American Thought Leaders - Communist China’s ‘Backdoor’ Into America: Cleo Paskal

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

There is a largely unknown U.S. territory that Chinese citizens can enter legally without a visa.China expert Cleo Paskal argues it’s an “open backdoor into the United States” that the Chinese communist regime can exploit. The area has seen problems with drug trafficking, birth tourism, controversial Chinese casinos, and allegations of corruption.Ms. Paskal is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and an expert on the Indo-Pacific region.In this episode, we dive into the Chinese communist regime’s tactics in the Pacific and its strategies to subvert America.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

There is a part of the United States where Chinese can arrive without a visa. Cleo Pascal is a senior fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an expert on China and the Indo-Pacific region. They're already embedding all over the zone, including in ports and port infrastructure, but also corrupting political systems. So if the U.S. does try to get across the Pacific or thinks it needs to get across the Pacific again, it's going to find it much, much more difficult. In this episode, she breaks down the Chinese regime's strategy against America.

Drug warfare is one of the 24 warfares listed in unrestricted warfare. They're actually subsidizing. They're giving tax concessions to the chemical factories that produce the precursors. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek. Cleo Pascal, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Always great to see you. Thank you for having me. So Cleo, you've alerted me to yet another U.S. border, one that I just simply didn't know existed, that's being, I guess, penetrated by, in this case, the Chinese communist regime. Completely legally. This is astounding. But there is a part of the United States

where Chinese can arrive without a visa. Absolutely without a visa. Just get on a plane, get on a direct flight, and get off in the United States. And that is in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands. This is where the United States borders Japan. If you know where west of Hawaii. Guam, which is also part of the U.S., is west of Darwin, Australia. It's about 1,400, 1,500 miles from Taiwan, about the same from Okinawa. And the Marianas are contiguous to that. They're north. So Guam is the southern Mariana Island. It's its own thing. But this Commonwealth of Northern Marianas, which is about 14 islands, is directly north of that. And that's part of the United States. It's been part of the United States since about 1986.

American citizens, American territory. And for a whole bunch of different reasons, Chinese can arrive without a visa. And some come for tourism, but quite a few have been involved in proven nefarious activity, including using the US Postal Service for distributing drugs, buying US passports. There has been legal but problematic birth tourism, seemingly purchasing marriages with American citizens, but the biggest strategic threat has been illegally crossing because once they get to Marianas they're not supposed to go to the rest of the U.S., but hundreds at least have been taking boats and going to Guam and some have been found roaming around U.S. military bases in Guam.

There's one other angle to this, which is they've also been linked to casinos in the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas that at one point were laundering, well, running, sorry, more money than the casinos in Macau. Billions, huge, huge amounts of money. So this is this open back door into the United States that is a huge security concern. And the governor of the Marianas would like to see it closed. It's in the remit of the Department of Homeland to do so. Members of Congress have written asking for that to happen, but it has yet to happen. Well, and the really interesting thing is that they seem to have

stopped the same practice for Russians, but they haven't stopped it for Chinese, which is extremely odd. Yeah, I mean, this was a part of the U.S. where both Russians and Chinese had visa exemptions. And they did stop it for the Russians. Nobody else, I mean, the Indians, none of the allied countries who would require visas for the rest of the U.S. have this dispensation. It was just the Russians and the Chinese. And they stopped, as you mentioned, they've stopped the Russians, but they've kept it going for the Chinese. And there's been a lot of push from the Chamber of Commerce to keep it going. They're saying it's essential for their tourism sector, even though now the majority of the tourists come from Korea. And there are very likely specific business interests involved. Some very important families are linked quite closely back

to mainland China operating in CNMI. This casino thing brought a ton of money and political influence into the country. There have been three major casinos. There was one on the island of Tinian, which got shut down. There was one in Saipan, which is the main island, which has been shut down, but the license hasn't been fully revoked yet. But now there's a new one on the harbor in Tinian. And Tinian, to give an idea of how important historically and strategically and geographically this location is Tinian was the site of one of the busiest airports in the world in 1945 because that's once the Americans had captured CNMI Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands which includes Saipan and Tinian from Japan that's where the waves of the b-29 bombers were

taking off from to bomb mainland Japan. They were in range at that point. And the U.S. is now rehabilitating those runways, putting in about $400 million to redo the runways on Tinian. But at the same time, there's this Chinese-linked casino right on the dual-use harbor with the ability to see what's coming and going. And through political warfare, through injecting money, getting political influence, perhaps being able to undercut those U.S. kinetic investments. Well, so here's the thing

