Thank you.
The “how can we be constructive?” question actually helps me complete my point on the previous question, because we need to bridge the gap between countries and institutions that focus very heavily on diplomacy, as if somehow entangling China in a web of rules, diplomacy, meetings and negotiations will prevent aggressive action. For example, ASEAN and the European Union seem to foreground diplomacy when they talk about the Indo-Pacific, rather than acknowledge that there has to be a role for deterrence.
On the other hand, with that gap, we have to work particularly with the United States to remind.... Yes, we want and need a very substantial deterrent power in the Indo-Pacific. U.S. leadership in that regard remains vital, but it needs to be woven in with agile diplomacy and engagement with this broad range of partners, for example, showing respect to the interests of southeast Asia.
That's the challenge. The contribution we can all make, for example, to the critical flashpoint across the Taiwan Strait is in all of us finding ways to contribute both to deterrence and to diplomacy. That deterrence is not and should not be expected to be frontline military deterrence from every actor—for example, from Canada—but there needs to be, at a bare minimum, a high level of understanding and support for the messaging that the United States sends, which is effectively to say to the PLA—not today but every day—that it's never going to be a good time to start a catastrophic war across the Taiwan Strait.
However, it also means that all of our countries need to be thinking about how to be prepared for conflict and crisis scenarios. The more prepared we are—including in terms of economic resilience, coordination with allies and partners, and perhaps a willingness to contribute to counterblockading operations in an extreme scenario—the more we're going to have a chance at influencing the calculations in Beijing.
To conclude, I don't think major war is likely but it's certainly possible, and the sense of possibility is going to go in many ways to the question in Beijing about whether the rest of the world will turn a blind eye to such a conflict.