CyberWire Daily - The Global Race for the 21st Century

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

In this episode, Dmitri Alperovitch discusses his book World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century with host Ben Yelin. Alperovitch highlights the rising tensions between the U.S. and China, focusing on Taiwan as a critical flashpoint that could ignite a new Cold War. He shares insights on the strategies America must adopt to maintain its status as the world’s leading superpower while addressing the challenges posed by China. By examining both strengths and weaknesses, as well as providing a timely blueprint for navigating the complexities of global relations in the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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connecting users only to specific apps, not the entire network, continuously verifying every request based on identity and context, Thank you. organization with Zscaler, Zero Trust, and thanks for joining us. On this Cyber Wire special edition, my Caveat podcast co-host Ben Yellen speaks with Dmitry Alperovitch, author and chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator. They're discussing Dmitry's new book, World on the Brink, How America Can Beat China in the Race for Policy Accelerator. They're discussing Dimitri's new book, World on the Brink, How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century. So I couldn't put your book down and I'm very thankful for our producer

for sending it to me ahead of time. It is called World on the Brink. You have both a prologue and an introduction. My hunch is that most of your interviewers start with a prologue, so I'm going to start with the introduction. Your background is in what was then called information security, but then became cybersecurity.

And your recent work has been in geopolitics. So I guess as a high-level question, what did you learn in the field of cybersecurity that gave you so much insight into geopolitics? It's a great question. So first of all, I have to say that I've been focused on geopolitics really since college. So I have spent 25 years on that issue.

It's always been a passion of mine. I took many courses in college. And then when I entered the cyber career, which was a very technical career, I immediately found myself immersed in this field of geopolitics because at that time, cyber was blowing up. with criminal activity that was most laminating from adversarial countries, particularly Russia, and later on some others as well. And then 10 years in, we saw another explosion of nation-state activity where you had military services, intelligence services of foreign countries, China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, infiltrating our companies to steal intellectual property, infiltrating our government networks.

And it became a critical national security issue right away. And I've had the fortune of being at the forefront of a lot of critical investigations that had been revealed over the last 15 years that were truly groundbreaking in nature. The first major investigation into Chinese hacks of the private sector, hacks into Google and about two dozen other companies that I named Operation Aurora in 2010. Operation Shady Rat, which was another Chinese hack into numerous industries over a five-year period, the hack of the DNC by the Russians in 2016, the hack of Aramco by Iran in 2012, the hack of Sonya in 2014 by North Korea, a lot of these really groundbreaking hacks that had taken place that were rooted in the geopolitical competition that we had with each of these foreign adversaries. And I coined a phrase back then, almost 15 years ago,

that said, we don't have a cyber problem. We have a China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea problem. Because fundamentally, those countries are using cyber to achieve their geopolitical objectives. If war is politics by other means, diplomacy by other means, as Klaus was famously said, well, so is cyber is effectively another way to achieve your ultimate national security objectives. So I've been immersed in that field for the last 15 years, looking at how cyber is helping to drive the

geopolitical agendas of all those countries. In the case of China, for example, being at the forefront of a lot of these investigations into intellectual property theft across numerous industries and numerous countries, I was saying this is not about cyber hacks. This is not even about theft of IP. This is about economic warfare that China is waging against our nation, against other nations as well. And the response to that can be in cyber. Do you see any parallels between how the broader industry

saw cybersecurity in the 2000s, basically as, well, this is a problem with our network or a problem with this specific malware versus how we view the threat landscape today in kind of a way that's too narrow and not big picture enough? I do. And I think this is part of the reason

why I wanted to write this book is that we lack a grand strategy in our thinking that we are very tactical. We tend to respond to individual threats and look at them at isolation without looking at the bigger picture of what is it that we're actually trying to achieve. One of the big questions with China, for example,

is not just what is the nature of the threat from China, where we are mostly coming to a bipartisan agreement on the problem that China represents to the United States hegemony, our economic and national security. But there is very little discussion, not even a debate, but even little discussion of what is the end goal that we're trying to achieve with regards to China? Where do we want to end up? We had that clarity in the Cold War, right? The containment strategy articulated first by George Kennan, of course, in the 1940s,

right after World War II, was that we are pursuing containment because the Soviet Union is a natural phenomena that would one day disappear, right? He had that insight in 1946. And we were marching towards that goal of waiting them out until they collapse. Well, China is not going to collapse, right? It's an ancient civilization that's been around for 5,000 years, will likely be around for another 5,000 years or longer. So what is it that we want to achieve vis-a-vis China? And that's a question that I attempted to answer in my book, or at least propose as an answer and try to get at least the conversation going. Because if you don't know the destination, how are you going to get there?

