In Episode 361 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder and executive chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, the co-founder of leading cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, and the author of the soon-to-be-released book “World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century.”

Dmitri Alperovitch makes the case that we are already in the midst of a new Cold War with China and that Taiwan is the strategic flashpoint that risks triggering a devastating conflict between two nuclear powers in a way that West Berlin nearly played during America's last Cold War with the Soviet Union. He and Kofinas discuss the similarities and differences between Cold Wars I and II, including the role played by the USSR as a liberator in Europe and the strong appeal of communism as a competing ideology in the early decades of the First Cold War. They also discuss how America lost an opportunity to build a sustainable peace with post-Soviet Russia and how this has made the new Cold War with China all the more challenging and dangerous.

The episode’s second hour begins with a discussion about the importance of Taiwan and a thought experiment about what would happen in the event of an uncontested Chinese takeover of the island. Alperovitch and Kofinas discuss the philosophical underpinnings of American supremacy and arguments for its preservation, the need to build national unity by addressing legitimate domestic grievances, military-industrial reform, immigration, and what it will take to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan that Dmitri believes could happen before the end of this decade.

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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas

Episode Recorded on 04/19/2024