We have seen that Russia and China are more aligned today than they have been probably since the period of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. It is, frankly, a catastrophe of American and western statecraft that we have reached this point, but this is where we are right now.
My view, and I've expressed it in The Wall Street Journal today, in case you're interested, is that we must prioritize Taiwan. Instead of adding more forces to Europe, the United States needs to be moving towards reductions. The main factor that Xi Jinping is going to assess in whether or not to attack Taiwan is whether he will succeed, and that will be a matter of whether the United States has enough forces, along with those of Taiwan and potentially Japan and Australia, to defeat an invasion.
There's often an argument right now that if we don't act sufficiently strongly over Ukraine, Beijing will be involved in that. I don't think that's correct, actually. They're differentiated in that way. We have to reckon with what I think of as the scarcity of our military power. We would like to resolve this issue by more allied effort. This is the point I'm trying to make to you, and I'm going to make it in the German press this week. I've made it in Britain and France and so forth, and I will make it to the Japanese tomorrow.
Together we can do so much more. The problem is that the alliance network that we're in is less than the sum of its parts right now. We don't spend a lot. We don't integrate very well, so the Chinese and the Russians are able to move much more effectively. That's the problem we face.