 Hi, welcome back to the final panel of day three of the Future Security Forum 2020. Our final panel is entitled, US-China Post-COVID-19 is Conflict Inevitable, and it's moderated by Colonel Frank Stanko, who is deputy commander of support of the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss. And in 29, 2020, he was the chief of staff of the Army, senior fellow at New America, where he also guest lectured with us here at Arizona State University, mentored several student researchers. His active Army student career, Army career, excuse me, spans more than 25 years. He served as the strategic operational and tactical level units across the States, Europe, Korea, and from America. He's commanded during three of his four combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Good afternoon. I'm Colonel Frank Stanko. Can you hear me? Just doing a check. You dropped off there, Dan. Thank you for that kind introduction. Very gracious of you. I'm absolutely honored to be here at the New America Security Forum. I've just left there about 90 days ago, and it's good to see some familiar faces back there. And in particular, this panel about the US-China Post-COVID-19 is conflict inevitable. For those viewing, my expressed opinions are my opinions and not the official position of the United States Army. Today's panel of experts are Sam Sacks, who's a cybersecurity policy fellow at New America and a senior fellow at Yale Law School's Paulside China Center. She's spent over a decade analyzing China's technology policies, both in the private sector and national security community, including as a China analyst with the Army. We are also joined by Randy Schreiber, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs. In addition, he's held a number of other East Asia, Pacific and the State Department positions and served in the United States Navy as an intelligence officer. Randy is a policy expert with lots of focus on Taiwan and U.S. strategic positioning in the Asia Pacific region, and there are a few people that know as much about Taiwan or as much about Taiwan and the U.S.-China relationship. Today, during the discussion, we'll just unpack the state of the U.S.-China relations and highlight what possible U.S. policy should be towards China from national security and technology perspective. I do think it's important to provide just a little bit of context for the discussion. I note that we're really not talking about COVID. However, I think what COVID has done is just placed the U.S. and China even in a more detrimental position because of the tension around the virus. And I think the domestic politics in both places have exacerbated the friction. You can make the argument that we're out now at a tipping point where the relationship has probably not been as bad ever since diplomatic relations have opened. Sam, your expertise is niche, and it's very niche. Whether the discussion revolves around you name the commercial tech company, I feel that everything right now is viewed through the view through China, the relationship through a national security lens. And some people would argue that that's probably now it should be. So I just offer two things to you. What are the national security risks of commercial technology entanglements with China? And what are your thoughts on how we can parse the national security with commercial and economic interests? Thank you so much, Colonel Senko. Appreciate you taking the time to do this. I understand you have a new, very big job with the Army. So we're grateful to have you with us. And it's an honor to be on a virtual panel alongside Randy as well. Randy was one of my earliest mentors when I first dipped a toe in the water of U.S.-China tech relationship and actually took me on my first trip to Taiwan almost a decade ago. So I think the way to look at this is it's become clear that we are now, the U.S. government is looking at the U.S.-China relationship primarily through a national security lens. And so what we're seeing, as Mara pointed out on the previous panel, is a blurring line between economic security and national security. And I would argue in the technology space specifically, that line also blurs in terms of how we think about concepts of privacy, as well as traditional cyber security. And so the challenge when I look at these issues is, how do we maintain the openness of the U.S. system, which has been one of among the greatest strengths, both from an economic and a national security perspective, but ensure that that openness is not exploited. Is that even possible, right? So it's sort of thinking about where are we putting the guardrails to create a more resilient openness? And are we putting those guardrail in the right places as we think about the host of issues under that blanket term of technology, whether we're talking about how data flows across borders, global supply chains, primary and thinking about things like semiconductor supply chains, talent, capital flows, as well as governance and standards around these new technologies. And I think that in order to do this in the smart way, in some areas we will need to close off and very tactically close off in order to preserve openness in a more secure fashion in other areas. And I would argue really that there's sort of three main ways that I go about thinking about this and we can drill down into it more in the panel. The first is around data. This has obviously come to the fore in this ongoing saga around TikTok. I think that not all data has the same levels of sensitivity and we need to be very targeted about where do we draw national security lines when it comes to data flows? Where