Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific?

China may not need to invade Taiwan to isolate it. Chinese coast guard and maritime militia ships now patrol east of the island, and have begun challenging commercial vessels by radio as though Beijing has authority there. Could these patrols be the opening steps of an incremental, gray-zone quarantine that takes shape before anyone recognizes a crisis?

Kwangyin Liu, deputy managing editor of CommonWealth Magazine in Taipei and host of Taiwanology, joins Ray Powell and Jim Carouso to discuss “Broken Chain,” her newsroom’s investigation drawing on 1.8 billion vessel-tracking records.

Kwangyin points to maritime boundary talks between Japan and the Philippines as the trigger for the June operation, and considers whether those talks simply gave Beijing a pretext for a move it already intended to make. They discuss how tactics tested around Taiwan’s outlying Kinmen Island are spreading to Taiwan’s Pacific waters, and why non-naval government vessels let Beijing press its claims with less risk of escalation than warships.

The investigation drew attention from security specialists but got little public response. Kwangyin describes a public focused on a robust economy and stock market, and resistant to warnings that Taiwan is the world’s most dangerous place. Fishermen near the Diaoyutai (Senkaku) Islands tell her that Chinese patrols they once watched closely have become unremarkable. She recalls National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu’s warning that the worst outcome is a public grown numb to pressure.

Kwangyin also explains differences between the governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and opposition Kuomintang (KMT), including unease among younger KMT supporters over their party chair’s closeness to Beijing. What does “hedging” between China and America mean in practice, and how do Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole America’s chip business erode confidence that Washington would help in a crisis?

The conversation also covers the growth of AI-enabled influence campaigns and her thoughts on the Trump–Xi summit. Kwangyin closes with why she started Taiwanology: to bring a Taiwanese perspective to international conversations about the island.

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• Follow Kwangyin on X @kwangliu, LinkedIn, and listen to Taiwanology here.
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For decades we've been told this is the Asian century: that the region's economic weight will turn into geopolitical power, and maybe into China's century. Retired Ambassador Bilahari Kausikan calls that "a snappy phrase used by lazy thinkers," and one Beijing is happy to promote.

Bilahari, Singapore's famously undiplomatic former top diplomat, spent 37 years in its foreign service as ambassador to Russia, permanent representative to the United Nations and permanent secretary of foreign affairs. Here he joins Ray and Jim to discuss his controversial recent essay, The Myth of the Asian Century.

His starting point: there is no geopolitically coherent "Asia" to have its own epoch. China and India are rivals, as are China and Japan, while Japan and South Korea remain uneasy partners. China is far stronger than it used to be but "not 10 feet tall," and its rise is already producing pushback, most visibly from Japan. The real danger is fatalism: if the region accepts Beijing's predominance as inevitable, it helps make it so.

On the recent New Delhi BRICS summit, Bilahari sees less a bloc than a Global South "mood," with no real convergence of interests among India, China, Iran, Russia, the Gulf states and the rest. He points out that the summit’s 140-paragraph declaration never mentions geopolitical hotspots Ukraine or the South China Sea, and argues that longer communiqués usually signal less agreement, not more.

On America, Bilahari argues Trump didn't create the shift, but simply strips the idealistic wrapping off a country that, like all countries, has always put itself first. Asian governments learned that lesson from the Vietnam War, Nixon's surprise opening to China and the 1985 Plaza Accord. His standing answer on whether America is reliable: "Of course it's not reliable. However, you are indispensable."

Bilahari also explains why he expects little from the interminable South China Sea Code of Conduct negotiations, even if ASEAN and China do somehow produce a text this year. He sees a slow Chinese “strangulation” of Taiwan as more likely than an invasion, and worries even more about Taiwan’s own will to defend itself. The conversation also ranges from Pakistan and Indonesia to Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s shocking recent Taiwan remarks, which Kausikan dismisses as simply “Anwar being Anwar.”

