A Stroll Through the Indo-Pacific, the Most Important Region in the World
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You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the founder of War on the Rocks. In this episode, we take a jaunt through the Indo-Pacific, the most important region in the world economically, perhaps militarily, and increasingly the most dangerous region in the world.

I'll let our experts introduce themselves. I'm Lisa Curtis. I'm director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. Dimitri Aparavich, chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator and author of World on the Brink. Zach Cooper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Dimitri, Lisa, it's your first time on the show. Welcome, Zach. It's not your first time. I wanted it to be your last time last time, but you have a lot of good blackmail material on me, so here you are again. I do.

So we're here to talk about Indo-Pacific security, which is a pretty big topic when you're talking about such a broad swath of geography. But let's start with China, the biggest and most important country in the region. What have we seen so far in terms of signals and actual policies from this new administration when it comes to China? Well, I think what we've seen from the second Trump administration is that China

They will definitely be prioritizing the Indo-Pacific region. We could see that with the fact that Secretary of State Mark Rubio held a Quad meeting, the Quad being India, Australia, Japan, holding a meeting with the Quad foreign ministers. You saw early visits by the Japanese prime minister, the Indian prime minister.

So clearly the Trump administration is signaling it will work closely with allies and partners to deal with competition with China. But on China itself, on the bilateral relationship,

Trump is clearly signaling he wants to have some kind of deal with China, some kind of economic deal. Of course, we all remember the phase one trade deal that they concluded in January 2020. Thanks to some delicious chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago. Yeah, I remember. So, I mean, we can debate how successful that was, but...

There's no debate, really. The Chinese never adhere to any of their commitments. Exactly. Exactly. But still, Trump wants to make a deal. He wants to strike a deal. He said just yesterday that he expects Xi Jinping will visit the White House soon. So we'll see if that actually happens. But he clearly wants to try to deal with China. But he does have hawks in his cabinet. Maybe

Marco Rubio, his own national security advisor. These are people who, when they were on the Hill, initiated a lot of legislation to make sure that the U.S. could compete effectively with China. They're going to be pushing for export controls.

They're going to be pushing to have a higher military budget to be able to deal with Chinese aggression and bullying, whether it's in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea. So we'll see how this all plays out within the cabinet. You had some similar friction in the Trump administration as well. So we'll see how it plays out. Yeah, this is the issue where you have the most conflicts on policy issues. I mean, you see that on Russia and Europe more broadly.

the administration is very aligned on what they want to do. Here, I think you have

A lot of his staff that wants to pivot to the Indo-Pacific, wants to be more confrontational towards China. Some of them, I think, want to try to peel Putin away from China, from Xi Jinping, in sort of a reverse Kissinger, reverse Nixon type of move. I'm not sure the president was with them on any of this. I think he's actually thinking about this as, I want a good relationship with Russia. I want a good relationship with China. And I want to focus on my own hemisphere. I want to focus on Greenland, Canada, Panama Canal.

And China can have more of a free reign in the Indo-Pacific. Russia can have more free reign in Eastern Europe. We haven't really seen, at least unless I missed it, Trump does say a lot of things, so maybe I did miss it, but he hasn't really commented on the security dimension in the, at least as far as China is concerned, that much, has he? No. And look, this is a man that I think does not typically want to fight wars, hot wars or cold wars.

And wants to do deals, wants to do business deals. And I think that he sees confrontations with either Russia or China very much in the same lens of this is dumb. Why don't we trade together now? He wants a more balanced trade. And that's why you see tariffs going up on Chinese goods by 20%, actually, since he came into office on top of the 25% he did in the first term. So cumulatively almost 45%.

There are some exceptions and some of the goods, but nevertheless, quite significant. But I don't think he wants to have a military confrontation over Taiwan or anything else with China. I broadly agree with that. And I think the question now for the Trump team is they're going to want to, I think for the president's sake, engage with Xi Jinping. And I don't think the Chinese are particularly interested in having direct Xi-Trump engagement until they know exactly what's going to happen at that meeting. And I think the president clearly wants to have a meeting with Xi, and

and they probably want to sort out some of the trade differences that the two countries have. And I don't think the Chinese will agree anytime soon unless they feel confident they know exactly what's going to happen. They do not want a Zelensky-style blowup in the Oval Office or Mar-a-Lago or in the Forbidden City. And so I think now we're in this awkward moment where you're hearing a lot from the White House about how they're going to engage with the Chinese, but you're actually not seeing that much public engagement between the two sides.

