BUCK: We were just talking about Pelosi bringing her son, Paul Jr., to Taiwan with her. And she says that there was no business done; this is not a Hunter Biden situation. She promises. Here’s what she said.

Nancy Pelosi claims her son had no "business dealings" when he joined her trip to Asia:

"No, he did not, of course he did not."

pic.twitter.com/1BOgzqLSsf

— Benny Johnson 🍊 (@bennyjohnson) August 11, 2022

BUCK: Okay. She said he did not. Pelosi lies all the time. Maybe… He probably didn’t ’cause she’s meeting with people that are important in the Taiwanese government. Her husband invests in semiconductors; we can all connect the dots there. But the point of the visit itself, Clay, is interesting because we were talking about a boondoggle before. This clearly rattled some cages. This clearly got people fired up and the Chinese Communist Party is very unhappy with what happened here, and Pelosi spoke about this a bit, telling us what was the purpose of this visit?

.@SpeakerPelosi: "Our purpose in going to Taiwan was to say that we have this strong relationship built on the status quo. […] We will not allow China to isolate Taiwan. They have kept Taiwan from participating in the World Health Organization." https://t.co/uMHvbiOTOK pic.twitter.com/K1gkY9wbXi

— The Hill (@thehill) August 11, 2022

BUCK: Clay, I think the truth here is that if the Taiwanese government is relying on the U.S. government in their moment of need in crisis to come save that country if China does invade, I think they’re likely to be very disappointed.

CLAY: There’s some great war games taking place right now. Have you read these articles about Taiwan-United States-China war games and how exactly those would play out? And the thing that maybe stood out to me most — we could probably spend a bunch of time; maybe next week we can even bring it back up. But all of these war games presuppose that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would include a bombing attack on American forces in Japan.

And I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about that aspect of this. In other words, a lot of people — you, me — have a lot of discussions about, should the United States get involved. If China begins its invasion of Taiwan by bombing U.S. troops and U.S. supplies and planes and everything else in Japan, we’re kind of at war, right? And that seems to be the consensus view of what they would do, because otherwise their amphibious assault has to cross a hundred miles of open ocean and is very difficult to undertake if there is any opposition whatsoever in the air.

BUCK: So the best option, I think, from the perspective of supporting freedom in Taiwan is help them be as self-sufficient in their defense as they can possibly be. The Japanese territorial defense forces, their Constitution has a lot of limitations it puts on their military in the post-World War II era. But the Japanese forces are pretty considerable, actually, their defense forces. Taiwan needs to be able to raise the cost so that the calculation for Beijing is, we’re not gonna do this by force. They’re gonna pressure them a lot politically, they can do a lot of things. But they gotta make it so that Taiwan is too high a price for them to pay and not rely on a U.S. carrier group to come in and save the day.

CLAY: And they gotta hope that their people fight like the Ukraine situation, which we haven’t talked about in a while, is kind of interesting. Probably could update that in a little bit. But the hit that they just took in Crimea, Russia did, is interesting to think about too.