that we should talk about, right? This area of the world is incredibly important for U.S. security, right? And we, you know, not too, too long ago, we had Grant Newsham on the show talking about the fact that the compact treaty had not been funded. And this was, you know, would be a massive blow to the U.S. security posture. And in general, we've had you on the show before talking about this, you know, how important these tiny island chains which seem, you know, if you don't, if you're not thinking about it carefully, almost inconsequential if you're focused on, you know, mainland US politics is where the reality is, they're incredibly important. So I want, I want

you to kind of frame that for us again. Yeah. Yeah, so the, we often lump all the Pacific Islands together. The Pacific Islands. So it's about 1 fifth of the planet. And it's the buffer between Asia and the Americas. So when we're talking about the Pacific Islands, it could be the Solomon Islands, which would be the Battle of Guadalcanal, which

is down by Australia. It could be French Polynesia, which is down, which is French, and which is down by sort of Chile, kind of down there. The part that is the most important to the United States, which is why the U.S. has maintained these relationships, are the ones in the north of the equator across the center bridging Hawaii to the Philippines. And this is a strategic lesson that the U.S. has known since the Spanish-American War. So why does the U.S. have Guam, for example? So Spanish-American War, end of the 19th century, the U.S. took the Philippines and Guam. And then the other islands

that were kind of across the middle between Hawaii and that middle part, the Germans bought them from the Spanish. So the compact states that you were talking about, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, and the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas, which is just north of Guam. So it's this kind of zone that goes across and then up. This bridge, watery bridge between Hawaii, between the U.S. and Asia was most of it was taken by Germany and then when Germany lost the First World War and they used it for strategic reasons. There was, we talk a lot about the cables now, the fiber-optic cables across the Pacific. In Yap, in the Federated States of Micronesia, the Germans had a telegraph station. The telegraphs were the

fiber optic cables of 100 years ago. So the Germans knew how strategically important it was. And when the Germans lost World War I, or even during the war, the Japanese took over the German possessions. And so Japan controlled that zone. Commonwealth of Northern Marianas, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, all down the coast and then across, which is what allowed them to hit the U.S. For 30 years, Japan was sitting in the middle of the Pacific from 1914 to 1944.

And then the U.S. had to, at great cost, win back those islands one by one by one. That's, you know, Battle of Macon, Tarawa, Kwajalein. Those two are a little bit to the south. And then you start going across Truck Lagoon, Peleliu, and then the Battle of Saipan. So June 15th is the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Saipan. And once the Japanese lost Saipan and they fought pretty much to the last man. And entire Japanese families that had been living there, in some cases for 30 years, running school systems and pharmacies and clock-making little enterprises. I mean, it was a whole Japanese culture there threw themselves off cliffs and committed suicide rather than give in to the Americans. is seeing that Japanese response that made some American planners think,

if we go into Japan proper, we're going to see this and more, and fed into the thinking of the nuclear attack on Japan. And in fact, the Enola Gay, which carried the Hiroshima bomb, took off from CNMI, took off from Tinian, those airfields that are now being rehabilitated. So this was empire after empire has known this. And after World War II, the US took what had been that Japanese mandate, that whole Japanese territory, Commonwealth of Northern Marianas, Palau, Far East, Macronesia, Marshall Islands, as the U.S. trust territories. It's the only strategic trust territory the U.N. has ever designated.

And during the decolonization period, the question was, what do you do? Like, you know, it was being run by the Navy. Saipan was closed to outsiders and was being used in the late 40s and early 50s as a CIA training base for probably Taiwanese to potentially go into mainland China. Like, these were still military or intelligence installations very late. The Marshall Islands were the site of nuclear testing. 67 nuclear tests were done in the Marshall Islands. What happened was this trust territories, through Congress of Micronesia, the people

decided they would have these three countries, three independent countries, Palau, Federal States of America, and Marshall Islands. They would become independent, but then enter into these compacts, which is what Colonel Newsham talked about with the U.S., which gave the U.S. exclusive defense and security rights. But the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas decided to join the United States. So that's how the people of the Marianas

entered into this covenant. That's how important this relationship is. They call it the covenant with the United States. As long as there is the potential for conflict between Asia and the Americas, the way to physically get from one location to the other is through this zone. Any Taiwan contingency, resupplying of Japan,

resupplying of South Korea, that all requires this zone being secure for the U.S. So of course, China has been putting enormous effort to make sure that it becomes less and less secure for the U.S. Well, so one of the things that we've been discussing offline a little bit is how modern technology and modern warfare techniques, notably the CCP's unrestricted warfare doctrine, has kind of erased that distance to some degree. I believe that comes from Colonel Neuschem's congressional testimony. The question is, are these places really that important in a modern age? And I think some people don't see their importance anymore, or at least it seems that way. Yeah. So it depends on what battlefield you're looking at, whether you're looking at a kinetic