are cross-border data flows actually in U.S. economic and security interests? The second area is around export controls. Where do we need to put sovereign borders around certain kinds of technologies? And I have some concrete ideas about how to do that, but we're right now in the process of overhauling an export control regime, which I think rightly had in loopholes which had been exploited. And the question is again, how do we do this in a smart way that doesn't come back to shoot so we're not shooting ourselves in the foot? And the third is to think about areas that traditionally haven't been regulated, haven't had government restrictions. So open academic basic research. Where do we think about the lines both in terms of researchers and scientists? I'd argue in building again on Mara's excellent book, The Scientist and the Spy, we are very much in a moment of xenophobia and racism where Chinese researchers and scientists I think are in a very hostile environment and are we going about that in a smart way? But also where are there legitimate law enforcement in national security areas? And then from an ethical standpoint, how do we think about open research collaboration on technologies, dual use technologies like artificial intelligence, where we know that those are technologies that are being deployed in very troubling ways in China, most notably in Xinjiang, where you're having vast incarceration of Muslim minorities there. So those would be the broad buckets that I think we need to have a smart US strategy around where to open up and where to close off. And I look forward to the discussion. Thanks, thanks, Sam. And so, and Randy, just going to your area of expertise. So China has already been named a strategic competitor and a top priority in our strategic documents, whether it's the National Defense Document or National Security Strategy in this era of great power competition. And with the administration's policy of free and open into Pacific concept, are there opportunities the US can leverage from the impacts of COVID? Yeah, well, thank you, Colonel, good to be with you and Sam, great to be with you. Very kind of you to refer to me as a mentor, but one of the most gratifying things in professional life is when students surpasses teacher and just really proud of the work Sam continues to do. So I think there are opportunities. At one point, it might have been a reasonable expectation that COVID could have been an inflection point in the other direction that we would have sought new ground for collaboration. We would have seen greater shared interests in combating the pandemic and taking a more collaborative approach. But it's clear now that it really acted more as an accelerant to the United States effort to adopt a more competitive posture. So I think right now the opportunity is for us to continue to demonstrate to partners and allies the kind of regime this is, how irresponsible their behavior can be and how that doesn't just affect the people of, the people's Republic of China that can affect the region and in fact, the whole globe. So leveraging those very legitimate concerns and talking about how we can build partnership around not containing or combating China, but to support and promote the free and open qualities of the Indo-Pacific. So all the things we've worked on trying to strengthen sovereignty for all countries in a matter of their size, trying to support international law and norms, trying to persuade countries to pursue peaceful means of dispute resolution and the like. I think China's response to the coronavirus is really putting a spotlight on what kind of actor they are going to be in regional affairs and their response is not really pivoted in any way to think that they'll be more responsible and supportive of countries in the region. So I think this opportunity is still there for us, including with emerging partners. We have a lot of very strong historic alliances, certainly five treaty allies in the Asia-Pacific region but we have these important emerging partners like Vietnam and Indonesia and India. Countries of the Obama administration did a terrific job investing in but now our opportunity is to take that even further and build closer tighter partnerships. So not COVID alone but certainly informed by COVID, we have these opportunities to strengthen relations to really try to promote and secure the free and open qualities of the region that we want. Thanks Randy, appreciate those insights. And so Sam, if I pulled the thread a little bit about where do we draw the lines and how do I weave in together Randy's comments and your comments so if we would, if we go to decoupling and so how does decoupling impact your space of tech? It's so intertangled and then does decoupling, what does that do for a national security perspective with the neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region? So I'll go to you Sam first, what do you think? So first from a national security perspective on decoupling I think oftentimes when I hear discussion about the consequences of decoupling it's talked about purely from a cost standpoint. US companies generate a lot of revenue in the China market and cutting that off will then hurt their ability to put that revenue back into the R&D and the very technologies like 5G we're trying to compete against. And I get that and there's certainly there's a revenue aspect but I think on a national security side something that's often missing from the conversation is what are the dangers of losing visibility into the cutting edge technology developments that are happening from the top engineers, the top researchers, the top