One thing that struck me about your book is that you argue pretty explicitly that our concerns about China should subsume our concerns about other geopolitical conflicts. Can you just explain that a little bit to a person who's just learning about this conflict? Why is this more important than Russia or Ukraine or Israel or Gaza? So all of these problems, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and many others are real issues, right? Climate change, etc. And I'm not suggesting that we should ignore all of them and only focus on China. Far from it.

We have to manage a lot of conflicts, a lot of interests that are at play as a global superpower that we are. However, there is only one truly existential threat to the United States, to our economy, to our national security, and frankly, even to our climate. And that is a conflict with China, right? So even if you're someone who is completely focused on climate change and the threat that it represents, which is significant, any attempt to reduce carbon emissions globally is going to go straight out the window if you're in a devastating war with China, right? So I believe that that is the fundamental problem that we're facing as a potential in the next 48 years,

as I suggest in the book. And we have to do everything in our power to avoid it. And that's why everything that we're doing around the world, we should not abandon, but we should be looking at it through the lens of this deterrent mission that we're on to prevent another world war, to prevent a devastating conflict.

And we should be asking the question, is this important enough to take away that focus for us? And some things will be, but many others will not, right? And we should also be asking, is it helping us in our efforts to achieve that outcome? So just like everything in the first Cold War was looked at through the lens of the great competition of the Soviet Union, not always helpfully, there have been mistakes and plenty of them, right? Vietnam, the most prominent,

but nevertheless, when you look at that entire period from 1945 till 1991 effectively, it was by and large, a good policy of the United States with terrible mistakes along the way to outlast the Soviet Union, to wait out till they collapse, right? And that focus that we had was really vital to the success of that endeavor. And we need to bring that focus again. So just to kind of, before we get to some of your proposed solutions, which I think is the most important part of your book, can you lay out,

I don't know if it's your worst case scenario threat landscape, but what you describe in the prologue of your book is a very well-articulated scenario of China invading Taiwan days after the 2028 presidential election. Can you talk about what that would look like, what the next steps would be? Just kind of describe that scenario for us so we can have a better idea of the nature of the threat. Sure. So for military history, military strategy junkies, they will find that prologue quite interesting. Spent a lot of time on it, looking at realistically, how would you do this if you're China? And this is very, very hard to pull off. If they manage to do it, it will be the most complicated military operation in the history of humanity by far.

This island is a natural fortress. is a natural fortress. It is surrounded by very rough waters, primarily in the Taiwan Strait, which is practically impassable half the year to anything but huge container ships. You've got stormy weathers. You've got fog.

So really big challenge to A-cross it. And then when you land on this island, you've got mountains, you've got rivers, you've got just a really tough terrain to try to capture. This is not the plains of Ukraine. And this was appreciated for a very long time because there have been, as I go through the history of Taiwan and China in this book, there have been numerous

attempts over centuries to conquer this island. Large lands successfully or only partially successful and only one finally succeeded, which was the Japanese in the late 1800s that finally managed to subdue the tribesmen that were on this island and take full control of that island. That was the first time when anyone, any outside force actually fully controlled Taiwan. It was not China, which only had very partial control of it. It was Japan. And then again, in 1944, literally as we're speaking, this is the 80th anniversary of a plan to invade Taiwan that was put together by the joint staff in August of 1944, two months after the most successful amphibious invasion in history, Operation Overlord D-Day, to take Normandy, right? And D-Day, of course, involved about 150,000, 160,000 allied

forces crossing the English Channel, which is roughly the same size as this Taiwan Strait, landing on the beaches of Normandy and ultimately taking France and going into Germany from there. But on the heels of that incredible success, the planners in the U.S. military, who had obviously learned all the lessons, the good and the bad from D-Day, put together a plan to invade Taiwan, which had about 60,000 Japanese forces entrenched on that island, a smaller force than the Chinese would be facing today with the Taiwanese military. And they doubled the number. They went from 150,000 for D-Day to over 300,000 for Taiwan and estimated enormous casualties. One estimate called for 45,000 American casualties in that operation. D-Day, just by comparison, on that one day, we lost about 2,500 Americans, right?