This tension that you've mentioned about the sort of security hawks within the administration and then the president's own focus on economic issues, I think is going to become more and more difficult to manage. The interesting thing is, obviously, there have been lots of tariffs announced on Canada, Mexico, Europe, etc. One of the few tariffs that have been kept are the tariffs on China. And I think it's mostly because of the Chinese, because the other leaders were willing to call Trump, were willing to make concessions, were willing in some cases to appease them.

And Xi Jinping is not willing to do that. He's not willing to kowtow to him even in exchange for lowering of tariffs. And that's why you may see more escalation in that relationship because the Chinese are not willing to play ball. It's interesting. So you basically are saying, Dimitri, that Trump wants to do deals, but the economic dimension might make the security dimension more salient because it will increase tensions across the board.

I think it's very unlikely they will actually get to another deal because the Chinese are not willing to make significant concessions. I think that they've learned, and you have Jameson Greer as the new USDR, who is incredibly capable. They've learned from the phase one deal in the first Trump administration, and they're going to try to strive a much harder bargain with China. And I think China is not going to be playing

playing ball with them. I agree with Dimitri that we should not strike a deal with the Chinese that they're not going to follow through on, right? So there was a $200 billion phase one deal. They did, let's say, $60 or $80 billion of that $200. There's no way that the Trump administration strikes a phase two trade deal that's less than $200 billion. I would think it would have to be significantly more, like $250 to $300 billion. And I think we know what that looks like.

It's basically agriculture, it's energy purchases by China, maybe some liberalization in the financial sector, which the Trump team has talked about. I think the question is whether the Trump team will do the deal, even if it's a bad deal. And I agree with you, Dimitri, Jameson Greer is not going to be in favor of doing that. I think there are other forces within the administration who are going to say, yeah, let's take this deal. I think the president's instinct at times has been to take bad deals over...

or announce deals that aren't actually going to be followed through on by companies. We've seen some of those already. So I'm a little bit more pessimistic. I'm worried that he'll accept a bad deal

one that we know the Chinese won't follow through. I don't know. I think the jury's still out. I think you can look at the Hanoi summit with Kim Jong-un and the first Trump administration, and he walked away from what he thought was a good deal, a bad deal, even though he desperately wanted a deal and potentially a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for a deal with Hong Kong. He'll take it where he can get it, whether it's North Korea or Russia. Lisa, you focused a lot on the Quad

If you're one of the members of the Quad, obviously not the U.S., but if you're one of the others, you have to be a little nervous. Even though you got these early meetings, which I agree with you is a really important signal, you have to be watching this relationship with China and wondering where your interests are going to fit in and whether you're going to be sort of

left along, left by the wayside. I think that's right. I think that we probably will see the quad countries, Japan, Australia, India, do some hedging. India more than the other two, frankly. And perhaps we're already starting to see some of that with Prime Minister Modi's comments about China touting their good relationship. And of course, they have diffused their border tensions over the last several months. Yeah, Modi was already kind of more accommodative with China.

with China in the last six months or so, right? Is that fair? India has a different relationship with China than the other three quad nations. It shares a border with China. It's had a war with China, the 1962 war, which India lost very badly. It had a very serious border clash with China in 2020. About 20 Indian soldiers lost their lives, at least four PLA soldiers.

So India has to deal differently with China than the other three nations. It is at more risk. India's main concern is keeping that border quiet. They have diffused the border tensions in the last six, seven months. And, you know, from the U.S. standpoint, this is a good thing because India basically was able to get what it was demanding from China, which was China to move back

to pre-May 2020 military positions before it had aggressively occupied areas on the Indian side of the border. So China was not able to change facts on the ground in that case with India. But I think, you know, we have to understand India's position. I don't see it so much as accommodative. They have to be realistic about the real threat that they... Yeah, they have to play a different game. Yeah, I think that's right. What are Japan's main equities? So Japan...

is probably even more worried about Trump. Number one, just his unpredictability. That does not sit well with Japanese leaders, but also with the China challenge. So they will do hedging in their own way in terms of engaging with China, dealing with them economically.

But Japan has, you know, really transformed its approach to security and defense over the last few years. You look at their commitment to increasing defense spending, increasing their capabilities, being willing to export military items to other countries. All of these are major changes from their traditionally, you know, pro-pacifist approach.

And I think that is welcomed by Washington. It's welcomed by the Trump administration. But certainly Japan is watching very carefully to see how Trump approaches China.