companies in China? And I would argue that those commercial ties give us a very important lens that going dark on may actually be much more destructive. So and I've had this debate with proponents of decoupling a lot. So that's one, you know, I think that also so I want to talk about the sort of export control issue for a moment. One of the other areas that I'm watching play out we've really seen, you know, if we look at for example all of the new restrictions on US semiconductor suppliers or Huawei, these really haven't, there's been a lot of gray zones in those and what that's done in terms of implementation and enforcement and I think what that's done is created a lot of uncertainty around the world that may also backfire, right? So right now if you look at places like Europe and other parts of the world I think we're potentially seeing a designing out of US components because of this new uncertainty. Are US suppliers going to be unreliable? Could export controls become a source of geopolitical conflict? So designing out of suppliers is not beneficial either. So what's a good approach as we think about, you know how to decide where to put sovereign borders around technology? So the first thing I would argue is I don't have a list of certain technologies that should or shouldn't cross borders because I think instead it should be a framework and it should be a process and I've testified to Congress about this several times in the last two years. The first is where does the US truly have a, where is there truly a scarcity and of knowledge and expertise on something? Where is the US truly ahead of the curve? There's a real sort of cutting edge gap there. What is truly essential to the US military? Not just what is used by the military but what is essential? And then last this needs to be an ongoing process where you have industry and government experts on specific kinds of technologies coming together and regularly updating it and thinking through critically what this looks like because I think, you know, absent that we're going to end up in a period of sort of stagnation and I think the Commerce Department is trying to put forward these new controls around emerging foundational technologies and we haven't really seen a lot of forward momentum on that and this might be a good way to sort of kickstart that process. No, thanks, thanks, Sam. So Randy, I'm just continuing along that line. You know, what do you think for the decoupling, you know, the policy position of the White House and where it's going and what kind of support does it have and how do you see that from your lens? Yeah, well the current White House is very keen to do, I guess what I would call targeted decoupling or smart decoupling. Certainly you'll find proponents for something more aggressive and more robust but I think the center of gravity is decoupling in a sort of more complete and comprehensive way would be extraordinarily difficult and probably not even desirable. I mean, this remains a place of 1.4 billion potential customers as well as our opportunities to benefit from their expertise and their success as Sam was pointing out but I do think there is very serious study at looking at our supply chain vulnerabilities in certain areas. I think there's a lot of interest in the direction of China's military civil fusion policy and how that really creates vulnerabilities across and into the commercial sector in ways that I don't think we had to necessarily focus on in the past. And so this is a real slog. I mean, this is where details matter and this is where, in some instances, it's going to be case by case. Some things are very obvious. We can't remain so dependent on China for rare earths and we're taking steps to diversify including bringing some of that extraction and refinement back to the United States. I think that obviously after the outbreak of coronavirus interest in reshoring or at least diversifying pharmaceuticals and I think we got a little help from the Chinese when they actually threatened to cut off pharmaceuticals to make the point that we better be proactive ourselves to ensure those supplies. You know, I think other things, it'll just take time. It'll be a slog. I mean, the semiconductor industry, as Sam was pointing out, it certainly cuts both ways. I mean, there being a critical supplier to some of these Chinese entities certainly means we have to pay attention to those contributions to Chinese modernization and success particularly where it spills over onto the military side and we don't want to deprive them of revenues so that they can be a national security contributor in their own right in the United States but there's got to be a balance. We can't inadvertently be the primary contributor to China's successful military modernization when in fact we're squared off in long-term strategic competition with them. No, thanks, Randy. I'd like to circle back to this heightened tension between the U.S. and China and a lot of speculation right now around Taiwan could be a flashpoint and could bring us closer to conflict with China. You know, but everything else is more of rhetoric and either side really doesn't have the interest to start a conflict but that if there were to be one, it would be over Taiwan, you know, low probability, high impact. If you could provide, you know, you just came back from there. If you could provide your insights on it, there was some kind of provocation in Taiwan that Xi Jinping could not back down from. You know, his assertiveness and renewed sense of restoring China to ancient greatness where he seeks to be the Indo-Pacific Hegemon and then ultimately global