EXCERPT:
MCFAUL: “This is a preemptive war. The world does not support preemptive wars. We learned that in 2003. Putin will be celebrating this because he did his own preemptive war in Ukraine and now it’s like, well, this is just what great powers do. Maybe Xi Jinping is going to think the same. He’s going to say, ‘Well, if they can do it here, we can do it in Taiwan.’ And the last thing I would say in terms of the tertiary consequences that we won’t know about for years to come is, are we now isolated from the rest of the world because we don’t care about the United Nations, we don’t care about the U.N. Security Council, we’re just going to go it alone? That worries me a lot, especially when I think the greatest threat to American security is China, not Iran. And I worry that those national security interests in the long run could be damaged. I hope I’m wrong.”