So just incredible level of loss. And ultimately, President Roosevelt, General Douglas MacArthur, and others looked at this plan and said, no, this is too hard. This is too costly. We're not going to do this. We're going to bypass Taiwan entirely, and we're going to go for Okinawa. So even 80 years ago, for the U.S. military that was sort of drunk on the success of Operation Overlord, they knew that this was tough, right? Well, in the ensuing 80 years, this has only gotten tougher.

Obviously, defensive technologies have improved dramatically, anti-ship missiles, drones, smart mines, all sorts of capabilities that the Taiwanese now have that makes this much, much harder for the Chinese to pull off. So the prologue really goes through a scenario that I think is a very realistic scenario of how you would achieve this if you're China. Very difficult, very risky, but it's probably a more realistic scenario. It abandons a lot of the myths around how this invasion would go. One of them, most prominent, is that they would need to take the beaches.

My invasion plan does not rely on the beaches at all. In fact, I think the beaches are a distraction. And by the way, the U.S. military agreed in 1944 and did not do a beach invasion like they did with Normandy when they were putting together the plan for Taiwan. They focused on the port facilities. I think they remain essential because the beaches on Taiwan are very small. The waters there are very shallow and very rough. So your ability to bring in massive amounts of troops and logistics onto those beaches

is going to be very, very limited. So if you can't take that infrastructure, the port facilities, the airfields, I don't think this is doable at all. And I talk about in the prologue how you would accomplish it step by step. I don't go through the other side of the plan, which is how would Taiwanese respond to it. But purely looking at it from China's perspective, this is how I think they're likely to try this if they should do so. But the other side of this coin is the stakes, right? The stakes of China either successfully taking Taiwan or fighting a prolonged battle over Taiwan,

either just with the Taiwanese or with the US military involved, are dramatic for the entire world. Obviously, very dramatic for us as well in the United States. First of all, economically, right? Taiwan, the world economy depends on Taiwan, right? Taiwan produces about 40% of all semiconductors in our digital age.

Nothing can be built on a piece of electronics. Yeah, that was something that really stuck out to me in the book. I didn't realize the percentage was that high, yeah. Yeah, 40% of all semiconductors, 90% of all advanced semiconductors are coming from Taiwan, which by the way is not going to change in the foreseeable future. Despite the successes of the CHIPS Act, which was passed by U.S. Congress in 2022

to invest about $75 billion in domestic industry, it is a drop in the bucket compared to what you'd need to actually displace Taiwan. And it's just not going to happen in the coming decade. Zero chance of that. So Taiwan is going to remain important. You take that capacity offline temporarily or permanently, you go into global depression. Estimates are you lose about $10 trillion of economic value right off the bat in the first year.

So something on the scale you haven't seen since the global depression of the 1930s. And then of course, if you're in an actual hot conflict with China, if the United States chooses to fight for Taiwan, while you're in a conflict you haven't seen since World War II in terms of intensity, casualties, threat to the mainland United States because the chances that it would

be contained to the Pacific are not great. And you also have the potential for escalation to a nuclear level because for the first time since 1945, two major nuclear superpowers would be fighting each other. You had a small conflict between India and Pakistan in 1999 in Kashmir. But outside of that, you've never had two nuclear powers fighting each other directly. So very, very dangerous on every level. We'll be right back. Do you know the status of your compliance controls right now? Like, right now.

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when you go to vanta.com slash cyber. That's vanta.com slash cyber for $1,000 off. And now a message from Black Cloak. Did you know the easiest way for cyber criminals to bypass your company's defenses is by targeting your executives and their families at home? Black Cloak's award-winning digital executive protection platform secures their personal devices, home networks, and connected lives. Because when executives are compromised at home, your company is at risk. In fact, over one-third of new members discover they've already been breached. Protect your executives and their families 24-7, 365 with Black Cloak. Learn more at blackcloak.io. So before we get into some of your proposed solutions,

I think there are kind of the macro solutions that you propose in the book. But this is a cybersecurity podcast. And just from the perspective of somebody who's in the private sector, who works in Silicon Valley, who works as a startup, can you explain the significance of this potential conflict to that type of person,

why they should care about this, and then what they can do even in their capacity as a private company or through public advocacy to help address this problem? Sure. Well, I would argue regardless of where you are, this is really important and vital because, again, as I mentioned, the potential for war over Taiwan with China is going to affect everyone and no one has been left untouched by it. But in cyber in particular, this is very cute because of a threat group known as World Typhoon. World Typhoon, right? This is a threat group that the U.S. government talks a lot about, tied to the Chinese government that has been breaking into critical infrastructure around this nation for several years now, and not doing the traditional things that you've seen from China, which is focus on companies where there's really great trade secrets or intellectual property that they can steal and give to their domestic companies in order to allow them to better compete against Western companies.