preeminence. Yeah, well, it's certainly the case that tensions are rising and the risks are I think are growing greater and that's primarily because of Xi Jinping's vision that great national rejuvenation can't occur without completing the unification, his view that perhaps time is not on their side leaving Taiwan to its own devices. So I think there are some growing risks. I think that the good news is Taiwan is a successful place. It's very defendable from a military sense. You know, 80 nautical miles of water, mountainous inhospitable terrain is a pretty good place to start before you buy a single weapon system. If they buy the right weapon systems, even more so and so the work we're doing with Taiwan on implementation of their overall defense concept, I think has them going in the right direction of buying the right things and making Taiwan a very hard target. And I think our own role in terms of being a supporter of Taiwan can buttress deterrence. I used to say my job as assistant secretary defense partly was for the PLA to wake up in the morning and say, well, I guess not today. And then the next day they get up and say, not today and maybe not next week or maybe not next year. I think at this point it's reasonable to think that the PLA would have serious doubts whether they today have the capabilities to successfully invade and take over and hold Taiwan. They can certainly punish it and destroy it and do a lot of things just through ballistic and cruise missiles. But it remains axiomatic. You gotta have soldiers with rifles and bayonets holding and keeping ground in order to exert sovereignty over an otherwise unwilling population. And that remains the long pole in the tent is their strategic lift, how they get enough people across the strait either by amphibious means or by aircraft. And I think there's a lot we can do to complicate that or at least create enough uncertainty in their success that we can maintain that deterrence. No, thanks, Randy. So I would say that there's a lot to be said by moving together whether in policy, for national strategy and how we deal with technology. Do we think that that messaging is moving out in unison or is it kind of bifurcated? What we're doing on the policy area is not really woven into the technology piece. Do you think everybody's kind of moving out in the same direction or is it kind of stovepipe? Well, I'm taking lots of notes here about everything Randy's saying about Taiwan because I think my world has been a bit stovepipe from that. And this was a great opportunity for me to get a download on the issue from one of the leading thinkers on that topic. So to the extent that that silo exists, at least in the way that I think my world has been thinking about some of these technology issues, I'm learning a lot here. In the sort of commercial technology space and the US-China relationship, the way that Taiwan has come up most recently, of course, is over Huawei. And most recently in May, the amendment to the foreign direct product rule by the Commerce Department, which essentially cuts off Huawei from its lifeline of Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing, TSMC, which to date I think has been one of the most significant moves that the US government has made to bringing Huawei to its knees because TSMC is the lifeline. If Huawei cannot rely directly on US semiconductor companies their own, and they rely on their own internal chip division, high silicon, they need TSMC to do that. So I think that's where Taiwan figures really prominently into these issues. I do think it's fascinating though, if we look at what the Chinese response has been to date, even this move cutting off Huawei from TSMC, where Xi Jinping sees Taiwan as part of China, we still have not seen a retaliatory response from the Chinese government. And I think that that's significant and probably worth some unpacking what's going on there. We know that over the weekend, for example, China issued regulations on an unreliable entities list, which would, if activated, name potentially a dozen US firms for direct retaliation in China. We'll see if they do it. I think they're really waiting to find out what the next US action is gonna be. Because from my perspective, and this does go back to COVID, the Chinese government faces enormous economic pressure right now. And so I think they've been hesitant to push too hard on the US business community in terms of retaliation. And that may have been one of the most, an important driver for why we haven't seen a strong response yet from Beijing. No, thanks, thanks, Sam, I appreciate it. So we're getting a lot of questions here. So I'm gonna kind of turn some questions over, and this one is for Randy. There's a lot of discussion generally on the question of proxy warfare. Where does the use of surrogates or proxy warfare fit into the Chinese strategy and its interactions with the US? I'm sorry, could you repeat that question? There's a lot of discussions generally with the questions of proxy warfare. Where did the use of surrogates or proxies fit in Chinese strategy and the interactions with the US? Well, I don't think, the way I think we traditionally think of proxy warfare, the way we saw it play out in the Cold War where there were genuine client states and very committed partners to both the United States and Soviet Union, I don't think we quite see that. I think we see China looking at the periphery and looking at the region and trying to find where they can exert influence. And in some cases, that is gonna be trying to leverage the relationships they have. And I'm thinking about in South Asia, their relationship with Pakistan