School of War - Ep 206: Cleo Paskal on China’s Central Pacific Strategy

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

Cleo Paskal, non-resident senior fellow at FDD and author of Crossroads of Competition, joins the show to discuss China’s campaign for influence and control at the scene of America’s bloody island-hopping campaign in WW2. ▪️ Times      •      01:35 Introduction     •      04:03 Pacific desert        •      07:45 Control       •      13:48 Post 1945     •      22:43 Significance           •      24:31 Yap     •      29:43 Divisions           •      32:18 Diplomatic maintenance     •      35:54 Designs     •      41:30 Strategic concerns            Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

So things in the Middle East are busy right now, and we will have more on Israel's campaign in Iran and the Islamic Republic's response in episodes to come. But one of the ongoing themes of this show is trying to understand the shape of any coming war in the Pacific. In today's conversation, a remarkable report from the Central Pacific, is in that spirit. We'll talk about the tiny islands that America had to battle through to bring the war to Japan's home waters in 1943 and 44, and how China, recognizing the significance of this terrain is working to box us out. It's happening as we speak. Let's get into it. for more follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter.

And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Cleo Pascal, a non-resident senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Cleo, you are one of the worlds. Well, I'll say it's one of America and Washington's few. experts, I would say, on the Central Pacific, a topic that seems important all out of proportion to the level of knowledge that one typically encounters on it. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure. And that is a very nice distinction. I like that because, of course,

in the Central Pacific, there are a lot of people who know it much better than I, including the vast majority of the people who live here. So it's very well put to say that within D.C., it's a bit perplexing where a location where 100,000 Americans died not that long ago is not as visible as it should be. When we scheduled this episode, I did not realize where you were going to be. And before we started recording, I apologize because it's the middle of the night where you are and viewers or listeners won't be able to see this because we're not on video, but your background there is very austere. Where are you speaking to us from? And what time is it? So it's about 1.50 a.m. I'm on the main island of the atoll of Woliye in this state of YAP in the country,

the federal states of Micronesia. And I'm about a 10-minute walk away from the runway where a Chinese construction crew has just arrived to rehabilitate an old Japanese airfield. Good, good. That sounds great. Well, look, there's so many different ways in. It's a huge topic. It's an important topic. I guess kind of our thesis is. is that it's important so people should learn more about it. And I want to orient them to things, both in space and in time. And maybe let's start with space. Maybe you could start with where you are and sort of zoom out.

You know, we talk a lot and you've written about this specifically, people in Washington who care about China, people in the military care about China, just Americans. You know, are probably familiar with the first island chain, maybe the second island chain and sort of the perimeter questions in the Western Pacific. But there's this whole expanse east of that that comes between us and those chains that, as you just pointed out, is this side of this enormous bloodletting in the Second World War. It's, you know, on Google Earth, if you kind of pivot the globe just the right way, you just sort of are looking at this hemispheric expanse of blue. And if you zoom far out, it doesn't look like there's anything there of note. Of course, there's actually a lot there.

And it's very notable. Can you just kind of give us a bit of an orientation to this part of the world and how people should visualize it? Yeah, sure. Thank you. So in a desert, an oasis is life-saving. And in a vast ocean of blue, a little spot becomes extremely important for survival or defense or power projection or whatever it is. So the size of the land is not a good way of evaluating, although it often is what people do mentally, how important this location is. And this was actually known in the U.S. from the middle of the 19th century onwards, because there was a concern at that point. Remember, the U.S. hadn't fully formed.

At that point, Alaska was only purchased in 1867. Hawaii was annexed in 98. California was only admitted as a state in 1850. So the U.S. as a country was moving west because it really couldn't move east. East was full of Europe. And Europe at the same time itself was moving east and was coming around the globe and into the Pacific. And there was a realistic concern that if the Spanish or the French or the British colonies or the German at one point colonies in the Pacific, continued their expansion east, they could hit the U.S. as it was expanding west. And this was sort of one of the great concerns around, for example, Hawaii. Hawaii was sacked by the

French in the 1850s. And there was a concern that if a European power set up in Hawaii, the west coast of the U.S. wouldn't be safe. And this became very explicit during the Spanish-American War, where McKinley said, you know, look, I sent the troops down to take the Philippines from the Spanish because if the Spanish set up in the Philippines, they could hit us eventually. And he kept, the U.S. kept the Philippines in Guam. And that became a bit of a problem because of exactly what you're talking about. That was this sort of idea of if you can control the edges, you're okay. But it left out this whole center of the Pacific. The Spanish had possessions all across the center of the Pacific.

which the U.S. didn't take. And the Germans bought them off the Spanish, and then the Japanese took them off the Germans, and then the Japanese set up across the center of the Pacific. This location where I am now was part of the Japanese Empire for 30 years. Walking, there are zeros in the forest behind me. They're Japanese gun emplacements all over. You can see it.

