Days before ASEAN's foreign ministers landed in Manila, a Chinese Coast Guard sailor clubbed a Filipino sailor bloody at Second Thomas Shoal. Beijing normally lowers the temperature before diplomatic set pieces. This time it raised it, and nobody outside China knows whether that was a local commander improvising or a deliberate message.

Co-host Ray Powell was in Manila for all of it, and this week he and Jim Carouso work through why the gray zone war across East Asia is heating up again and why it reaches well beyond a few contested reefs.

The Philippines chairs ASEAN in 2026, and this month hosted regional foreign ministers as well as China’s Wang Yi and America’s Marco Rubio. Ray and Jim work through why a quarter-century of Code of Conduct negotiations still lead nowhere: China's nine-dash line claim is maximalist; its 1996 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea ratification carved out "historic rights" incompatible with UNCLOS itself; it rejected the UNCLOS-prescribed 2016 arbitration outright; and it profits from talks that never end, or from a code weak enough to push UNCLOS aside. Ray owns the “code-of-conduct pessimist” label and explains why.

On the related political warfare front, Ray's new report traces how the CCP's United Front Work Department has captured Chinese-language education in the Philippines: teachers supplied through so-called "blood transfusion" and "blood generation" plans; Beijing-supplied materials; career pipelines into Chinese state firms; and how much if it homes back to Jinan University, whose Center for Philippine Studies-hosted symposium recently declared the Philippines’ northernmost islands to be China’s.

Finally, the Bashi breakout: China Coast Guard patrols east of Taiwan along the Japan-Philippines EEZ boundary, radio challenges to inbound shipping and Beijing's boast of "inspecting" more than a hundred vessels. Ray's question: will we look back and say Taiwan's quarantine actually began here – not with an open declaration, but one incremental squeeze at a time, as more and more ship captains quietly decide that complying is cheaper than resisting?

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China posted a record $1.2 trillion global trade surplus in 2025, and its export machine is still accelerating. From electric vehicles and batteries to electronics and household goods, Chinese products are pouring into markets across Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Consumers may welcome better products at lower prices, but what happens when local manufacturers cannot compete, workers lose their jobs, and countries become dependent on Beijing for essential goods?

This week, co-hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso welcome Wendy Cutler, Senior Vice President of the Asia Society Policy Institute and a former U.S. trade negotiator who spent nearly three decades at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Wendy explains how government support allows Chinese companies to keep producing even when markets are saturated. Beijing rejects the idea that it has an overcapacity problem, and Wendy argues that negotiations cannot succeed when the two sides cannot even agree that a problem exists. Her solution is a coordinated response by the major economies receiving these exports.

In this episode:

• How China’s industrial policies help its companies outlast foreign competitors
• Why U.S. tariffs redirected Chinese exports toward Europe and Southeast Asia instead of slowing them down
• How cheap imports can destroy local businesses, eliminate jobs, and create dangerous dependencies
• Why the U.S., Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia and Southeast Asia must act together to change Beijing’s calculations
• How China weaponizes its control of critical minerals, rare earths, and permanent magnets
• Why Washington’s tariffs against allies could undermine the coalition it needs
• How developing economies can defend local industries without losing access to the Chinese market
• Whether the fragile U.S.-China trade truce can survive as both sides test its limits
• Why today’s low prices could become tomorrow’s strategic vulnerabilities
• Wendy’s candid reflections on three decades at the negotiating table

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For the first time, China's coast guard is asserting sovereignty over waters beyond the First Island Chain and out in the open Pacific, far to the east of Taiwan. To justify it, a hastily assembled group of Chinese academics has suddenly declared that the Philippines' northernmost (and very much inhabited) Batanes island province actually belongs to China.

Is this a dangerous new escalation or just another day in East Asia’s highly contested maritime gray zone?