and what ultimately that might mean as their tensions with India play out. But if you look at the Indo-Pacific, China's best relationships are about as good as our worst. They just don't, they don't have allies and partners and supporters the way we do. It's really our great asymmetrical advantages having allies. They've got, if I gave you my list, it might include Cambodia, Laos, I'm not even sure North Korea, they're not particularly fond of the Chinese, although they find themselves in a, I guess a historic legacy, lips and teeth relationship. So I think it's a little different. I mean, they play for influence through things like BRI, through some of their other diplomacy and types of support. But they don't quite have the same approach that I think we saw, for example, from the Soviet Union and Cold War. If I understand the question correctly. So this is for both of you. Thanks, Randy. For both of you. How do you all view on the, come down on the question of the Chinese coverup over COVID? Was this maybe at the local level in Wuhan or only early in a pandemic? Or was there a larger coverup at the national CCP level? Sam, you go ahead. You know, I think this is one where there's been a lot of really good scholarship trying to retrace exactly what happened. I think the Congressional Research Service, issued a phenomenal study of this and I would point our audience members to that report. I think so far that has been the most comprehensive study looking day by day of what exactly went down. I think I learned that on January 3rd was when Dr. Lee, the hero doctor that died of COVID and was one of the early whistleblower. On January 3rd, he was in police custody, I believe, writing a self-criticism for trying to raise awareness of what was going on in his hospital. January 3rd, I got off an airplane in Juhai and so it's sort of mind-blowing to know that I was there as this was all going down. I will say though that as both sides play the blame game, something really important to keep in mind. You know, no matter what we pieced together about what went down in China, did the Chinese government, either at the local or the central level, suppress information in a crucial early window when it could have created, it could have been massively impactful on a global scale? Yes. Is China to blame for the 200,000 deaths in the United States and the US economy at its knees? No. The first official case in the US was the same day as the first official case in South Korea. Let's compare the numbers in all of these countries. And I think that one of the reasons why we have seen an acceleration in ramping up the sort of Chinese virus, Wuhan virus rhetoric as we head into an election is a naked attempt to shift blame onto China. And so let's not get distracted by these appeals to what happened in Wuhan in the early days. Yes, the Chinese government censorship regime, absolutely, needs to be held accountable for that, but it does not explain the 200,000 deaths because of the failure of leadership here in the United States. No, thanks, Sam, and Randy, over to you on that. Well, I agree with most of what Sam said, and certainly this reveals both the greatest weaknesses of the CCP as well as some of its strengths, weaknesses, it's always sort of reflexive that they're gonna wanna suppress or deny or cover up until they feel themselves, they've got their hands around the complexity of a challenge, you know, it's strengths, you know, it can lock down, they can lock down in ways that we can't and we've certainly proven that. But I do think it's important to continue to focus on and China as a perpetrator here because this isn't the first time they failed us in terms of containing a pandemic. And if we don't continue to hold their feet to the fire and continue to have other countries join us and pressuring them to investigate, you know, Australia has gotten themselves into all kinds of political trouble with China for Scott Morrison merely calling for an investigation of the early outbreak by trusted authorities. We've seen it with SARS, with avian flu, if we don't continue to hold their feet to the fire, this will be repeated. And that's why I think, I understand Sam's point about the 200,000 Americans, but we need to also play this for a longer term, a longer term opportunity to try to prevent these things from happening in the future. Thank you, Randy. Okay, so the second part of the panel's title is conflict inevitable. And many experts believe the severe conflict is inevitable between China and the U.S. So, you know, Randy, is that true? And then to Sam, can technology, even technology cooperation help with this or is it too late? I don't think conflict is inevitable. And I think there's broad appreciation on both sides for the potential costs associated with that to nuclear armed states, to large standing militaries, et cetera. So it's certainly something that we should both be working hard to avoid. And as much attention we got for our competitive posture vis-a-vis China, I'll tell you, I spent an awful lot of time with the PLA. I supported my leadership in engaging the PLA. There's still much energy and effort going in to try to reduce risk and try to keep the operating environment safe so we don't have an unintended incident or accident that would then escalate. Certainly risks are growing, though. And that's, we already discussed Taiwan, but there's certainly other flashpoints, the East China Sea, the South China Sea, the border with India. So I think it's important to compete but compete smartly and so that the environment remains benign. And I think that's achievable. I think we can do that. And it's