You grow up a little kid in this place. You grow up with the relics of war because the U.S. did what you were talking about in the 19th century. It understood the center of the Pacific was important. And then it sort of only thought the edges were. And by leaving the center open to somebody else, exactly what McKinley was worried about and what was worried about by others happened. And the U.S. got hit. Can I ask some dumb questions? So both one about the middle of the 20th century and then maybe we'll ask a second version and update it to today.

Well, why does it matter? I mean, by the 1940s, you know, you've got ships that can go pretty far without refueling. I mean, I actually am not a student of this, but I assume there's probably some at sea refueling opportunities even then. You have nascent aviation. You know, by the end of the war, you have B-29s. It can go pretty far. Why do we care about these little rocks in the middle? Can you just kind of bypass them?

Sure. and the missiles that are set up on this? Right. Well, speaking in the 40s, then we'll come up to the present day. Why did it matter in World War II? It gives me fight for years through this stuff. Why didn't we just skip it?

You can't. I mean, this is, it's just, it's this, I think that in a previous podcast, you referred to it as this kind of cloud of islands across the center. And it was such a hard nut to crack that when after Pearl Harbor was hit, The logical thing would have been to try to get across the center of the Pacific and hit Japan.

But because Japan held the center of the Pacific and had spent 30 years increasingly militarizing it, the U.S. had to go down to south and then come back up through Guadal Canal and Terawa and Macon and then make its way across Marshall Islands, quaj, you know, all the way across west. So it's just this big strategic block in the middle. And I would add in, there was also an awareness at the time when we talk about the Pacific of the importance of Alaska. You know, Alaska is part of the Pacific. And if you don't control that part of the Pacific, you're also vulnerable. And this is before you got to the technology that could allow some pretty substantial problems coming in from the Arctic.

So that's why now when you talk about the United States, you've got all these relics of that strategic understanding. And the United States actually, you know, if you grew up in a U.S. classroom, talked about this before, but it's a helpful visualization for me, at least. The map you would have had on the wall is the National Geographic, classic map of the world, probably. And that map, at the center of that map, is Europe. It's not the United States. And if you had the United States in the center of that map, all of the United States, it would go in the east from the Virgin Islands to the west to Guam and the Northern Mariana's, the North Alaska, and the South American Samoa.

And you would see that it would shift your whole understanding of the U.S. being a Pacific country in a fundamental way and in a way that was very clear to strategists previously. I mean, the U.S. sent this the exploring expedition through the Pacific from 1838 to 42. And this was quite an amazing endeavor to open up trade and to do navigational, to do charting and exploration. And then there was the Great White Fleet, you know, that also went through 1807 to 1808, because Teddy Roosevelt's great. That was his big stick that, you know, he was speaking softly about. Like, it was, we, the U.S. knew it.

And the first island chain and the second island chain were a luxury that resulted from being able to take the Central Pacific for granted. Yeah. You've used this phrase in your writing that the Pacific is America's geographical pivot of history, which I thought was a nice update or twist on, on. McKinder and his notion of the Eurasian heartland, that for us, it's the Pacific in your argument. It is. Well, yeah, I never understood why McKinder was so worship, but that's another issue. But I mean, on that, on that issue, because if somebody else controls that strategic

heartland, that geographical pivoted history for the U.S., and it has been when somebody else controlled it, it was somebody else was in control of U.S.'s future. And it's very much a maritime future. It's a Mahanian sort of look where trade and power projection is intertwined. It's not just, it's not, I don't quite like that, you know, I'm not comfortable with the whole idea of it being militarized. Because when the U.S. is in control of this area, it is free and open. This is the original concept of a free and open Indo-Pacific that the U.S. was concerned about for, at least 150 years in the Pacific.