This week, co-hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso flip the script and put a reporter in the guest chair: Brad Lendon, CNN's Senior News Desk Reporter for Global Military Affairs, who's covered China's maritime rise for over a decade and authored the June 25 story that sparked this conversation, “‘Salami slicing’: How China is trying to increase control in the Pacific”

Brad makes the case that this "salami slicing" is nothing new. Beijing has spent years applying steady, below-the-threshold pressure using white-hulled coast guard ships rather than navy gray-hulls. But now those ships are radio-challenging commercial vessels east of Taiwan, mapping the seabed and settling in for what looks like a permanent presence outside the First Island Chain.

In this episode:

• Why coast guard "law enforcement" ships are a more insidious tool for asserting sovereignty than warships
• What China's radio challenges to commercial ships could be rehearsing, and Ray's "boa constrictor" warning about a soft quarantine of Taiwan already beginning
• How the out-of-nowhere Batanes claim fits Beijing's long-game strategy
• Whether the Japan-Philippine maritime delimitation talks were a real trigger or just a convenient pretext
• What it all means for the U.S. defense strategy built around the First Island Chain, and whether it's the right tool for a non-military threat
• Brad's unforgettable story from the bridge of a Canadian frigate threading the Taiwan Strait at midnight
• A sharp, practitioner-level look at how the map of the Western Pacific is being quietly redrawn one slice at a time.

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We picture China as a place where no one dares speak out, but the reality is quite different. In 2025, despite one of the most sophisticated censorship machines on earth, workers protested over unpaid wages, homebuyers demanded stalled apartments, and rural communities pushed back against land dispossession.

In this episode, hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso sit down with Kevin Slaten, who leads Freedom House’s China Dissent Monitor, the only public database tracking protests across China, from its office in Taipei. Slaten’s team recorded about 40 to 50 percent more dissent in 2025 than the year before, including the largest pre-Lunar New Year labor protest peak the project has ever recorded.

The twist: US budget cuts had recently knocked the project offline for four months, and it still came back with a skeleton crew to record its highest numbers yet. Fewest resources ever, most dissent ever recorded.

Slaten explains what more than 15,000 cases reveal about the real China beneath the propaganda--an economy under strain, a “social contract” that may never have been one, and why even “local” protests matter politically in an authoritarian system. He also unpacks who protests and why, where Beijing’s red lines fall, and how protest pressure can actually produce real concessions, from policy reversals to quiet legal changes.

Key topics:

• Why dissent is rising even as China tightens censorship
• Who is protesting: workers, homebuyers, rural residents, and more
• How Beijing decides what to tolerate, censor, or crush
• The 2022 White Paper protests: anomaly or symptom?
• A school bullying case that spiraled into crowds chanting “we want democracy”

If you want to understand where China is really heading, pay attention to the people already demanding change.

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What if the most important strategic relationship of the 21st century is the one Washington is actively damaging? In this episode, hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso sit down with Kurt Campbell - former Deputy Secretary of State, President Biden's "Asia czar," a key figure in building the modern Quad, and founder of The Asia Group - to ask whether the U.S. and India can move beyond damage control toward something far more ambitious: a new kind of alliance.

Last year, U.S.-India ties hit their lowest point in a quarter century: 50% tariffs over India's Russian oil purchases, a tilt toward Pakistan, and a sharp breakdown of trust. Yet at that very low point, Campbell and Jake Sullivan published "The Case for a U.S. Alliance With India" in Foreign Affairs, warning Washington risked driving India into its adversaries' arms.

Drawing on decades of firsthand diplomacy, Campbell offers a candid insider's read on what went wrong and what might still go right. He reveals why Pakistan has out-maneuvered India in navigating the Trump White House, why his own successor's speech in Delhi drew audible gasps from the audience, and why India's celebrated "strategic autonomy" masks a quiet but unmistakable tilt toward the West.