battlefield or whether you're looking at sort of a political warfare battlefield, which has kinetic elements to it. But to overlay what you're talking about, this erasure of distance, which Colonel Newsham talked about in his congressional testimony. Since the founding of the U.S., George Washington himself spoke about the United States' detached and distant situation. The idea in a lot of strategic planners' minds in the U.S. is isolationism is a viable choice. You can be isolated. And that's often the debate you have. Should we get involved in something or not? And that debate is predicated on the assumption that that choice is your gift, that you can be isolated. That distance has been erased. It's been erased through cyber. So the Chinese can

disable the grid in a way that previously would have taken a bomber hitting a transformer to do. It's been erased through chemical warfare with fentanyl, for example, killing more Americans in a year than died in the Vietnam War. Chinese fentanyl has killed, by a factor of four or five, more Americans than Russians have killed Ukrainians. The amount of Americans that have been killed through this deliberate chemical warfare. It's a very deliberate attack. And each death destroys a family.

I just want to mention, we've covered on recent shows with Peter Schweitzer, for example, how that actually works, like how it's very clear that this is Chinese Communist Party strategy and not, you know, oh well we don't have much to do with that, right? Because that's always of course what they would say. Well the Select Committee just came out with their report that says that they're actually subsidizing, they're giving tax concessions to the chemical factories that produce the precursors. Right. You know, and that's not for some domestic, you know, pharmaceutical consumption. And drug warfare is one of the 24 warfares listed in unrestricted warfare.

And it can work in both ways. It can be drugs that are used to kill you, like fentanyl, but it can also be gaining control of drug supply chains, pharmaceutical supply chains, to have that lever over you as we saw during COVID. And COVID, of course, is another way where distance was erased. And regardless of where it came from, they blocked the flights from Wuhan to the rest of China,

and they let the flights go to the rest of the world. There's the gain of control over our media in terms of things like Hollywood or- DAVID FREEMAN, Or for years, carrying these supplements, paid supplements, ostensibly, that looked quite similar, actually, to the actual newspapers in The New York Times and Washington Post and so forth. The Confucius Institute, the distortion of public debate around China, very deliberate, the intellectual property theft. The Houston Consulate was

a physical example of the erasure of distance. It was, you know, operating as a spy and influence base, but you don't have to be physically in a consulate for this to be the case. And yes, there have always been spies operating, but the degree to which China has managed to erase distance and do the sort of damage in U.S. society, economy, politics is as if you had an enemy country, if not right next door, actually within your own country. This is beyond fifth column, right? It's pervasive and it's fundamentally changed the nature of U.S. society and of US cities. You walk through cities that have been deindustrialized through political and economic manipulation of the US systems that have allowed the extraction of manufacturing, for example. So that's kind

of one thing is the outflow, but then in terms of the inflow and the embeddedness, it's acknowledged that China can turn off the lights in Minneapolis. You know, the other thing, of course, is that some of this was very much with the willing participation of Americans. So there's that piece, which was, you know, for example, in the time of the Soviet Union, there wasn't that level, anything close to that level of willing participation. So this has been the great accomplishment, their great accomplishment during the Cold War, the first Cold War. In a Rocky movie, Rocky could punch a Soviet fighter in the face and everybody would cheer. You're not going to have Rocky fighting a Chinese communist fighter

in a movie anytime soon. They figured it out, they got control of Hollywood, and that ain't going to happen. We're not even allowed to say who the enemy is. If you can't say who the enemy is, you can't open up the toolkit that lets you defend yourself and fight back properly. So perfect opportunity to, we've talked about comprehensive national power on this show before. I want to get back to that, actually, because you really revealed to me in that years ago now episode, how important this is to the entirety of the Chinese approach to foreign policy, national security, and frankly, military action, whether it's through unrestricted warfare or otherwise? So the first time I read about comprehensive national power was in a book that came out

over a decade ago by a Chinese New Zealand academic. And in it, he said, you can't understand China's strategy in the Pacific Islands without understanding China's grand strategy. Since the 90s, it has been comprehensive national power to be, then I started reading more. But he himself is an interesting guy.

This is Jian Yang. He, as it turns out, taught for over a decade at a spy school in China, then came as an academic to New Zealand. I met him in New Zealand when he was head of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. So he was guiding the debates around these topics within that sector of academia in New Zealand. He then became a member of parliament in New Zealand and was one of the key people on their foreign affairs, including taking New Zealand politicians on trips to China where they met some of his old colleagues. He is a living example of China's

comprehensive national power. So what is this comprehensive national power? We are used to thinking about national power in a very reductionist way. You'll get military, economic, kind of the big things. The Chinese Comprehensive National Power metric, which is an empirical metric where they assign numerical values to each country, is much, much more comprehensive. And it includes things like taking a panda.