What they are doing is they're breaking into electric utilities, water utilities, places that don't really have significant trade secrets or intellectual property that you would want. And they're not actually stealing anything. want. And they're not actually stealing anything. They're implanting themselves into these networks and remaining there, maintaining persistence. And the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community is that they're there to enable them to do reconnaissance in those networks so that they can orchestrate a disruption or a destructive event in the case of conflict or in the lead-up to conflict. So that you impact power in the United States, you impact water, particularly in places that

are critical for U.S. military mobilization. If you're going to choose to fight China in the Pacific and you need to flow forces to the region, because we're obviously very far away. Cyber can play a really big role in that. So if you are in the cyber field, you are essentially in the front lines of this conflict, fighting the Chinese military as they're doing these infiltrations into our critical infrastructure. Do you get the sense that as an industry, we're prepared for this type of disruption or that we appreciate the breadth and the depth of the problem? Well, in terms of appreciating the breadth and depth, no. I think U.S. government

does, and it's being more and more vocal telling the American public about the threat, but I'm not sure it's getting through as much as it needs to. In terms of whether we're prepared or not, it's an interesting question. So on the surface, it's easier, of course, to say no and that the Chinese have been very successful into infiltrating into a lot of these places. A lot of these utilities don't have significant staff, cybersecurity staff or resources to invest in cybersecurity. So you could even say that they have very little chance of being able to confront a military service

of the Chinese Communist Party, particularly one that's gotten significantly better over the last two decades as it has engaged in a lot of these operations. So it's easy to say all of that. I hesitate to say it only because I have spent the last two years working closely with the Ukrainians, going to Ukraine and looking at what they've done and learning to appreciate to a much greater extent the resiliency of human societies, even when they come under enormous pressure and threat. And I don't think it's unique to the Ukrainians. I think most societies, when faced with those types of challenges, figure things out, right, out of necessity and just human desire for survival.

And when I look at the Ukrainians who have not just been hit by significant cyber attacks from Russia against their critical infrastructure, but have been hit kinetically with missile strikes and drone strikes that, in some cases, have been able to destroy up to 50% of their electric generation capacity. And I still see them working around that, keeping the power on despite blackouts, despite other challenges, figuring out how to procure generators and work around the issues. I get much more optimistic about our ability to survive even a very sophisticated and all-encompassing cyber attack from China because it's not just all about the bits and bytes and there are other things you can do, right? And we actually have a lot of resiliency in our society,

believe it or not, because every year we deal with hurricanes and other natural disasters, power goes out, water may not be drinkable because of a main break or something like that. And we figure things out, right? We get bottled water, power goes out, water may not be drinkable because of a main break or something like that. And we figure things out, right? We get bottled water, we get generators, we get diesel.

It's not pretty and it's not perfect, but we figure out how to survive, at least in the short term. And it's impossible to predict how things would go, but I think we would figure things out. It would slow us down, no question about it. It would make us less efficient. It would have economic impact. But I think the people that are sort of predicting 9-11-style or Pearl Harbor-style cyber disasters

are likely overstating their case. Interesting. Well, then switching gears and talking about what your recommendations would be to help ameliorate this problem before we get into the 2028 scenario that you described. What are those concrete steps that our governments can take, that our private institutions can take in preparation for something like this? So there's a lot of this in the book. Again, I encourage people to read it, World on the Brink, How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century. I'll talk about three high-level ideas.

