwan Strait is something that's a real possibility. This is by far the most dangerous issue in the broader U.S.-China relationship. It's the single issue that could most realistically lead to military conflict between the U.S. and China. And it's probably the most dangerous potential flashpoint for conflict in East Asia today. That said, I don't view war as inevitable by any means or even necessarily how the war is probable. I think that there are continued to be kind of significant mitigating factors in place that give all three kind of key parties, Taiwan, the PRC, the United States, an interest in preventing the war outcome. Most obvious that a war would be enormously disruptive and costly to all three parties. And so I think that all three parties continue to have strong incentives to avoid that kind of an outcome. In my view, and I'll answer this from the U.S. perspective, avoiding military conflict kind of involves kind of a complex mix of policies toward the Taiwan Strait coming from Washington. So on the one hand, it's important for the United States to make it such that the PRC would likely face very high costs and a lot of uncertainty about prevailing in the event of military conflict. In other words, the U.S. needs to do things to enhance and maintain robust deterrence in the region by maintaining a robust presence in the region, by maintaining strong alliances in the region, and by encouraging Taiwan to invest extensively in its own defense capabilities. But the flip side is that I think it's also important for the United States to do things that give China a strong stake in a peaceful status quo. So China should also feel that its interests are served by not pursuing a military course of action in the Taiwan Strait. And this means keeping dialogue open with China and I think kind of avoiding moving into kind of a world where the U.S.-China relationship kind of resembles a new Cold War where PRC leaders feel less invested in the current global order and hence kind of potentially more willing to contemplate use of military force in a case like Taiwan.