If you take a panda in your zoo, then you are helping China project a positive, soft, cuddly image of China, and you are part of that kind of soft power expansion. But it's also, if you have lithium deposits, you might think that's part of your comprehensive national power, but if those lithium deposits are being extracted by a's part of your comprehensive national power, but if those lithium deposits are being extracted by a Chinese company and going back to China, that's part of

their comprehensive national power. If your democracy is being eroded or being questioned, that hurts you and that helps China because fundamentally it's a competition of systems. So it's extremely, extremely comprehensive and it's relative. So if China's goal is to be number one, you can do it two ways. One, you can get better. The other is you knock the other guy down. And even if you get knocked down, if the other guy gets knocked down more, you've won. So that's why if you have an epidemic in your country and you think you might get hurt by it, in a comprehensive national power logic, you want everybody else to get hurt even more. So you turn your epidemic into a global pandemic and you use those few weeks,

especially slowing down the WHO on human-to-human transmission and things like that, to position yourself to be in a better comprehensive national power relative position when the rest of the world gets hit even more. You know, absolutely fascinating. One of the huge tools, of course, was the one, propaganda, and two, capture of multilateral institutions at some level. Basically, the WHO was just repeating what we learned was preposterous position that the Chinese regime had taken. We were successful through lockdown policy. I think this comprehensive national power measure is an extremely important thing,

and I just don't hear it talked about very often in terms of thinking about the China threat. So I think of this in terms of geopolitical articles of faith. Okay, so if you are a person of faith then you might have the same goal as somebody else who's a person of faith. So let's say for example a Buddhist and a Catholic and a Jew walk into a restaurant. Your goal for all three is going to be the same, to live a good life and to have a good afterlife if that's part of your faith. But what you order off the menu will be shaped by your article of faith. So a Buddhist will be a vegetarian. If you're Catholic and it's Friday, you'll eat fish. If you're Jewish, you'll look for kosher.

So those articles of faith, even though your grand, say, strategy is the same, to be good, your tactics are going to be different depending on what your article of faith is. In the same way, strategists all have their articles of faith. Some will say, I think the Chinese economy is going to crash, so that's your article of faith, so you don't really have to worry about China. Some will say, China's economy is going to crash, so that's going to make them more dangerous. And then everything, all the rest of your strategy grows out of that. So these geopolitical article of faith, the acronym is GAF, because we all make gaffs,

and it's very useful to go back to try to figure out what your original gaff is out of which you grow all this other stuff, right? So if your gaffe on China is, it's a kinetic threat only, then you're looking at building up the Navy. You're looking at, you know, if you're dealing with an island like CNMI, then you put in this $400 million airfield. When you talk about China and Russia, for example, in the context of Ukraine, I think China is trying to create as much chaos as possible in the world and try to fragment relationships. And so I find it a lot easier to think that China is helping Russia and Ukraine and will continue to do so. If you think China is this force for potential good, then you think,

well, we'll just share some intel with China and show them how badly Russia is behaving, and then maybe they'll help us solve the Russia problem. And to your point, I think it's extremely clear right now. I think even there's a senior U.S. official that has said China is helping Russia. But if you remember at the beginning, the US was, before the invasion, brought intel to China to say, oh you know Russia's gonna do this, you better slow it down or you better talk to your Russian friends and tell them not to do it. Whereas if you

had my gaff, which is your boat to give them intelligence that's going to let them know what intelligence you have and they're going to be doing this anyway, so all you're doing is really helping the Russian invasion, it leads you down different paths. But the point of this, going back to the GAF mine is this comprehensive national power outlook for China and you think you can counter it by building airfields in Tinian while at the same time the Chinese have put in a casino on the harbor, you would be better off sending one less plane and sending 10 more lawyers and investigators to the government of CNMI, and the governor would like this to happen, to investigate money laundering, corruption, organized crime, and that would have a better

defence and security outcome than sending that extra plane to Tinian. Fascinating. So, you know, you're also playing unrestricted warfare then in your approach. Unrestricted defense. Okay. So if you've got comprehensive national power, you need comprehensive national defense. You can't just, defense can't just mean kinetic. You know, it's like this thing with the marijuana farms in Maine, right? What's that about? That should be a very high priority defense and security issue.