something we're going to have to remain committed to, because falling off that, we understand we would see an awful lot of ground in the Chinese, not only general ground and territory, but the free and open policies that we all benefit from in the region. Well, thank you. Thank you, Randy. So any follow-up with that, Deb? So from a technology standpoint, I think that there's an important area that we need to look at, which is let's take mistrust as a given. We can reinstate all of the dozens or hundreds of dialogues that happened before this current chapter in the relationship went so sour. But we are fundamentally going to have mutual mistrust. And I don't think even that that could be restored necessarily. So the question is, how do you create security in an environment of low trust? And is there a role for technology to play in that, whether it's through mechanisms like encryption, for example? Sue Gordon, a former senior official at the Central Intelligence Agency, has talked about the idea that we live in an interconnected world, and we will have to connect at some point with quote-unquote dirty networks. And this is why I think one of the reasons why I think Pompeo's Clean Network Initiative is kind of an impossibility, because that level of interconnection in low trust is a given. So what are the security mechanisms from a technology standpoint we can use in that? The second point that I'll make is, I think that there are areas of this that have in some ways are much bigger than US China and are about sort of getting our own house in order on a technology governance perspective. So let's look at things like data security. With, you know, this is where I think we need to have more robust cybersecurity rules and data privacy mechanisms in place to secure US citizen data. Again, it goes to how do you have security in an interconnected world without trust. And third, and this is a little bit more broader than technology, is we need to have meaningful crisis management mechanisms. You know, and it's not gonna be things like have a hotline. I think everyone would agree the hotlines don't work. So what would be a meaningful mechanism that we can use if neither side wants war? And I would say that neither side does, I think both sides do want to avoid war. So how do we avert a crisis to prevent that kind of miscalculation and restore some of the mechanisms and channels to begin having that so that decisions are not made in a hasty manner? Thanks, Sam, it was said. So if I would, if we had to talk about the overall theme of the forum, the future security forum, the policy landscape is complex and it has changed dramatically, Randy, since you started. And so has the technology landscape. And now they're merging together and where the digital battle space is meeting the physical battle space and creating a new battlefield. And so from your perspective, is our policy and our national security documents, are they really addressing it to get after it? Or is there a gap there? And then, Sam, what do you think about this new battle space? So I'll turn it over to Randy first. So I think the national security strategy, national defense strategy that you mentioned benefit the US government, the current administration by virtue of the clarity that's found in it. I mean, for the first time in my professional life, we understand that China is a strategic competitor. We also understand it is the number one priority. It's not a priority, it's not among priorities, it is the priority. And that has brought tremendous focus, I can tell you from the defense enterprise having served there and given a sense of purpose across that broad enterprise that this is a challenge to focus on. Now, focusing on it and then actually implementing and doing the smart things, there can be a delta there. And I think if I were to be very candid, some parts of the enterprise are moving more rapidly in the quote unquote, right direction and other parts of the enterprise are lagging a bit. I think on the future force, we've got some more work to do, particularly with our services and our services have all the money. They tend to be interested in sustaining legacy platforms and doing things the way that they've been done in the past and that's, I understand that, but that's something that needs to change if we're gonna truly adapt in the right ways for the competition with China to very much include the technology space. I mean, it's sort of become mantra and everybody can talk about where China's succeeding and we need to do more in hypersonics and AI. And you get through the, you run through the buzzwords and then you kind of wonder, what are we doing about it? Well, we're investing a little bit more in these areas. And I certainly had my own time testifying in front of Congress explaining, how we're investing in these areas where we've worried that China is either caught up or even might even have an edge. But that's pretty easy to do in an era of $750 billion defense budgets because there's no trade-off really. You just add on the margins more on the R&D side. We're gonna be facing some cuts and I think that's true no matter who's elected. The defense budgets tend to follow the laws of gravity and I think they will be coming down. And that's when you'll really see, are we going to make the smart investments including in the high tech areas that are needed to compete smartly with China? Or are we going to continue with business as usual in ways that will disadvantage us ultimately? Thanks, Ryan and Sam over to you. So I think that what's become clear is that data is truly at the center of this great power competition who