Inside "Defending Taiwan": How to prevent a war between China and the US with Eyck Freymann

**Eyck Freymann** (0:00)
For Beijing, I hope that they will say, the United States actually does have a strategy to use every element of its national power to preserve peace and stability without provoking us, and that we should not assume that the United States is incapable of such an effective response. In Taiwan, I think the lesson is, the United States trusts the people of Taiwan to choose the best future for themselves, and ultimately Taiwan's fate is up to the people of Taiwan to choose. That is the heart of what the American One China Policy is about and must be about, and the people of Taiwan must choose, and that the United States will respect their choices.
I think that is a very profound insight that doesn't get said often enough.

**Bernard Leong** (0:45)
Welcome to Analyse Podcast, the premier podcast dedicated to dissecting the pulse of business technology and media globally. I'm Bernard Leong, and the rivalry between the United States and China has become the defining strategic question of this century.
Most debates default to cold war analogies, containment, blogs, and inevitable clash between superpowers. But a growing group of historians and strategists argues that the deeper danger is in the Thucydides Trap.
When a rising power challenges an established one, fear, miscalculation and domestic politics can turn competition into conflict. Today we examine whether Washington and Beijing are destined for confrontation, or whether diplomacy, deterrence, interdependence or technological governance can bend the curve away from war. With me today is Eyck Freymann, Hoover Fellow at Stanford, and author of a new book which I really enjoy reading, Defending Taiwan, a Strategy to Prevent War with China. We will discuss the great power rivalry, Taiwan technology, allied coordination across Asia, and Xi Jinping's 24-9 horizon. So Eyck, welcome to the show.

**Eyck Freymann** (1:54)
Thank you so much, Bernard, for having me on. I'm really looking forward to getting into it.

**Bernard Leong** (1:57)
Yes. I first have to, we share some common origin story, but I want to start from your origin story. How did you start your career?

**Eyck Freymann** (2:04)
How did I start my career? Well, I guess I got interested in China as an undergraduate. I had taken a freshman year where I took a seminar about ancient Chinese history and was captivated by the civilization. And I took a summer and I did some backpacking around China, did a short little homestay, and was enchanted by the language, which I still really struggle with, by the food, by the warmth of the people, by the depth of the history. And also, most importantly, by the politics, which seemed to be trending in a self-confident and assertive direction. And I came back and took classes on Chinese politics. This is at Harvard as an undergraduate. And I was struck by the fact that what I was hearing in my Chinese politics classes on campus was increasingly diverging from the China that I would see when I went back over the summers. This was the beginning of Xi Jinping's first term. The anti-corruption campaign was getting going. The media and political environment was tightening.
And it just became increasingly clear to me that this peaceful coexistence or convergence that the United States had seemed to, and China had seemed to be on through the 80s, through the 90s, through the aughts, was breaking down because Xi Jinping just had a very different idea, a much more rigid, Leninist ideological idea of what he wanted China to be.
And I was fascinated by that because I'm interested in how power works, I'm very interested in how propaganda works, but I also wanted to do international affairs and not have to specialize in just one country. And it seemed to me that if China continued on this trajectory, they would touch everyone and everyone would have to understand them. So if I did China and the world, I could specialize without specializing. And that has been, I guess, my great professional bet. One project after another, trying to help translate China for others, that has been the goal, to specialize without specializing.

**Bernard Leong** (4:18)
And your path is pretty unusual, Harvard. Cambridge, fellow alumnus as well. Oxford in Chinese history. Research assistant roles for Graham Ellison at Harvard, who I read his famous book, Neil Ferguson at Stanford and Xu Zhixin at Tsinghua. And then Grey Metal on the market side. And now Hoover on the grand strategy. So when did the Taiwan deterrence become the question that pull all of these treads together then?

**Eyck Freymann** (4:44)
Late. My first job out of college was as a research assistant to Graham Ellison where I helped to research and draft chapters of the Thucydides Trap book that you said.