In this episode:

• Why Campbell calls India America's most consequential 21st-century partner, and what "escape velocity" means
• How he and Sullivan are trying to recast what "alliance" means for a country that will never host U.S. bases
• How Pakistan adapted to Trump-era diplomacy more effectively than India
• The surprising story of how India went from reluctant Quad participant to its driving force
• How India quietly cut its reliance on Russian arms from 80% to under 40%
• Campbell's new Asia Group report on the Strait of Hormuz crisis and why it's hitting the Indo-Pacific harder than markets expect
• His warning that the South China Sea, not Taiwan, is the likeliest flashpoint for miscalculation

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The day her BYD rideshare driver told her the dashboard screen was a “national secret” … that's when Wall Street Journal correspondent Yoko Kubota knew China had really changed, and maybe it was time to think about leaving.

What does the world lose when fewer foreign journalists are reporting from inside China? In this episode, hosts Ray Powell (35-year military veteran) and Jim Carouso (former senior U.S. diplomat) sit down with Yoko Kubota, who spent eight years in Beijing before leaving China and writing a striking farewell column about a society growing alarmingly suspicious of outsiders.

From that small, telling BYD moment, Yoko traces how a tightening espionage law, national-security messaging, and rising nationalism seeped into everyday life. As a Japanese reporter for an American paper, she also describes the anti-Japanese sentiment she and her family encountered, from a parents' school chat group to the phrases her young son began repeating, and how the 2024 attacks on Japanese children in Suzhou and Shenzhen deepened her fears.

The conversation also digs into her business beat:

• Why on-the-ground reporting from inside China still matters and what we lose as it dries up
• Why China can be both increasingly confident and deeply wary of outside scrutiny
• How China's EV industry went from a punchline to a global powerhouse, and the "zombie" carmakers left in its wake
• Why the race for self-driving cars may come down to regulation as much as technology

With the press corps thinning – underscored by the recent expulsion of New York Times reporter Vivian Wang – this is an on-the-ground account of an increasingly inaccessible country that still, as Yoko puts it, "won't go away from our lives."

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Washington is engaging plenty with its Indo-Pacific allies these days … just not always on the things they want, and too often on things they don't. So how do savvy allies steer that relationship when the world's most powerful partner feels less predictable than ever?

To find out, Ray Powell and Jim Carouso sit down with Marise Payne, Australia's former Defence Minister and Foreign Minister. Marise helped launch AUKUS and grow the Quad, and navigated the first Trump administration from both chairs. Now a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, Payne brings rare insider perspective on how middle powers keep America engaged and what they must build for themselves when it drifts.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Payne unpacks:

• Why "fewer Shangri-Las, more submarines" sets up a false choice, and why showing up still matters
• The AUKUS reality check: what the shift from the "optimal pathway" means, and the social license challenge facing Canberra
• Whether Pillar One is now on a "suboptimal pathway," and the case for driving Pillar Two harder
• How the Quad found its feet again after COVID, and why the New Delhi foreign ministers' meeting matters
• Reassuring a skeptical ASEAN on nuclear submarines, and the relationship-first diplomacy that made it work
• China's "do as I say, not as I do" stance on Japan's remilitarization
• The contrast between leading Defence and Foreign Affairs: "straight lines" versus "grasping at wisps of smoke"

It's a practitioner's masterclass in alliance management for an era of strategic uncertainty. Essential listening for anyone tracking US-China competition, AUKUS, national defense, diplomacy and the future of the Indo-Pacific.

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Is Vietnam quietly drifting into China's orbit, and what does that mean for the United States and the future of Southeast Asia? Dr. Nguyễn Khắc Giang explains why Hanoi is hedging harder than ever because, as the Vietnamese saying goes, "when the buffaloes and oxen lock horns, the mosquitoes and flies suffer."

In this episode, Ray Powell and Jim Carouso sit down with Dr. Giang, Visiting Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, to unpack his provocative Carnegie essay, "Why Vietnam Is Swinging in China's Direction." Giang argues that Vietnam isn't becoming pro-China, it's hedging in a world where US policy feels unpredictable and China is offering concrete benefits: market access, infrastructure, technology, and political reassurance.

The conversation moves from geopolitics to economics: US tariffs, transshipment concerns, Vietnam's export boom, and the risk of being crushed between Washington and Beijing. Giang explains Vietnam's delicate formula: stay close enough to China to manage the relationship, but distant enough to preserve its independence.