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Roughly $4 billion a month. That is what Iran’s sanctioned oil trade with China was worth when it ran normally, according to Charlie Brown, and the revenue goes directly to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Brown, a former U.S. Navy officer who heads the Iran Tanker Tracking Program at United Against a Nuclear Iran, joins Ray Powell and Jim Carouso from Singapore to explain how Iranian crude reaches China’s teapot refineries by way of an anchorage 80 nautical miles from Singapore, often relabeled “Malaysian blended crude.”

He calls Malaysia’s Eastern Outer Port Limits “parking on the side of a superhighway.” The location is within Malaysia’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), shallow enough to anchor and close enough to Singapore for resupply. Ships go there, he says, “precisely because they won’t be disrupted.” None anchor in Indonesian waters, where Jakarta’s enforcement is stronger across its full maritime zone, having once seized the Iranian-flagged Arman 114.

Malaysian fines run just five figures against cargoes worth $100 million, which Charlie calls a slap on the wrist. This past January, Malaysian authorities detained two false-flagged tankers conducting a transfer off Penang, then released them with a minimal fine, which changed nothing at the Johor anchorage. Malaysia updated its EEZ Act in June 2026 to cover illegal anchoring and unpermitted cargo transfers across its maritime zone, but Brown says nothing has really changed.

Also in this episode: what the U.S. blockade has and has not stopped, why 26 Iranian-flagged tankers sailed within days of the MoU signing, and Brown’s argument that roughly a third of these ships are now stateless and can be seized by any nation on the high seas.

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Onstage at the Seoul Defense Dialogue, Philippine Secretary of National Defense Gilberto “Gibo” Teodoro was taking a question about Chinese coercion in the South China Sea when a forum staffer handed him a note, handwritten on hotel stationery, from China’s delegation. He decided to read it out loud, dismantling it line by line, and then said he would keep it as “a memento of how desperate China is.”

That clip rocketed around the world.

Secretary Teodoro joins co-hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso to explain that the note was one move in a pattern he has watched across five regional forums: off-topic “alternative lectures” delivered instead of questions, people posing as journalists trying to make him lose his temper on camera, and delegations that avoid the panels they cannot control. His read is an active attempt “to make a more Sinocentric world,” and he points to Palau as another example of another country being told it’s too small to object.

On Beijing’s insults, Teodoro is blunt. China’s foreign affairs ministry berated him and other Filipino officials who push back for being “a handful of grandstanding buffoons”, though its official English-language translation softened the phrase to “certain individuals”. His verdict: “It’s duplicity, plain and simple. That’s what they are. Not as a people, mind you, but as a Party”. He traces the method to Mao’s destruction of Peng Dehuai and Xi’s purge of more than 200 senior figures, describing “muscle behind the cotton cladding.”

• Asked whether any channel exists to cool an incident at sea, Teodoro reveals he shut his department’s hotline with Beijing down: the calls became attempts to co-opt his people, with “neither discipline nor structure.”
• Asked what a Code of Conduct would need to be worth signing, his answer runs six words.
• Teodoro calls Chinese fuel and fertilizer shipments a “carefully laid down trap of dependence to make it look as kindness,” designed to produce “some kind of Stockholm Syndrome.”
• He walks through the illegal steel-plant network his department has raided: donated obsolete furnaces, radioactive scrap, substandard structural steel, a self-admitted fake Filipino operator, and a thread running to Singapore’s largest money-laundering case.
• He responds to the Chinese university report claiming the Batanes Islands belong to China and explains why Chinese instructors teaching Filipino children matter more than the paper did.

Plus, what Ukraine taught him (“reserves, reserves, reserves”), why he cannot imagine a Taiwan conflict that spares a country 90 kilometers away with 200,000 citizens working there, why the Philippines is talking about an expeditionary navy by 2050, the gap in Philippine espionage law he wants closed, and how he handles it when others float his name as a future president.