So, and that's what allows the trade that allowed the U.S. to grow, because along with all these other things that the U.S. was doing, you know, for that we just talked about, Spash and Rick and War, for example, it was, you know, there was opening up Japan. There was a treaty with the Qing dynasty. You know, it was very much about trade and economic growth for this new country. And the vision, this westward getting across the center of the Pacific, it was fun. fundamental to that. This corridor of freedom, freedom of navigation, freedom of trade, freedom of movement underpinned a lot of that development. So just to take it back to World War II

and then we'll start working our way forward, you know, the sort of the killer app, I don't know what metaphor I want here, but we'll go with killer app for the moment. The killer app of warfighting in the Pacific in the 40s are these land air bases as opposed to aircraft carriers, right? Aircraft carriers are cool and they move around and they're very potent, but they can also be sunk and they require all kinds of stuff to keep them going eventually have to go home for a while. You know, if you build an airpace on a tiny island in the jungle and then you can figure out how to keep it supplied, that's very potent. And the threats that your assets from that base can pose to, you know, naval traffic, but you know, whatever you want, really, that the size of the planes you can land there, the fact

that you can't really sink it, you know, these are all unsinkable aircraft carriers. You know, this, this is what then drives the warfighting. You know, it's what causes the, you know, the landings in Guadocanau towards the beginning of America's war is the fact. the Japanese are building an air base there and it's otherwise kind of unremarkable spot. You know, so we have to, we have to fight for it and we do. And after the war, we sort of figure, well, we shouldn't give this stuff up considering how important it was to us. So pick up the story there, if you would. What was the settlement in the Central Pacific after the war and had it evolved into these compacts of free association that became the dominating political construct up to

the present? Yeah, I will, although my Amtrakker friends will kill me if I don't mention and the importance of being able to get across the reef, right? Oh, fair enough. Yeah, before you can build those unsinkable aircraft carriers, you have to get across the reef. And the first sort of big battle, the Tarawa battle, where you could actually do that, changed amphibious warfare in a very fundamental way.

And so I think that, you know, that that's something that's, there's currently actually a memorial being put together for Amtrakers at Quantico. And it's this sort of the people who know it, know it. And once you've seen these islands, you understand how incredible that was, especially if you've got these Japanese fighters who've been dug in for 30 years. To be able to try to go and do that is really a remarkable accomplishment. And then, of course, the Marines destroyed it and then the CBs came in and built it again. So there is that kind of process across the Pacific.

And at the end of the war, what you had was this central Pacific, which had been captured from the Japanese. And it may be worth just also saying other places like Guadalcanal or Bougainville, places like that, when you talk to the locals, they'll say, and I've had this said to me repeatedly, you know, we've been conquered by a lot of foreigners. people, you know, the British came or whoever came, and the Americans are the only ones who left. So there were a lot of parts of the Pacific where the U.S. liberated and left because it's not, it actually is not a comfortable or natural colonial power. But it had this problem in the Central Pacific, which was, it's a geographical pivot of history. It's a strategic heartland. You can't let anybody else have it. So how do you square the circle? How do you make sure the region isn't a threat to you without becoming a colonial power?

And that whole Japanese mandate, which was across the center of the Pacific, included what's now the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas, which is Saipan and Tinian and a few other islands. And then what's now Palau, Federal States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands. That was all Japan. that went to the United Nations. The United Nations Security Council this gave it to the U.S. as the Pacific Trust Territory. It was the only thing done like that

through the UN Security Council, and that was partially done because the Soviets obviously were not delighted with this. So they had to, you know, there's a lot of political background and diplomatic background to all of this. It was initially administered

for the most part by the Navy and all sorts of things happened. There were the 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. There were CIA training operations training center in the naval technical training unit or something in Saipan. It was being used because the war was over, but there were a lot of battles going on. There was still what was going on with China. There was still what was going on, obviously, Korea. so was still understood to be active.

But over the decades, there was this push to give them a choice in their own political future for the first time in their histories and modern histories. And Congress of Micronesia was set up in Saipan with representatives from across the region, across the Micronesian region. There was a lot of internal politics to it. I think the U.S. would have liked to have had one political unit that they could deal with for their own convenience. But, you know, the Palawan didn't want to be in a union with the Chukis. And I mean, it was sort of very kind of complicated. The Commonwealth of Northern Marianas voted to join the United States as a territory. And so they have the most recent chunk of the United States.