But if you look at the joint statement of the recent visit when Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba was at the White House just a few weeks ago, it was a pretty good statement. It was a tough statement. It talked about Taiwan and it talked about Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. So I think the Japanese were pretty pleased with how that visit went. And I think the other Quad nations also were pleased.

to see such a strong joint statement and mentioning Chinese aggression. Zach, you are often on the long flight to Tokyo. What are you hearing from your Japanese interlocutors? Yeah, I agree with Lisa. I think the Japanese are pretty happy with how the visit went. They were pretty worried about the press conference, and the press conference went fine, actually.

Ishiba spent something like 30 hours in the two weeks beforehand studying for that meeting with the sort of Americanists in the Japanese government. And so I think he came in very well prepared. So it's interesting that quad leaders, you know, Ishiba and Modi have both had visits to Washington that went well. I think the Australians are in a slightly more tricky spot.

The real question, I think, on the Japanese side is how long does this last? How long does it take before the trade tensions start to infect the rest of the relationship? I do think they're nervous about what the administration is doing on Ukraine because they have been staunch supporters of Ukraine as a sort of rule of law issue. But then the last thing is, Ishiba, his polling numbers are not looking great. And so even though he and Trump may have had a good visit,

he's probably not going to be there for all that long. This summer, they've got elections. And so, you know, I think there's a pretty good chance that Yeshiva's gone this summer. Whether that means that the LDP has gone with him would be a whole different question and something that would be really hard to handle as an alliance issue. Let's turn to Australia. You mentioned that it is more difficult than it is. On one hand, Trump did make some supportive statements about AUKUS, although he didn't recognize the acronym at first. But then

Well, before we turn to how some remarks by our friend Malcolm Turnbull were received, I think AUKUS has already been in trouble in that there's a lot of questions about whether the Virginia-class submarines that have been promised to Australia will ever arrive. And there's also some concerns, and there's a debate about this, a healthy debate, I think, about whether the AUKUS class, the SSN AUKUS class submarines will actually be successfully delivered as well.

And then there's the pillar two activities about sharing of advanced technologies. And I haven't seen a lot of victories there. I haven't seen a lot of big announcements.

Beyond protocols, beyond mechanisms, beyond regulatory issues. There's a lot of research that's going on on a variety of fronts. Sure, but there hasn't been like, wow, it accomplished this. There's not a lot to show for it yet. So I think that agreement was already in trouble. Does everyone agree with that so far? I don't know that it's in trouble. The problem that Australia faces, they don't have many choices. They've made a strategic decision to move away from diesel submarines for a variety of different reasons. And on nuclear front...

You know, they can't necessarily rely on the French either, so they don't have that many options. Maybe they could do a deal with just UK, but you need licenses from the US there and UK industrial base is not in good shape either. So they're kind of stuck in my view. Yeah, I would just note that there have been legislative changes, the ITAR changes that were in the NDAA. Of course, you know, there are still problems with the technology exclusion list, the

So it's not perfect, but I think it would be wrong to say there hasn't been any progress, at least on pillar one. I think when you talk about lack of progress, you're looking at pillar two. And this is, you know, the agreement to cooperate on advanced capabilities. And there, there's been a lot of talk, but not much action.

So I think they really need to focus more attention on Pillar 2. Pillar 1 is moving. It has its own momentum. The Australians have announced their $3 billion in investment in the United States. Trump really likes that.

So I'm not sure that I know that the agreement is in trouble. I think that Defense Secretary Hegseth's statement that he's talked to Trump about it and Trump supports it, you know, that's encouraging. And, you know, his meeting with the Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Richard Marles went very well. So that's positive.

But there are questions about the incoming or nominated Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Bridge Kobe, who has been skeptical of August and worried about whether it cuts into the U.S. industrial base. So that, I think, is the one question that sticks in my mind is where is Bridge Kobe going to be? I don't think Bridge is the problem. And I don't speak on behalf of Bridge. But I think Bridge is recognizing something that would have been a problem even had Harris won is that

we might not have the subs to give to Australia. And I think this would have been a problem no matter who won the last election. And he just sort of nodded to that in his confirmation hearing. And I think the Australians are cognizant of this as well, which is why they're worried. Most of the benefits, early benefits of this deal are actually mostly on the US side. Not just the investments that Lisa just mentioned, but the access to the Australian ports for our subs in Perth, very, very strategic, very important, much closer to the region.