Secretary Teodoro’s bottom line: peace “is not a free dividend. It is purchased, it is bought, and it is enforced.”

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Melissa Sanderson returns to unpack why China’s grip on the world’s supply of rare earths has become one of the most consequential economic stories in the Indo-Pacific, and why a deadline just weeks away could reshape supply chains for everything from smartphones to fighter jets. Mel spent 21 years in the U.S. Foreign Service before moving into mining, and now serves as co-chair of the Critical Minerals Institute and a board member of American Rare Earths.

Mel opens with a promise: she’ll define rare earths, and then you can promptly forget the definition. What matters is what they do. A small handful of these elements make the magnets inside laptops, cell phones, electric vehicles, wind turbines, data centers, robotics, and missile guidance systems. America’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which carries hundreds of pounds of rare earth content per aircraft, can’t fly without them.

Mel explains how Beijing built its dominance over four decades: large domestic deposits, a processing and manufacturing chain developed deliberately alongside them, and aggressive acquisition of mining concessions abroad through infrastructure-for-resources deals she calls neocolonial. Washington is now running the same playbook - creating friction with a European Union that accuses the U.S. of using its checkbook to crowd European buyers out of the market.

But the real chokepoint isn’t the rock in the ground. China mines roughly 60% of the rare earths used in magnets and controls 91% of refining and 94% of magnet manufacturing. Everything between the mine and the finished magnet is the issue.

When asked whether U.S. government equity stakes in mining companies count as industrial policy, Mel says that’s just market economics. Real industrial policy starts with the end user and works backward to the mine. What America is doing instead is “shotgunning resources”: building processing plants with no secured supply to run through them.

Beijing’s suspension of its expanded export controls expires November 10, and the measures snap back automatically unless China acts. Meanwhile, new rules bar Chinese-linked materials from the entire defense magnet supply chain starting January 1. Mel’s arithmetic is brutal: the deadline is months away; the fastest U.S. mine-and-processing build is three to four years.

Her bottom line? “No mine, no cell phone.” And for now, we need to play nice with China on rare earths.

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As Pacific Islands Forum leaders gathered in Palau, one of the last nations recognizing Taiwan, five members skipped sending their top leaders. Meanwhile, a June survey found New Zealanders now rate the United States a greater threat than China, to which our guest said warmth toward Washington had “fallen off a cliff.”

Hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso are joined by David Capie, Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, who explains why views of both great powers have shifted. Warmth toward China had eroded for years because of its actions toward the South China Sea, Hong Kong, and the Uyghurs, as well as its expanding Pacific presence since the 2022 Solomon Islands agreement. Then a PLA Navy task group circumnavigated Australia and conducted live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea, diverting commercial flights. Strategy documents are read by “foreign policy nerds,” Capie notes, but when flights carrying “grandma home to the Gold Coast” get rerouted, the public notices.

What flipped the ranking was 18 months of U.S. policy, such as tariff whiplash, Greenland and Canada rhetoric, and USAID’s closure leaving perceptions of America “in the freezer” while Beijing now pitches itself as the responsible, predictable partner.

He maps New Zealand’s foreign policy reset ahead of November’s election: leaning into Australia and Five Eyes partners, deeper security cooperation with Japan, new partnerships across Southeast Asia and a recalibrated India relationship. On the Cook Islands, Capie traces how Wellington’s relations with Rarotonga had soured over a China partnership agreed without adequate consultation, the aid pause that followed, and the new Declaration on Defence and Security, but then unpacks the surprise U.S.–New Zealand port project at Penrhyn and its link to seabed minerals.

On the missing PIF leaders, his verdict is “a little from column A and a little from column B”. Chinese pressure is real, but so are local dynamics like the Solomon Islands no-confidence vote that pulled Prime Minister Wale back home. He warns against “always seeing strategic machinations where often there are local dynamics at play.”