So the first one centers really on Taiwan itself, and you have to deter this invasion at all costs, I believe. I think Xi Jinping is committed to taking Taiwan in his lifetime. The man is 71 and is looking potentially at the next 10 years or so of Fembinion power to accomplish this task. And a lot of that depends on hard power, military power, both Taiwanese investments that they have to make and other allied forces like the Japanese, but also us and reforms to our defense industrial base. And there's a lot of that in the book. The second one is we need to increase our economic leverage over China

and decrease their economic leverage over us. And the second piece is very important because if Xi Jinping looks at the world and sees that the United States is so dependent on China for procuring semiconductors, for procuring critical minerals and solar panels and batteries and electric vehicles, he might say, rightly or wrongly, that there's no way they're going to fight us. This is going to be so devastating to them economically if I cut them off that I can deter them from coming in. And if the United States is not coming in, that means Japan and Australia are not coming in.

That means Taiwan is on its own and I can take it. We don't want him to think that. So as a result, we have to not decouple. And I coined this phrase in the book. I call it unidirectional entanglement. What you essentially want is to create this asymmetric dependency with China where we're less dependent on them, but they're more dependent on us in areas like semiconductors, like biotech, and many others.

And that requires a number of things. It requires us to prevent Chinese from building their own chip independence, essentially achieving chip breakout capability, which we can do because all of the equipment that you need to build semiconductors is produced by Western companies. In fact, three of them in particular, United States, Netherlands with ASML, and Japan are responsible for the vast majority of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. So if you cut them off and you cut off the maintenance and the parts that are going to that equipment, their industry will collapse effectively.

So that means that they'll be more dependent on buying chips from us and Taiwan and others rather than building themselves. And we'll be less dependent on them because we won't be buying their chips, right? Secondly, you need to secure the critical material supply chain. And the reality is that

it depends on mineral by mineral, but roughly speaking, China processes and refines about 90% of the world's critical minerals, whether it's rare earths or cobalt or nickel, lithium, you name it. Now, processing and refining materials is not rocket science. We know how to do it. The technologies are well known. We just have to do it. And in many cases, we can do it better than China because we will actually do it to higher environmental standard than they will. And if you're worried about things like pollution and climate change, you have to worry about what China is doing because it's one planet, right?

If they're polluting China and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, it's just as bad for us as it would be if we were doing it here in the United States. So you have to prevent China from holding us hostage in that critical minerals market by diversifying production, both French shoring and on shoring, to refine and process these minerals. Mining is a little bit of an issue, less so than the process of refining because there are lots of mines around the world. Some of them are owned by China, not all of them. We need to make sure that they don't capture the entire ecosystem, of course, but we have alternatives there. And we have to invest in innovation. and synthetic biology, space technologies, green tech technologies, etc., to make sure that we remain at the forefront of innovation in all those spaces that will really dictate

who will win the 21st century. And I argue we have to enable skill-based immigration to this country. We need top talent. It's better for us when people come to this country and create new businesses, create new innovations, new opportunities, create jobs, right? You look at the top companies in the world by market cap, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Apple, Tesla, and SpaceX, they're all either have been founded by immigrants or children of immigrants, every single one of those, right,

or are run by them right now. So even just at that top level, you have an incredible advantage that immigrants bring to this country. And by the way, it also weakens our adversaries. Imagine if we were able to take the top people out of China and bring them here and have them contribute to our economy versus China's, right? It's a no-brainer. And then the last piece is defending innovation. You have to reform the defense industrial base to focus on more asymmetry, focusing on quantity versus quality, reducing costs, because the reality is we've become too enamored with weapons platforms that are too expensive for us to buy in the quantities that we need to.

They may be great, but if you can buy only a few of them, it doesn't actually matter. So that needs to be a really big focus for us. We need to sanction IP theft that is undermining our economic advantage that China continues to prosecute and has been for the last 25 years. And you need to engage in new alliance frameworks. I call for a new framework, sort of an economic NATO idea

that I call Treaty of Allied Market Economies, where you can help other countries that have come under Chinese coercion from, you can help them to deter this coercion by banning together and engaging in collective punishment against any aggressor that engages in this type of activity. I mean, it strikes me in many ways as similar to

how we won Cold War I. You refer to this conflict as Cold War II, was building up our infrastructure, our economic might, our military superiority. Obviously, there are differences along the way, but it's the same formula. It's similar. The one difference really is the outcome, right? And we don't have the benefit of this unnatural phenomenon of the Soviet Union that was made up of these artificial, well, it was an artificial framework made up of real countries with their own ethnic backgrounds that didn't really want to be part of the Soviet Union. In large part, the Soviet Union collapsed was not just because of economic stagnation, but primarily because of ethnic nationalism and that all these countries, the Baltics, the Armenians,

Azeris and others just didn't want to be part of the Soviet Union. They wanted their own nations. You're not going to have that with China, which is basically a homogeneous society by and large, with Han Chinese being the vast majority of the population. So China is not collapsing. It's not going away. You can't even assume that the Chinese Communist Party will go away. It would be nice if it did, but you can't count on it. And there's nothing you can do about that anyway.