Explain that to me, just briefly. So there's all these Chinese-linked marijuana grow-ups in Maine that were discovered kind of by very good local investigative journalists, and they're finding more and more and more. And there seem to be long trucking routes. They're obviously illegal. They were doing it through the financing of the mortgages seem to be through one Chinese-linked clearinghouse, so relatively easy to identify. If they're doing it in Maine, it's unlikely that's the only place that that sort of thing is happening. And once you have that kind of organized crime infrastructure, it's not just going to be contained to that. There'll be other elements involved, including obviously human trafficking and extortion and blackmail, bribery. And a lot

of it can come down to just the local sheriff, whether they want to prosecute or not. And the bad guys know that. So they're going to put a lot of effort into getting friendly sheriffs put in place. And then once they have the friendly local law enforcement put in place that won't look at the marijuana grow up, he or she, that law enforcement also won't look at all the other stuff that they're doing ancillary to that. Well, what's also very relevant is this, you know, unholy trinity of the, how these, you know, the wealthy business tycoons work together with the triads with the organized crime work together with Chinese state security that they're all actually kind of collaborating as opposed to how we might

imagine you know on separate teams yeah and getting back to the basics which which is what's what's the goal is the foundational goal? And I would argue in the context of this being a battle of systems, the goal is to destroy American democracy. American democracy is a defense against the Chinese Communist Partyification of a society. And it is an existential threat to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party because, of course, it all goes back to the ultimate, ultimate goal, which is the preservation of the Chinese Communist Party. So the success of any other system other than the Chinese system

is a direct existential threat to the Chinese Communist Party. And the beacon, the city on the hill, the shining city on the hill of the alternative system is the United States of America. So you need to discredit, tarnish, disintegrate through tropic warfare, unrestricted warfare. Demoralize might be a term. I keep thinking about that lately. Yeah. this demoralize might be a term I keep thinking about that lately yeah because you know with all the you know obvious challenges I think that some we've been discussing on this show for example here it's it still remains that way I in my

view it is still that yeah in many ways the shining city on the hill but it can be hard to see when you see amidst some darkness. And that's interesting. Yeah. And I'd say that the thing about the shining city on the hill is the shining, that light doesn't come from street lamps, right? It comes from the individuals, which is the incredible strength of the US system. That's the inner light of all of the Americans, not America, of Americans. Going back to CNMI, to the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas, I was very touched and privileged to talk to a woman, a Chamorro woman, who had been hiding in the caves during the American

invasion. When the Americans came in, the locals who could hid in caves, and they hid in caves for weeks while the bombardment was going on. And it wasn't the starvation. It was really the thirst that was getting to them, just not having anything to drink. In her cave, two Marines came up quietly and told them they were going to be safe, they were going to be okay, and led her and her family out of the cave. And one of the Marines gave her some water to drink from his canteen. And she's in her 90s now, and when she talks about it, the emotion of that

kind of gift, you can see how incredibly touched she was by that. And she spoke Japanese. But that communication between the two of them was this individual young marine who had just lived through hell trying to liberate Saipan. And this little 10-year-old girl created such a bond that that was why many Chamorros, many of the locals, voted to become American. And in her case, she actually became a nun, and then she became a schoolteacher, and she taught in inner city America during desegregation to repay the Marines who had come and liberated them.

She's not black or white, and she thought she could play a role in helping America move forward. These are stories that are uniquely American stories. These are such kind of that inner light of an American who is fighting for freedom has what has illuminated a lot of the globe. I mean, you're from a part of the world where you've seen that also, right? It's not this city, Washington, that's the city on the hill, right? It's the individual Americans. So that light needs to be extinguished for the Chinese Communist Party to be able to flourish in the darkness that it so craves.

And that's why fighting back against them involves shining light. You know, I came here in a cab and the driver was Uyghur. And his, I'm not going to be too specific, but he very close relative is still back in China. And he's living in a city where people are going to restaurants, having a normal life, all that stuff. But he, part of his heart is in China. And that relative had been thrown into a labor camp for a year,

lost touch, you know, this is still, the fight is still going on. Yeah, well, I mean, the genocide, you know, is still going on. Yeah, and... An actual, actual genocide, right? And if, we're the ones who are supposed to be fighting that. Our light is supposed to be bringing relief to that darkness. And that makes it a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party and to their comprehensive national power and all that sort of stuff.

So we don't even realize we have those tools to deploy. But we really need to. And you know a place like Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, you know, which has had these Chinese arriving without a visa, you know, money laundering, all that sort of stuff. It's so easy to fix that just by doing the things we're supposed to do anyway, which is go after the corruption and throw the bad guys in jail and, you know, all those kind of really basic elements of what is part of that light that has inspired and attracted so many? And I say that as a Canadian. Yes. I mean, I think we're both rare American exceptionalist Canadians.