The others divided into three sections, the country, what's now the country of political. out, the country of the federal states of Micronesia, which consists of four separate sort of political entities in a federation, one of them being Yap, which is where I am now, and the Marshall Islands were quaj missile bases. Those three countries became independent countries, but they each signed a compact of free association with the U.S., which are these are agreements that are unlike anything the U.S. has with anywhere else on the planet. The people of these countries can live and work freely in the U.S. They can serve in the U.S. military, which they do at very high rates. They can go to U.S. University for in-state tuition.

The postal service is considered domestic rates. They're tied to the U.S. in a very deep way. and from a military perspective, the U.S. has strategic denial, and it has rights and responsibility, which means that it can say no to other militaries operating the region. And it has the rights and responsibilities to defend the countries. Now, this is, we can get to it later if you want, because I think that this is where an adaptation needs to be made. because the view has been of what an attack is on a country in this region is viewed through a very narrow kinetic lens. But the Chinese are operating on a political warfare front. So they're achieving an emplacement which can have kinetic potential even though it looks like something else.

So we can get to that in more detail if you want, but this is just explaining the compacts. The compacts are renewed. Their sections of them are renewed every 20 years. The financial support, there's also financial support. It costs a little bit over $7 billion to cover three countries for 20 years. So to secure the entire Central Pacific, one another retired Marine colonel, Grant Nusum estimated the value to replace that would be about $100 billion for just one year. And they were renewed in 2023. 100 billion for one year of campaigning in the area, you mean?

Or just to have, just what it would cost you to have the equipment to have that level of defense and power projection in the region. Yeah. Yeah. I see which to me. So 223, 24 was officially, that part of it was renewed. There, of these three countries, two of them recognized Taiwan, Palau and the Marshall Islands. and the one I'm in, the federal states of Micronesia, is recognized as China and is increasingly close to China. It's quite a large country, and Yap is highly strategically important.

Secretary Hegeseth announced about $2 billion worth of investments, a billion recently in Yap. But Yap is like New York. There's the island of Yap and the state of Yap. most of the money is going to go in fact as far as I know almost all of it is going to go to the island of Yap where I am is one of the outer islands

and we can see here that Chinese are rebuilding an airway airfield and it's a highly complex place politically and one of the my concerns and one of the reasons I'm here to try to learn more from the people here

is to understand whether those two billion dollars worth of investments, that brand new, the airfield, they're going to be rebuilding and the roads and whatnot are just going to end up being used by China in five years. Yeah. And this, what you just pointed out in terms of the diplomatic relations question for China versus Taiwan, you know, it gives some context, sort of put some meat on the bones to events that get reported in passing that to people who are not following it closely sound, I mean,

borderline risible, you know, oh, Kiribati, you know, now recognizes China. and not Taiwan. I mean, if you don't have the context, it does sort of provoke a kind of so-what response. But as you point out, this is all extremely significant strategic terrain and the fact that an entity in that terrain is formally signaling that it wants to be closer to China and less close to Taiwan is significant. It's significant to the Chinese and it's potentially points in the direction of further developments. It is. And it has operational implications as well. Well, if you have a Chinese embassy in place, you have a forward operating location for influence and intelligence operations. You have a safe house. You have a place you can bring in diplomatic pouches.

So it's if you have, if you recognize Taiwan, it gives you a layer of protection. And the Taiwanese can actually be very helpful in a lot of these places. The most immediate effect for the locals of the Chinese influence operations is crime, prostitution, drugs. that's very, very socially destructive. And so in Palau, which recognizes Taiwan, the Chinese are trying to run influence operations that are pretty socially destructive and brutal, and including some major organized crime figures. The Palauans have busted up some of those gambling operations.

And the Taiwanese have been very helpful with analyzing the seized tech, with being able to, both technically, but also in terms of language, helping the Palauanians. go after it. So it's not just sort of raising one flag, lowering another. It's actually, if you recognize Taiwan, it gives you a layer of defense against the Chinese operations that, especially for a small country that can easily get overwhelmed, you know, they have limited capacity. It's, it can be very helpful. I want to get to more information on what the Chinese are up to and what we might do about it. But before we do that, could we talk a little bit more about the complicated of this part of the world, or maybe just take where you are right now, Yap, as a case study.