Australia’s Ocean of Peace Alliance with Fiji prompts hard questions about militarization and whether Canberra and Wellington praise PIF centrality while building a parallel architecture. That tension showed after China’s July 2026 submarine-launched ballistic missile test into the Pacific, its first ever into international open waters. Leaders spoke frankly, but no collective PIF statement emerged.

Keeping China out of the Pacific Islands, Capie says, would be “a fool’s errand” – the real concern is its expanding security footprint. His challenge to Wellington, Canberra, and Washington: lift your game and treat transnational crime and climate change as priorities in their own right.

Plus: pavlova, flat whites, and why David won’t perform a haka.

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Could Scarborough Shoal become China’s next artificial-island outpost? Can transparency effectively counter gray-zone coercion at sea? Why did scholars from seven Chinese universities suddenly claim that Batanes, the Philippines’ northernmost and very much inhabited island province, belongs to China? And why has the Chinese embassy in Manila spent so much time attacking a Philippine Coast Guard officer, and one of our own podcast co-hosts, online?

In this special crossover episode, the usual roles are reversed. Rear Admiral Jay Tarriela of the Philippine Coast Guard, a two-time Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific? guest and a leading champion of Manila’s maritime transparency campaign, takes the host chair on his podcast, Just the Truth. Recorded in Manila, he puts Why Should We Care co-host Ray Powell in the guest seat.

Jay and Ray examine what happens when China’s pressure at sea is paired with political warfare on land. They discuss the risk that Scarborough Shoal could become Beijing’s next fortified outpost, the sudden claims over Batanes as Chinese coast guard vessels push east of the First Island Chain, and whether publicly documenting water cannons, ramming, swarming, and other coercive acts changes China’s behavior, or at least builds the national resilience and international backing needed for a long-term resistance.

They also explore why the Philippines has embraced transparency while many Southeast Asian neighbors still prefer quiet diplomacy, how independent journalists aboard Philippine Coast Guard ships have helped make maritime encounters impossible to ignore, and why the political contest over facts, images, and public opinion may be inseparable from the contest taking place on the water.

Jay then lightens the mood with some of his favorite “mean tweets” about Ray: that he is an American propagandist, or secretly Jay’s CIA boss, or directing a half-billion-dollar U.S. government information operation against China… a windfall Ray’s wife would very much like to locate.

It is a candid, sometimes irreverent conversation about territorial claims, information warfare, Philippine agency, and why Beijing appears so determined to discredit the people pointing cameras at its actions.

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• Follow Rear Admiral Jay Tarriela at the West Philippine Sea Transparence Office on Facebook, on LinkedIn or on X, @jaytaryela
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If China controls maritime East Asia, what would that mean for Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, global trade, and U.S. security?

In Episode 163, Ray Powell and Jim Carouso speak with retired U.S. Navy Captain Brent Sadler, a career submariner, former U.S. defense attaché in Malaysia, Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow and author of two books: U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century and Naval Power in Action: Seizing the Initiative in the New Cold War with China.

Sadler’s answer is blunt: China is exercising growing control over maritime East Asia, as Beijing has spent decades building the military, commercial, and political leverage to do exactly that. He says this is not just a question of aircraft carriers, missiles, and hull counts, but also about China’s strategic commercial footprint in ports, shipping and repair infrastructure, distant-water fishing fleets, maritime militia, and the China Coast Guard.

Ray and Jim ask what it means that China’s coast guard vessels are operating east of Taiwan. Are these deployments preparation for a possible blockade? Why are fishing fleets moving in organized formations? And how could Beijing use gray-zone coercion to change the status quo before anyone agrees that a crisis has begun?

The conversation also examines the recent China-Russia naval exercises and potential for submarine technology transfer, Russian pressure on Japan around the Kuril Islands, and Beijing’s efforts to turn even limited naval interactions with countries such as Indonesia into political and propaganda victories. Sadler explains why Southeast Asian leaders’ rhetoric must be weighed against what matters on the water: maritime rights, military exercises, commercial ties, and freedom of navigation.