I think I can speak for you, knowing you enough. You've never told me that explicitly. As a Canadian, if I were to join the Canadian military, I would need to swear an oath to King Charles III. I think a military that has you swear an oath to a constitution is a pretty

remarkable thing. It's not exceptional anymore because others have picked up the idea, but it certainly was an exceptional formulation at the beginning. And that's why it is worth going back to those founding documents, including this George Washington quote about the U.S. being detached and distant, to see how that is being compromised. So I want to talk for the remainder of our time about the importance to U.S. security, beyond the shining of the light, which I think is a really beautiful way of saying it, of both Taiwan, the quote-unquote unsinkable aircraft carrier,

and I'll get you to explain that to me too, but just kind of to summarize, right, that Taiwan and these other islands in the Pacific that you have spent so much time understanding and watching how to use, you know, the term from your detailed paper on this, Chinese island hopping, I think is the term you used. Just explain to me the importance of that and how that is being threatened. Okay, yeah, thanks. So Taiwan, first Taiwan. Taiwan is often reduced to, oh, it's just the chips or, you know, that kind of thing. But there are two... Wait, the chips are important. Yeah, okay, the chips are... Fine, the chips are important. However, I would argue, based on my understanding of comprehensive national power, that China is willing to damage everybody

if everybody else is damaged a bit more than it is. Right? So if the chip factories are destroyed, that means nobody's getting the chips. So China won't get the chips, but neither will everybody else. And undoubtedly, you know, there are second level chips that they think that they've cornered the market on or this or that, whatever. But you can't think of it in terms of logic or it's not our logic. It's a completely different logic. You know, like, I have a bit of a different opinion on this, on the demographic. China does have demographic issues.

They're not stupid. They knew that 30 years of one-child policy was going to create these demographic issues. And I think that at some level, the planners thought, okay, well, then we'll go through this bump, then we'll have all these old people and we'll be just unbalanced, and then they'll die off, and then we'll have a reduced general population. I think they include the death of tens of millions of people in calculations in a way that… Would be unthinkable. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we can't, I think that, you know, applying, that's why I try to understand as much as I can of the Chinese terminology and logic or incomprehensible power understood to work for that sort of thing. Taiwan creates two other big problems for China.

One is this existential issue of their legitimacy, the Chinese Communist Party saying, well, the Chinese can't handle democracy. And then you look across the strait and you've got Han Chinese that are doing way better and have created a much more vibrant society and economy than the ones that have been living under communist rule. So it undermines the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. And, you know know the other and they've already you know gotten rid of one partial democracy which was also thriving for a

long time yeah yeah which which goes to that which feeds into that other chip thing which is people are like oh they'll never they'll never kill the golden goose that's Hong Kong. Oh, well, they did. That's right. You know. So it's the logic is different. So you've got, if you're China, China's Communist Party, your legitimacy rests on a few things. One is your system is better. So the success of the U.S. is a threat to that.

Han Chinese can't handle democracy. Well, Taiwan takes care of that. You need authoritarianism if it's a country of a billion people. Well, India takes care of that, which is another reason why India is another big target for them. So that's one reason why Taiwan is a problem.

The other is geography, because yes, there's been this erasure of distance for hitting the US but you still have trade routes and you still have you know sort of the other and kinetic and if you look at the way they're building up the Navy they clearly think that maritime domain is one that needs to be dominated and if you're standing on the Chinese coast and looking out what you see is what's known as the first island chain, which is the sort of set of islands off the coast, Japan, Taiwan, Philippines. And it's actually very difficult to get, for example, your submarines out unobserved, to fly

your jets out to project power, which is, I think, probably one of the reasons why they've been militarizing the islands in the South China Sea, because that pushes them further towards, closer off the coast towards the first island chain. If you can break Taiwan, if you can take Taiwan, then you've broken the first island chain, and you're out into the Pacific, which takes you to the Arctic, which takes you down into the Indian Ocean. So from a strategic perspective, breaking that chain is very important. The islands, the Pacific Islands, through political warfare, so there are two different battlefields, right?

There's the kinetic, and that Taiwan piece is very much kinetic. Well, if I might add, though, but, you know, they've invested a ton into the political warfare side as well, right? They've taken over media, you know, there's this demoralization, there's the, sorry, demoralization, there's been these over constant overflights, the persistent threat, you know, there's all of this, right? That's right. And that's why, and I should specify that, first of all, political warfare doesn't mean nobody dies.