controls, who creates it, who controls it, how it's used, who it's shared with. And increasingly we're going to need to reconceptualize power to account for data at the center. But data is different from a missile or an armored vehicle, right? It's not like I have it and you don't. It's not zero sum in that way. It can be replicated multiple times over. We're trying to put national borders around it but I would argue that it's probably, the value of it is probably realized most when it is flowing across borders. And it's telling that the US and India have recently entered into a very tense cycle and shortly after their border clash, one of the most deadly incidents on the border in decades earlier this summer, there was a tense period afterwards as we sort of waited to see what each side would do. And the first salvo after the border clash happened in the digital realm through data. And it was the Indian government coming out and saying, we're going to ban 59 Chinese cell phone apps. So I think that this is really telling. Now, why would you ban a cell phone app when you're dealing with two nuclear armed powers at this moment, right? And I think that's one of the most important areas sort of counterintuitively that India actually does have leverage over China is access to Indian citizen data and India's digital economy. So let's keep an eye out on data as the new battle space frontier in this realm. I appreciate that. Thank you. Robert Ferrandi, would adopting Taiwan into the D10 alliance of democracies be strategic for managing semiconductor supply chains? And does that entail a serious risk of provoking Yi? Well, I think there's work underway, particularly in the semiconductor space to shore up supply chains and tighten up our partnership when we were there. Just last weekend, we had more discussions about DMSC's planned investment in Arizona, an extraordinary investment to $12 billion or so. So I think there will be ongoing work in that area, irrespective of what we might do on a strengthened community of democracies or a league of democracies. I do tend to think that it's appropriate to include Taiwan in those groupings. I think it's unfortunate they've been excluded from the community of democracies as a full member because a non-democracy, China objects to their participation. I think more and more are the ideological and political dimensions of this competition with China will compel us to wanna work with like-minded democracies to include those that bring with them some, if I could say political baggage given their ongoing dispute with China. And again, you can come back to COVID and say, did the system of governance matter? Should it matter going forward as we look at how we combat this pandemic? And I think we can affirm that it did matter and Taiwan stood extraordinarily well and we could benefit from more cooperation with them. And I think if that's through a vehicle like a collection of democracies, then I think we should support their inclusion. Thank you, Randy. For Sam, some different, do you think that the Trump administration's actions attempting to ban TikTok and force a sale to an American company as they step towards more, a more closed, isolated American internet akin to the moves of China or Russia? Well, I think that it certainly is taking a page from Beijing's playbook in terms of asserting cyber sovereignty. There's an argument to be made. Well, China started it with banning Twitter and Google and the Great Firewall. And so now we're just responding in kind. I guess my response to that would be, China does a lot of things that I think probably aren't very wise for us to replicate. And the question is, does this make us fundamentally more secure from a data security standpoint, from an information censorship standpoint, and as far as the ability of our own tech companies to operate globally around the world. And I would say the answer to all of those questions is a resounding no. And happy to follow up with more about what my reasoning is behind that. So we have just a short time left, Brandy. So you talked about increased risk. A lot of things going on in the news with China and in the South China Sea are violating Taiwan airspace. And so the question would be, is China's more aggressive posture post COVID a sign of weakness or strength? Well, I think we see the trend of more assertive behavior, willingness to accept friction throughout the near seas and China's periphery. And that's sort of an abnormal. That's driven partly by capabilities. They've invested heavily in their capabilities and that pays off at some point to give you tools to do things that you previously couldn't do. Part of it is she and his own willingness to accept that friction. So I think we're in a bit of a new normal and we'll have to navigate that carefully. That's why I said, we continued to meet with the PLA to put emphasis on risk reduction and confidence building. And I agree with Sam, hotlines aren't particularly effective, but we're trying to find the modalities that could be more effective. Cause really the alternative is seeding the international space, international water to the CCP. And I don't think we want to be in a position to let one country unilaterally change the free and open qualities of the region. No, thank you, Randy. Sam, any final thoughts? Is this panel wraps up here? Not for me. I want to thank you both for participating today. I don't obviously get to do this very often. So it's a good change of pace and thank you for what you do with New America and what you do on the policy side for national security. I appreciate it. Dan, thanks for having this panel today.