Finally, Sadler assesses the military balance approaching the much-discussed 2027 window of war concerns, China’s Taiwan contingency preparations, gaps in America’s carrier presence in the Indo-Pacific, U.S. shipbuilding deficits, the future of unmanned vessels, and what Ukraine’s drone war may mean for Taiwan and regional partners.

Sadler’s larger warning is that maritime control is no longer just a contest of fleets, but a contest of coercion, commerce, access, and political will; one in which Beijing can test regional governments, reshape behavior below the threshold of war, and learn whether America and its allies will respond before temporary pressure becomes a permanent advantage.

• Follow Brent Sadler at the Heritage Foundation, on LinkedIn or on X, @brentdsadler
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On July 6, a Chinese submarine fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile out of the South China Sea. It likely overflew parts of the Philippines before coming down in waters between Tuvalu, Nauru and Solomon Islands, inside the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone. The 14 Pacific Island countries in whose region it landed were almost entirely skipped in Beijing's notifications. A month later, when Pacific Islands Forum foreign ministers met in Fiji, two of its members held up the response text.

Kathryn Paik of the Center for Strategic and International Studies joins Ray Powell and Jim Carouso to explain what Beijing was signaling, and why the Pacific Island Countries couldn't answer with one voice. Paik wrote the first-ever U.S. Pacific Partnership Strategy at the National Security Council, following 23 years in the Marine Corps as a helicopter pilot and as a military attaché in Indonesia.

In this episode:

• Why the missile's route mattered more than its range: launched from the South China Sea, overflying a U.S. treaty ally and landing in a declared nuclear-free zone hours after Australia signed its fourth-ever mutual defense treaty with Fiji. Paik's read: the message was that China "can militarily touch you anywhere it wants."
• How Nauru and Kiribati, two countries that recently switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, frustrated an 18-member consensus bloc.
• Jim presses the obvious counter — the U.S. and France tested here for decades — and Paik explains what makes this launch different.
• How sports became a national security instrument in a deal to put Papua New Guinea in Australia’s National Rugby League, and the commitment on security ties with Beijing that came attached.
• Australia's diplomatic surge: mutual defense treaties with PNG and Fiji, plus bespoke security pacts with Tuvalu, Nauru and Vanuatu.
• Why Kiribati patrols an ocean territory larger than India with a population of roughly 140,000, and what that means for fisheries, the seabed and undersea cables.
• Paik on why U.S. Pacific policy has always been somebody's side job: "In Australia they have 300 people in their Office of the Pacific. We have about a dozen."
• The 2025 damage to U.S. standing, including USAID's closure, tariffs and no resident ambassadors across the 14 Pacific Island countries.

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• Follow Kathryn Paik on LinkedIn or X, @KathrynPaik
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Nearly all global internet traffic quietly moves through fiber-optic undersea cables on the seabed, yet most people still think of the internet as “the cloud.” In this episode, Ray Powell and Jim Carouso sit down with Trent Fulcher, CEO of Starboard Maritime Intelligence, to explore what he calls “the end of the benign seabed.”

Drawing on real cases, from a suspicious cable cut off Taiwan to fishing fleets and shadow tankers across key maritime chokepoints, Trent explains how vessels can mask their identities, spoof locations, and drag anchors over critical infrastructure while hiding behind flags of convenience. He breaks down why around 95% of internet traffic still relies on subsea cables, why repair delays can stretch to 45 days, and how new data fusion and behavioral analytics are shifting the industry from reactive incident response to proactive prevention.

The conversation digs into who is most vulnerable (from Pacific Island states to cable-dependent hubs like New Zealand and Singapore), how governments and cable operators are building joint defenses, and what smaller Indo-Pacific nations can realistically do with limited navies and budgets.

If you care about maritime security, great-power competition over Taiwan, or the future of the oceans, this episode will change how you think about the internet and the battle now being waged on the ocean floor.

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