I would argue that fentanyl is part of political warfare, and you've got tens of thousands dead. The other is, I think, and unrestricted warfare, it's a continuum. It's political warfare kinetic. It flows back and forth. And if the ability, if the goal is to be number one in terms of comprehensive national power, a component of that is military. So you want to be in a position to be able to break the first island chain and project power from Taiwan. How you do that might be, in their perspective, political warfare, not because it's more moral or legal, but because it's below the response threshold, the trigger threshold. So it has a lower cost.

But if the only way of doing that, I think, is more kinetic, then that's likely to happen. Because Taiwan has proven quite resilient to that non-kinetic encroachment and kind of takeover. Yeah, and I think that they're probably on a timeline. I agree with Captain Fennell about this. In fact, I learned from him about this, that they're probably heading towards the 100th anniversary of the founding of communist China, towards 2049. I think that that's dictating what they think their timelines are for accomplishing certain things.

Okay. I kind of distracted you from talking about the political warfare across the other islands, but of course these are connected. Yeah. So the political warfare issue for the Pacific Islands. So the term island hopping is a strategy that was developed by the U.S. military during World War II. So you had the Japanese all over these islands. And the question was, do we take every single island? And the response was, no, we're going to hop over some of them. We're going to

take critical ones. And that might leave isolated Japanese outposts that would then have their logistics cut off. But it means that they would be much more weak when we finally do come or they would surrender or whatever. So it wouldn't be we have to flood the zone. It's we're going to figure out how to hop through the region in order to be able to accomplish what we need to do, which is get closer and closer and closer to Japan to be in striking range. And this was based actually on work done by a Marine in the early 20s who saw the way Japan was in placing itself throughout the Pacific Islands. A guy called Pete Ellis who died

in Palau actually in the early 20s who wrote this very important treaties about these Micronesian bases. And undoubtedly Toshio Ishihara has written about how the PLA has studied US and Japanese emplacement in the Pacific Islands leading up to and during World War II. And you can see that China is, through political warfare, island hopping. It is grabbing strategic locations, in some cases, locations like Canton Island and Kiribati, where there is an old U.S. airfield from World War II. You see it in the Solomon Islands and Guadalcanal. They're using political warfare to embed in a way that has kinetic potential that is reminiscent of what the U.S. had to do kinetically during World War II.

So what this means is that they've hopped the first island chain. They're already embedding all over the zone, including in port infrastructure, but also corrupting political systems. So if the U.S. does try to get across the Pacific or thinks it needs to get across the Pacific again, it's going to find it much, much more difficult. Some months ago, I had a former premier of Malaita, the province in the Solomon Islands, on the show, someone who was standing up against all odds against the CCP and suffered for it greatly. He again was in the news recently as

the Solomon Islands had an election. There was a shift and I'm curious how it all worked out. The Solomon Islands is, sadly for the people of the Solomon Islands, a very useful case study to understand how the CCP operates. The Solomon Islands recognized Taiwan until 2019, when Sogavari, who was prime minister at the time, unilaterally switched to China. And then a whole range of things happened, including the signing of a security deal with the Chinese that allows for the deployment, we think, of PLA troops in the Solomons to defend Chinese citizens, Chinese infrastructure or major projects, and to put down civil dissent. So there was a whole bunch of ups and downs.

But as you mentioned, Premier Suidani in this and from Alida province stood up to this. A lot of money was pumped in by Chinese proxies to individually flip members of his parliament to get him out of power, which is what happened. There was just an election. election, the population of the Solomon Islands overwhelmingly voted him back in and voted out the pro-PRC premier that had replaced him, including his party, and nearly decimated Sogavare's party at the federal level, at the national level. So the population clearly didn't like the direction the country was moving in, for development reasons and things like that,

but for some, China really was an issue because China is very present when it comes into a country. It starts to take over the businesses, does illegal practices, its companies are linked to illegal practices like logging that affect society and populations, things like that. It's a parliamentary system. So that means that, and they're not very strong political parties.

So there were a lot of independents that were voted in. So Sogavare, the prime minister, switched to China. His party lost a lot of seats, but a lot of independents came in. And it's not inconceivable that a lot of money changed hands and maneuvered to a position where Sogavari's group claimed the prime ministership. Sogavari didn't become prime minister. He became finance minister, which is where you want to be if you've got dodgy financial dealings

anyway. And the guy who was prime minister was Sogavare's foreign minister. He's the guy that actually signed the deals with China. The international press reported Sogavare's government is out, all that sort of stuff. But then they didn't stick around for the weeks that followed to see the manipulation that happened. Meanwhile, in Malaita province, very similar thing happened. And this is the heartbreaking part. The pro-Chinese leaders in Malaita province could say to those members who are voted in, join us, join the Chinese side and you'll get money from China, you'll