So it can last for hundreds of years potentially, right? So the goal here is to prevent their hegemony, particularly in East Asia and ultimately globally. And how they manage their own country is going to be up to the Chinese. And I'm not sure that there's a lot we can do to change that. Last question, I kind of want to get into something a little more meta,

just about your personal role in all of this. I mean, I think one of the ways a lot of people who follow geopolitics know you is that you were very early in predicting the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I think when there were a lot of doubters, both in and out of our government. So did that experience inspire you in a way to write this book, knowing that you have this geopolitical expertise that might not exist elsewhere? And was that an impetus behind this book and the warning that you're trying to provide here? It is. And I've been focused on the issues of China, as I've said, for 15 plus years. But it made me tackle this issue with much greater urgency right after the invasion of Ukraine.

Because as you said, I predicted it about almost three months before the war began. I said, he's going to invade Ukraine before the end of that winter. And despite being completely convinced of that and putting my own reputation on the line with a public prediction, for which I was in some places ridiculed, it was still a shock when it happened. You know something is coming and you're convinced of that, but when it happens and it's so big, you're still sort of like, my God, this actually is happening, right? And I was kind of shell-shocked

on that day of February 24th, 2022. And as I was reflecting on the causes of that war, I realized that we're marching towards a very similar but even more devastating conflict with China and Taiwan. And the causes are identical. What was driving Putin, what is driving Xi, I believe, are the same things. are the same things. It's their egos, their distorted view of history, their focus on security and the problems of their geography. And it's their belief in their destiny, personal destiny, and their country's destiny to have these lands. And sometime after the war began, I received this email out of the blue from an individual I'd never met, who was a Ukrainian, born in Ukraine, immigrated to the UK. And he wrote me this email saying that he had read my writings and my predictions on the war, became convinced of that before the war broke

out, and tried to get his family out of the city of Kharkiv, where they had lived. And his family would not listen to him. As he was saying, war is coming, you got to get out. They're like, no, no, no, this is all nonsense. Nothing's going to happen. It's propaganda. Russians are never going to invade. And he got so distraught that they weren't listening, his siblings, his parents,

that he basically on February 15th, about a week before the war began, bought them all tickets and said, just go on vacation to Turkey and go for a couple of weeks and then you'll come back and hopefully nothing will happen. You'll return to your homes

and you'll just have a nice vacation, right? And they go and they never come back, right? Because the war breaks out, their neighborhood actually gets demolished by Russian artillery in Kharkiv. A number of their neighbors die. He writes me this email saying, you know, thank you so much for raising alarm bells

and getting me to push my family to get out and potentially save their lives. And I realized that, you know, my predictions at least had some real effects on a people. I was not just shouting to the ether. And if I was able to do a little bit of good with this war in Ukraine, maybe I can do more good with raising the alarm bells about a war that we have a lot of time still to actually prevent, which should be our ultimate goal. It was too late with Ukraine.

I was talking to senior administration officials at the time as they were trying to forestall this conflict. And both they and myself were realizing we've run out of time. There's not a lot you can do there. He's made his mind. He's going to invade. Well, with Xi, I don't think he has made up his mind completely. I don't think he's penciled the date certain in his calendar.

There's a lot we can do to still deter this, and we've got to do it because the costs of failure are going to be just absolutely enormous. Well, the book is World on the Brink. It was such a pleasure to speak with you and to get your perspective and highly encourage everybody to read the book. As I said, once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. So thank you very much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me, Ben. That's my Caveat co-host Ben Yellen speaking with Dmitry Alperovitch, author and chairman

of the Silverado Policy Accelerator. The book is titled World on the Brink, How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century. That's our N2K Cyber Wire special edition. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Domo's AI and data products platform comes in. With Domo, you can channel AI and data into innovative uses that deliver measurable impact. Secure AI agents connect, prepare, and automate your data workflows, helping you gain insights, receive alerts, and act with ease through guided apps tailored to your role. Data is hard. Domo is easy. Learn more at ai.domo.com. That's ai.domo.com.