Earlier this month, at Asia Society in New York, we hosted a panel discussion about The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, a new essay collection edited by Matt Pottinger, distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and former deputy national security advisor. In the book, Pottinger and his coauthors — including military and political figures and scholars from around the world — map out a workable military strategy for Taiwan, the United States, Japan, Australia and Europe to pursue collectively to avert a devastating war. They lay out urgent steps to deter the People’s Republic of China from pursuing an invasion or blockade — and grave consequences for democracies everywhere if deterrence fails. You can read Pottinger’s own essay on how to avoid conflict in Taiwan, excerpted here at China Books Review and at our sibling magazine The Wire China.

Joining the event for a conversation about this book with Matt Pottinger were: Amb. Winston Lord, U.S. Ambassador to China from 1985 to 1989; Zongyuan Zoe Liu, the Maurice R. Greenberg Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations; and Jianying Zha, writer and journalist; they were moderated by Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society. The panelists began by discussing the shifts in China over the past decades that have led to this moment of potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait. The event was disrupted by protests, and the video below was edited to focus on the content of the program:

If Xi Jinping is not confident that he could win a full invasion, he is less likely to even embark on a blockade, because what if the blockade doesn’t work?

Matt Pottinger