BUCK: Here, we’ve got 8,500 U.S. units placed on heightened preparedness — we mentioned this yesterday — and what’s the possibility of not just a war in Ukraine, but what’s the U.S. response gonna be in this Biden administration.

JOHN KIRBY: …try to provide some facts on these preparations that will reinforce our commitment to NATO and to the NATO response force and increase our readiness. Secretary Austin has placed a range of units in the United States on a heightened preparedness to deploy, which increases our readiness to provide forces if NATO should activate the NRF or if other situations develop. All told, the number of forces that the secretary has placed on heightened alert, uhhh, comes up to about 8500 personnel.

BUCK: Now, Clay, this is a volatile situation in Ukraine. We’ll talk more about it over the course of the show today. But when you look at the Biden team, the people that he has, and of course Joe Biden himself as commander-in-chief, I think a big part of the concern… It’s really twofold. On the one hand, there’s, “I don’t think these people are competent,” and I don’t think that they have a record, even the people they think in the Democrat foreign policy establishment are bright. I mean, look at Libya, look at all the disasters in the recent past. But beyond that, I think they also aren’t trusted right now because getting us more involved, whatever that means, than we need to be in Ukraine is a way for them to not have people focused on the disasters that are occurring in this country right now on a policy level.

CLAY: I think so, and we talked about this some yesterday. I don’t think you can underrate what China is taking from our response to Russia potentially invading Ukraine, because China — and I’m gonna keep hammering this ’cause I think it’s so absurd. We’re going over to China — we and the rest of the world — and effectively bending the knee and showing up in Beijing for the Olympics. And I wonder, based on the close relationships between Putin and Xi right now — at least what seems to be — between China and Russia, whether there’s conversations about, “Hey, are you gonna invade Ukraine before the Olympics so that it overshadows everything surrounding the Olympics?”

But also, Buck — and I think this is maybe the most significant part, China knows we did nothing when they effectively took over Hong Kong and ended democracy there. They threw all the reporters in jail. All these people who claimed to care about the First Amendment basically did nothing. Now they’re going to watch what we do with Ukraine, and they’re going to say, “If the United States is allowing Russia to take Ukraine, they’re gonna talk a big game about us taking Taiwan, but if we do it, they will do nothing.”

And then the question becomes: How much of what’s going on in Ukraine and in Taiwan represents the full nature of this expansionist ideal from Russia and China and/or are there other places that they would like to go grab to further illuminate their cultural hegemony — there’s another word for you, Buck, for the SAT — and where does that go? And that to me is the biggest question.