get money from the federal government, and you'll get money from Australia, New Zealand, and the US because they all want to work with the government who's in power. And the government who's in power is the Sogavare faction in the center you can stick with Suidani who's a moral man and you'll get nothing for your constituencies nobody's going to invest in you the Chinese won't touch you and the Americans won't touch you because they they'll think that if they invest with you we'll get mad at them at the national level so at the national level. So at the provincial level, that also happened, that you also now have a pro-Chinese leadership and power at the provincial level as well. And that's because

there is a, and I've heard Secretary Blinken say this. They'll go to the region and say, we don't want you to have to choose, we just want to give you a better choice. First of all, some people have chosen. Sudanese chose democracy. He chose to stand with a free and open Indo-Pacific, and he wasn't supported. Second, there is no choice. The U.S. isn't giving them

a choice. It isn't saying we'll help you with the clinics, we'll help you with, you know, consular services, we'll help you. There's no choice there. So if you're, have a, you've been elected as a representative from a constituency in rural Malaita. You have no clinic. Your mothers are dying in childbirth. The Chinese side is saying, we'll build you a clinic. Sudanese is saying, we want to build you a clinic and we want to give you freedom of religion and protect your rights and all that sort of stuff,

we don't know if we'll be able to. What are you going to do? Especially if they also slip you $30,000 on the side, which is apparently what was going on. And you know that that's at least money that you'll have right up front. Even if the clinic never appears, you've assuaged your conscience. So that's what's happened in the Solomon Islands. It's a complete failure by the West to respect the vote of the Solomon Islander people

and to say that the Solomon Islands is the government that is in power as opposed to what the will of the people was. I think this is a fascinating case study of I guess how isolationism doesn't work, right? If there's someone else that is interested in, you know, massive influence operations, encroachment, and basically subverting these small countries. But yeah, I think we have to finish up shortly. Yeah. So just to that point, I can't think of any bilateral relationships anymore. If you're negotiating with a country, China is in the room. China or Russia or Iran, if you're dealing with South America, Central America, or obviously the Middle East.

But always China. There's always going to be some Chinese element in the room or standing outside the door waiting for the other side to come out. Or your own side if there's economic interests involved. So the idea that you can operate in a China-free environment without factoring it into how you're proposing your strategy, very clear in Ukraine. You can't disaggregate China. And now you're seeing it with what's happening in the Middle East, what a big role China has been actually playing on the ground in the Gaza situation.

They're not going to just let things happen. Whatever happens, if they're not instigating, they're going to try to nudge it in a direction that helps China. They often have much better intelligence and much better resources. So what do we do? I'm going right back to my original geopolitical article of faith, my gaffe. I think our system is better and we need to fight for our system and help it spread. And you do that through fighting on our turf, not their turf. So I was talking to somebody who said they were in Africa and one of the Chinese operatives in Africa was saying, we're going to win because we have an unlimited bribery budget. It's fine.

So we should have an unlimited investigation and prosecution budget. You don't counter bribery with bribery. You counter bribery with cleaning up the system. And you give breathing space to the heroes like Suidani who are willing to fight for their own people in their own places. And there are a lot of them. We have created a structure where we're fighting on somebody else's corrupt turf. And by... And they're just really good at that. I mean, I guess you could say. Yeah, because it disintegrates society. And I don't think we've lost our side.

No. You know? Yeah. No, I mean, there aren't, even in Congress. So you mentioned you interviewed Colonel Newsham about what happened with the compact. So the compacts were finally funded. And they were funded because there was incredible commitment by congressional staffers, primarily, but also individual members of Congress to make this happen.

There were no votes for it in them. There wasn't a big Palauan constituency in Iowa or Florida that was pushing for it. But they thought it was the right thing to do. So in this town, there are also people who really they thought it was the right thing to do. So in this town, there are also people who really, who do want to do the right thing. The proportion is even higher than the rest of the United States and in the rest of the world. You know, these are not, we talk about kind of Western values, but India has led the way on a lot of this stuff. They banned TikTok. They banned WeChat. They're fighting for democracy and affordability of basic care and things like pharmaceuticals

that is transforming lives in places like Africa. This is a universal human value that became codified in this exceptional American experience. But the U.S. doesn't own it, but the U.S. can certainly fight to create the space where people can let it grow in their own soil. And they're waiting for that. There are honest, courageous people all over the world that just need the breathing room to be able to be in a position where they could stand up and fight for themselves. Well, Cleo Pascal, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you again for having me. Really appreciate it. Good to see you. Thank you all for joining Cleo Pascal and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

I'm your host, Janja Kellek.