I mean, we do some actual front line or on the scene foreign correspondency, which we don't often get a chance to do here on the show. What are politics, culture, society, et cetera, like in Yap. Yap is a remarkable place. It's, and again, just to reinforce how strategic it is. when the Germans controlled it at the beginning of the 20th century, they set up a telegraph hub. So we talk a lot about fiber optic cables now and the importance of landing stations. This Yap proper was a German telegraph hub 110 years ago. So I mean, these locations, the importance of the geography makes history, right, that old saying. And in this case,

the geography is still critical. Yap state is quite a large state, and it has the main island of Yap, and then it has what are called the Outer Islands, and that's capitalized, outer islands. The culture of Yap and the Outer Islands is completely different. The language is completely different. And there's a caste system, quite frankly, Outer Islanders are treated very differently on the main island of Yap. This goes down to having to wear different clothes, bowing or making yourself smaller in front of the Yapis. The outer islands themselves also have different language groupings. And transportation is incredibly difficult to get here because, of course, the runway is out of service.

The CB's fixed it up in the 70s. It lasted for a little while, and then it really wasn't viable. There's one air service, Pacific Mission Airlines, which is run by missionaries. It was founded by a former Luftwaffe pilot over 50 years ago, and the chief pilot is now an American. They will do medevacs. They'll do medical drops. They're an incredible organization. And they landed on Woolli Eye for as long as they could, but they had an accident last year. It was just not possible.

So, you know, the runways, it's just not viable. So to get here, I came out on a on the state transport ship. Wow. It takes about four days from the main island of Yap. It goes from Yap to Ulythi, which is, you know, the old, the old U.S. naval base. Naval base Ulythi was the largest naval base in the late 1944, 1945 era. And then from Eulithi on through some of the islands to here, it took about four days. It's sleeping on the deck of the ship.

The ship is supposed to carry about 400 people. They lost a couple of lifeboats. They may have just rusted off. So they're going over capacity. But it's the only way to get here. You have to bring all your own food, all your own water. You know, you've got hundreds of people just sleeping next to each other on the deck. that ship was provided by China aid.

This isn't a compact or free association country. So the focus has been on developing Yap proper to $2 billion. That's where all the, you walk into the ocean, your restaurant, which is an excellent restaurant, run by an American in Colonia, the capital of Yap. And you'll see CBs and Navy guys, You'll see lots of U.S. military guys. Not a lot of them are getting on that transport ship

to see what's going on in the rest of the state. And the rest of the state feels like it's the only choice is a China aid rusting transport ship where it's 100 plus degrees on deck and a Chinese rebuilt runway. And there's a lot of concern that the Yap proper is going to take whatever it can off the top of that project, and yet proper is worried that the federal government will come and

take whatever it can off the top of that. There's no love for the federal government here. At the groundbreaking last week of this runway, the president of the country attended, and he also attended a couple of high school graduations. And the thought among many in the states is he's just showing up to make sure that he gets his federal government cut of the U.S. military money. And then the state, within the state, the outer islands feel it's just the main island that's going to get its cut of the military money. And they're left to survive any way they can. And so presumably the situation you just described in a way can be replicated with obviously all the details different each time across all of these different political entities. They've all

got politics. They've all got, you know, potentially, they've all got sources of division. However, it may occur, and into those divisions, or those divisions then present opportunities, in this case, particularly to China. They do. And in fact, and I left out another element of it, which is that within Yap proper, there's the kind of elected legislature, and then they're the traditional chiefs. And the traditional chiefs feel like they've been left out. There is this operational control letter that was signed by the lieutenant governor, now governor, because the governor just passed away.

And the traditional chiefs actually had not approved that agreement. And one concern is that, you know, you know how it works within a military hierarchy, especially, is you want to just deliver what your boss asks for. And so if your boss asks you to get this letter signed and you've got a legitimate, competent authority that will sign the letter and they sign it, you feel like your job is done. But if you're not bringing along key elements of the traditional community in what is a very traditional society, it's difficult for me to describe how, I mean, at Woolliye, I was at an

elementary junior high graduation today. This is, you know, the girls dance topless. They have the traditional lays, the brass skirts with the woven lava lavas. I'm staying at the house of the high school principal. I'm very grateful to them for letting me in. This is an extended family compound. The girls live in one area. The boys live in another.