Ray and Jim also dig into Vietnam's defense strategy and its slow move beyond Russian weapons, then go inside Vietnamese politics under General Secretary Tô Lâm, whose consolidation of power is making foreign policy faster, more personal, and more ambitious.

In this episode:

• Why Vietnam is one of Asia's most important "swing states"
• US tariffs, transshipment, and Vietnam's export boom
• China's high-speed rail and technology offer
• Vietnam's arms diversification beyond Russia
• Tô Lâm's consolidation of power and the "Blazing Furnace" anti-corruption campaign
• Vietnam's reaction to the Trump-Xi summit

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Japan sits just 68 miles from Taiwan, while the Philippines is even closer at 61. As one guest puts it, “You can’t invade Taiwan if you don’t control the northern Philippines.” That geography is exactly why three countries - the U.S., Japan, and the Philippines - are quietly building what may become the backbone of deterrence in the Western Pacific.

In this episode, co-hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso sit down with Lisa Curtis, Director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and research assistant Ryan Claffey to discuss their report: “U.S.-Japan-Philippines Trilateral Cooperation: The Bedrock of a New U.S. Indo-Pacific Deterrence Strategy.”

The conversation covers:

• Why the First Island Chain, from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines, is the most strategically consequential geography in the world today
• How a bankrupt Subic Bay shipyard nearly fell into Chinese hands and is now being transformed into a military-commercial hub central to U.S. forward posture
• The expansion of the U.S.-Philippine Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) sites in northern Luzon and what permanent missile deployments in Batanes would mean for deterrence across the Luzon Strait
• Whether Trump’s transactional approach to Beijing and the prospect of a trade-focused summit could undermine allied solidarity
• Philippine political risks, including the Sara Duterte faction and what a change in Manila’s leadership could mean for the alliance
• Japan’s growing security role under Prime Minister Takaichi, from record defense spending to missile deployments across the Southwest Islands
• The race for critical minerals, the Luzon Economic Corridor, and how economic resilience underpins the security architecture
• Why this trilateral could become the foundation for a broader networked deterrence strategy across the Indo-Pacific

Whether you’re following the South China Sea, Taiwan, U.S.-China competition, Japan’s security pivot, or the future of Indo-Pacific alliances, this episode breaks down why the U.S.-Japan-Philippines triangle may become one of the region’s most important strategic partnerships.

👉 Follow Lisa Curtis on on LinkedIn or X, @LisaCurtisDC; follow Ryan Claffey on LinkedIn or X, @RyanHClaffey

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Indonesia’s former trade minister Gita Wirjawan - Stanford visiting scholar and host of the Endgame podcast - joins Ray Powell and Jim Carouso to unpack what the closure of the Strait of Hormuz means for Southeast Asia and why it is more than just an oil shock.

With a significant share of the region’s energy flowing through this narrow chokepoint, the disruption is exposing how vulnerable Southeast Asia really is. Most countries hold only weeks to a couple of months of fuel reserves, and governments like Indonesia - already facing higher-than-expected oil prices - are being forced into difficult tradeoffs between subsidies, social programs, and fiscal stability.

Gita explains why countries like the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia are particularly exposed, and why switching energy suppliers is far more complicated than it sounds. He also walks through how rising fuel costs ripple quickly into everyday life, especially in archipelagic economies where higher transport costs can drive up food prices and strain household budgets.

The conversation goes beyond the immediate crisis to explore deeper structural challenges, including limited fiscal space, reliance on foreign investment, weak regulatory environments, and gaps in technical capacity. Gita argues that these factors make it harder for Southeast Asia to attract the capital needed to strengthen its energy security and long-term resilience.

Looking ahead, the discussion turns to whether this crisis could become a turning point. While renewable energy is becoming cheaper and more viable, scaling it across the region will require massive investment and stronger governance. The episode closes by asking whether Southeast Asia can use this moment to assert greater agency, or whether it will remain dependent on forces beyond its control.

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