There's an outdoor communal cooking area. And you're about to dump $2 billion into one area where a very specific section of society might be benefiting from it. And a lot of other people won't. So apart from China being able to. to use those wedges to crack it apart, and there already are moves towards Yapese independence, which could undermine the entire compact structure within FSM. I think I would very much encourage those within the U.S. military to spend some time making sure that the people who they're dealing with, that group is expanded to build some continuation

over the long run. Well, both the military but presumably also, actually I'm not sure exactly where you are. Would it be state or interior? Like there are other entities of the federal government that in theory, I've seen it on paper. I'm pretty sure I've read the statutes where it specifies it, have some responsibility for the maintenance of relations with these communities. What's your assessment of how closely the agencies and questions are mining the shop as it worked? So you've done your homework. This is the committee of subcommittee of responsibility in the house for this area is natural resources subcommittee for Indian and insular affairs. This is, and they're great. I mean, Congresswoman Radoagian from American Samoa, is, knows this incredibly well. Her father was key in the trust territory period. But yes, this has been sitting with interior.

and State Department doesn't really like the compact historically because it's what is it? It's not a foreign country. It's not part of the U.S. It doesn't quite fit into a State Department mindset and the money sits with interior. But the utility, so to speak, from a U.S. strategic perspective,

sits with defense. So this definitely has been an issue. One of the recommendations to us, testified about this a couple of times recently is that the Secretary of Interior, Secretary Bergam is currently sitting on the NSC, and especially with the reduced NSC, the person that was covering the islands on the NSC is no longer with the NSC. That Secretary Bergam could expand his role there. He's there because of energy issues to cover the compact states. There's a concern that these places get a lot of federal programs, like Head Start, was about to come

come back. So when things are getting cut in the U.S., if you cut the Department of Education, and the sort of the statement is, well, it'll go back to the states, well, this doesn't fall into that structure. So just to make sure that whatever cuts to federal services are being made, if you cut FEMA, how is that going to work out here? If you cut postal service, how's that going to work out here, just to make sure that there's somebody going through that list as those cuts are made to make sure that these don't fall through the cracks because they were commitments made under the last compact. So this really has been a complicated issue who has primary responsibility, and do those who have primary responsibility have the political weight within Washington to be

able to make sure that the Central Pacific, which we've just been talking about as a crucial, as the geographical pivot of American history, doesn't get lost because just people don't understand how decisions they're making in one area are affecting this front line. Well, from your lips to Doug Bergam's ears, I hope. Let's talk a bit about China in the time that we have left. I'm acutely appreciative of the fact that it is very late where you are. And I really wish we were on video because I wish I wish viewers or listeners could see the background of the home that you're in. It helps things land.

I'm glad we're not on video because I haven't had a proper shower in about three weeks. So now, sir, you're a four deployed here. You're our first four deployed guest on School of War. Presumably the Chinese are not building these runways or paying for these transport ferries or whatever because of a general sense. of humanitarianism in a sense that they would like to be better. Or even, you know, you can imagine a strategic version of that. It was like, oh, we'll make them like us more. And that'll be good.

That'll be helpful in the long run that they know they get these good things from China. Presumably there is more structure to their strategic conception than that. Give us a sense if you look at it from their perspective, what are their designs pointing towards? I think it goes back to what, who is it, was it Keating? I think it was Keating, who one of the admirals testified in 2008 that some, some Chinese officer had joked about, you know, wanting to take, you know, said to the U.S., you take Hawaii East and we'll take Hawaii West and, you know, we'll just, we'll keep things, we'll report on what's going on. And first of all, you don't take, if you, if you've taken Hawaii West, you've taken Hawaii, right? But the idea is basically that because they understand that the Central Pacific is the geographical pivot of history for the U.S. And if you want to kill it, kill the U.S., strategically and economically, you push it out of the Pacific, right? So I think that that's very much part of it, and they're doing it to a large degree through political warfare. There was just a meeting

between the Chinese and foreign ministers of Pacific Island countries. And quite a few of them showed up, including the foreign minister of the federal states of Micronesia. And they got them to sign on to all of the usual things about Taiwan. But in there are things like increasing direct flights. And I mentioned that getting here is difficult. Getting to Yap itself from the rest of the world is difficult. You can only get there now from Guam or from Palau through Pacific Mission Aviation, through Palau or United from Guam. So if you're China, you don't want to go through Guam because you'll get, you have to get a U.S. visa, you'll get checked, to all that stuff. So this construction crew came in via Palau on Pacific Mission Aviation.

If they've got the runway up and running on Woli, they can come in straight from China. And one of the things that was mentioned in the joint statement was a goal for more direct flights from China straight into the Pacific. United Airways has had a de facto monopoly on the Central Pacific. It's incredibly expensive. It's very inconvenient. If an airline hubs out of Shanghai and starts running flights into the Central Pacific, people will use it. And it means they can get whatever they want in on their own aircraft with very little checks, especially because of the corruption element on the incoming side as well. So, and also in the agreement, they talk about prepositioning emergency supplies for natural disasters, of course.

but the lack of the desperate need on this side for infrastructure and for direct flights and for communications. They need energy communications and transportation in order to be able to be to survive. And they're in most cases lacking in all of them. And so the Chinese are coming right into those nodes, right into the telecoms. I mean, we're on Starlink at the moment because there's nothing else here. There's no cell service. People are using VHF here. This is how they communicate between the islands, which is very useful, but not very secure. So they have this easy ability to come in and in place. The runway here is technically funded by the federal government of federal states of Micronesia. But this particular company has already done work in the capital, Pompeii. And after they do this, the to do bridge elsewhere. And based on what I've seen from those bidding documents, they're just

underbidding everybody else by an incredible amount. So nobody can compete. So it's effectively it looks like, and it's a state-owned enterprise, of course, ultimately, the Chinese government is getting subsidies from the Federal States of Micronesia government to build this infrastructure functionally. You mentioned earlier that the way China is playing exploits a kind of, you know, a problem with the whole free association agreements from the start, which is sort of what they're designed to do is to prevent kinetic hard power threats, you know, they're there to be a buttress against foreign invasion, you know, whereas that's not exactly what's happening. There's this activity in the gray zone, you know, as it were, there's this political warfare

that's occurring. But there is still, you know, there are scenarios or iterations of this, right? And they can't not have occurred to the PLA and the PRC, etc. We're ultimately a switching of allegiances here or there, the ability to position assets, you know, one day covertly, maybe one day overtly, you know, becomes extremely problematic in some of these nightmare scenarios for the United States because it's not, as you also made a crack about missiles earlier, it's not just airfields anymore. You know, these places will be in the scenario of a Pacific War once again, key locations. for the modern weapon systems and sensors of 2025 or 2030 or whatever.

And having Chinese-controlled areas amidst them would be extraordinarily problematic in terms of our ability to get across or through. And I guess the nightmare scenario is not only a war. I mean, that's obviously a nightmare scenario. The other nightmare scenario is a slow diminishment of American influence and a build-up of Chinese influence such that they just one day wake up and they control the Pacific and we're gone. Now, these are sort of blunt, sort of crude descriptions of scenarios or outcomes, and what's actually happening is much more complicated and much more messy and sort of slow.

I mean, how do you, what most, here's the way to land this as a question. What most worries you about all this? Like, is it these sort of more dramatic hard power potential outcomes of these processes after many, many years? Is it some of the stuff that's happening in the interim? Like, help us understand the game as it's being played right now. So there are two levels. There's a strategic level and a human level. So at the strategic level, the idea of waking up and it's gone, that's not a fantasy, but it has to do with your mindset. And I'm concerned, like you'll keep hearing, for example, you know, we've lost the Solomon. Solomons is done, you know, because of how far it's gone. It's only done once you give up. And for me, that's, that's, that's, that's, you're not. And for me, that's, that's, that's, you know, you know, a very good case study in the Solomons. You know, the Solomon's, because this is a lot of this is done through political warfare

and through strategic corruption, the fight needs to be done differently. The people of the Solomons didn't vote for corrupt pro-Chinese government. In fact, at the last election, they voted a lot of these people out of power. And then there was a period after the election because it's a parliamentary system where a bunch of money was pumped in and independents were brought into the corrupt pro-Chinese camp again. If Australia, a lot of that, people will take the Chinese money, but they don't want to spend it in China

and they don't want to spend in the Solomons. They want to buy a beach house in Australia and send their kids to university. If the Australians just went after some of that corruption that they know is flowing through Australia, it would raise the cost of taking the Chinese money, and it would give the honest people to Solomon Islands a chance. If you change the way you fight, you can still win. And we have goodness, we have truth on our side.

And it sounds trite, but it is incredibly powerful. And we're not even fighting on the strategic corruption side. We're not even fighting on the narrative warfare side. So if you expand that, to the Pacific. I mean, you already hear people say, we've lost the Solonans. Well, what are they going to say next? Okay, we've lost Chirobis. We've lost Samoa. We've lost whatever. It's not even worth fighting. It's too complicated. It's too far. It's not actually that important. It's okay. We've got the bases in Japan. We have the bases in Korea. We have Guam. And then they just,

you suddenly wake up and you can't move. I mean, force design 2030, I don't know if the people who put that together who actually ever been to a place like Woolliye. Like there's nowhere to hide or scavenge if that's kind of a core part of your survival. And if it's a different sort of an island, then you're going to be scavenging from the local Chinese shop. I mean, they're all over the place, right? So it is happening strategically, it is happening very, very fast. And the elite capture is leading to state capture. And the state capture doesn't look like what you think it might look like. In the case of Solomons, for example, Coast Guard tried to come in to refuel and they're doing some anti-IUU fishing stuff. And nobody answered the phone. They couldn't really get permission.

Well, you know, it was like kind of all very vague. And then finally they were running out of fuel and they had to leave. Right. And then the Islanders, the U.S. Coast Guard, to clarify it. U.S. Coast Guard. Yeah. And so in the locals, well, you know, we're over capacity. We're too busy. We're such a small bureaucracy. You know, all this sort of stuff. So there's no, it's that sometimes it's called gray zone. I prefer the Philippines. I CAD illegal course of aggressive and deceptive, you know, because that explains the elements a little bit better. But they couldn't land there. They couldn't, and happen again in Vanuatu. They were also in FSM during COVID. It came very, it's on the record now because, President Penwello, who's president at the time, wrote about it, almost couldn't come into the country then. It's starting to happen. And what's particularly frustrating is that there are people here and in, for example, the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas, which is the United States, that are fighting really hard. The governor of the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas is repeatedly requesting the FBI to come in and to go through the books. to do investigations into corruption. Because the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana

is part of the United States is the only place in the U.S. where Chinese are allowed to enter without a visa. And from there, they're illegally going to Guam. And the Congresswoman from the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana who's sitting in Washington consistently pushes for easier access for Chinese tourists and for direct flights from mainland China

into the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas. That's the United States. That's happening in the United States. So how far down this has already gone is pretty far. That's the strategic level. My concern is it's going to be one of those cases where people go, oh, it's not a big deal. Oh, yeah, it's a big deal, but we can do something about it.

And then it's too late. We're not going to do something about it. And I would point out, you know, when we talk about, again, this Hawaii, East, Hawaii West, there are Americans living west of Hawaii in Guam and Commonwealth and Northern America. So you're just going to sacrifice them? They're Americans.

And they serve in the U.S. military, very high race, very patriotic Americans. I mean, the mindset, I think, really needs to change. At a human level, what I'm worried about is the way that the Chinese achieve these goals is through a very deep level of corruption and including social corruption. So I mentioned the gambling and things like that. This work camp would 10-minute walk away from here is on the runway is physically adjacent. to the high school. The young, there's nothing new going on here. For teenagers, the Chinese showing up with their tractors and whatnot is very exciting. And the boys are already showing up

to barter, you know, local foods for cigarettes or whatever else. And the local girls are starting to hang around the work camp also. And that level of potential, we've seen it very advanced in the Solomons, where there are serious prostitution problems, gambling, drugs, that social destruction, which favors Chinese political warfare because it fragments the society, and it gives a justification for their police support and the promotion of authoritarian figures that are indebted to China as leadership is very far advanced in the Solomons, but you can see that already starting to play in other places as well. This place has been through Spanish colonization, German, colonization, Japanese colonization, American occupation, finally freedom. But it's still, its culture is still intact. A few more years of what I'm seeing the Chinese do right down the road. And it will be culturally destroyed. The families will be destroyed. The communities will be destroyed. And coming back from that would be very, very difficult.

Cleo Pascal of FDD. You know, we scheduled this. You know, I've been an admirer of your work. You've testified before Congress. You've written about this stuff extensively. And I wanted to get your high-level thoughts. And it's turned into this extraordinary piece of sort of frontline reporting. And I'm grateful to you for making the time at all, but also in the middle of the night, as it turned out.

And, you know, be safe out there. Thanks for what you do. Thank you. And thank you for keeping these conversations going and bringing depth to what's often and just a lot of top-level discussion that if it just stays at the top and it isn't connected to what's going on on the ground and what has happened in history,

some times can lead us in wrong directions. I'm very grateful for the podcast. Thanks. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.