So it would be foolish on the US side to pull out of this deal. If this deal is in trouble, it will be because Australians decide they can no longer trust us. I agree. It's good for us. We also get $3 billion investment in industrial submarine base, but with, I believe, no clawback provisions, which is kind of crazy. But I think it's kind of a crappy deal for Australia, especially if they don't get what they're promised. I think the real problem with the arrangement they came up with was that

Essentially, Australia now operates one type of submarine, the Collins class, which is flawed. And if this agreement goes through, they would then have to operate a handful of Virginia-class submarines and this new AUKUS-class submarine. And I think the whole idea of what we're trying to do with our allies and partners is to simplify the number of systems that we and they are building and operating so

so that we can field more in terms of numbers, because the Chinese are just going to have huge numbers of systems out there. And I think the problem with AUKUS is they've essentially come up with a plan which has Australia operating three different types of submarines. It is very complex. And the numbers of submarines that we're talking about are in the less than 10 category, most likely. So this is just a lot of work.

I think what we're going to see is more and more talk about whether Australia should use unmanned undersea capabilities. And I think when you look at the price tag of AUKUS, that will be more and more attractive as a, not maybe a replacement for Pillar 1, but at least as a plan B in case it isn't able to be executed. I strongly disagree with Zach on this. Well, first of all, Collins is obsolete and they want to get rid of it as soon as possible. So I don't think that once Virginia or Australia

SSNs arrive in substantial numbers that they'll keep the Collins. They've said they won't. But secondly, with a timeline on the SSN AUKUS, they know. I mean, I had a conversation with a senior Australian official talking about the fact that you probably won't get them till 2040s. And he literally said, oh, we know we're buying a post-invasion fleet. So this is not as much relevance for China. This is longer term, second half of the century.

What's going to happen if there's going to be a war? It's going to be fought with Virginia class subs. Just moving on from that real quick. I think the real problem Australia also has beyond all this is this uncertainty about the entire relationship with the United States because Trump, in response to something Turnbull said on television, Turnbull, former prime minister, not current prime minister, about

the state of the United States as an ally under the second Trump administration, Trump responded by saying that Australia would not be free from tariffs. The United States has a trade surplus with Australia of about $20 billion. We mentioned how it's funding the US submarine base. So no country, no ally is free, no matter how good of a trade partner and a defense partner they are. I think the challenge here is if you're an Australian politician or expert trying to make the case for the US relationship and the US appears to be, you know,

you know, hammering you on trade issues and pulling back on security things that you care about, I think it just becomes more politically difficult. So I don't think that means that the alliance is going to go away or anything, but I do think it's going to feed those skeptics of the alliance in Australia who are already pretty strong in some circles. And it may change the alliance debate a little bit. Let's talk about Taiwan. I think if you're in Taiwan, you're a little nervous because you actually haven't been the subject of much conversation.

in the United States, in Washington under the Trump administration. The extent you have been and hasn't been super positive, it's more been about your lack of defense investment. Taiwan has been announcing investment after investment in the US economy. Where do you feel like that debate stands today? And Dmitry, what's the name of your new book we should plug? - Thank you, World on the Brink: How America Became China in the Race Route for the 21st Century. So I was just in Taiwan meeting with our officials two weeks ago. There's a lot of nervousness. There's a lot of tactical nervousness about tariffs on semiconductors in particular.

that Trump has not yet implemented, but there's been talk of potentially doing them. My advice to them was to explain to the US administration that these are not Taiwan's chips. These are American chips. These are Apple chips. These are Qualcomm chips. These are Amazon chips that Taiwan is just manufacturing. So Taiwan is really a sub when America is a general contractor, to put it in construction terms, that the president might relate to much better.

So it really wouldn't make any sense for the United States to tariff those chips. We have no other mechanism of procuring them. And look, Taiwan is trying to accommodate the United States. TSMC has announced a $100 billion investment to build additional fabs in the United States, something that's very controversial in Taiwan. The opposition party, the KMT, is trying to hammer the administration on this, saying that they are letting the chips industry that's so vital in their view to Taiwan's defense escape the island.

But clearly, they know that they have to make some accommodations to the administration, make themselves more relevant, and hopefully in exchange get some additional security guarantees. Although given how security guarantees discussion with Ukraine have gone, I'm not sure that they have much to hope for there. A lot of people are looking at how President Trump is handling Ukraine and Russia. And they're saying, you know, oh, Taiwan's going to be on the bargaining table for President Trump. In other words,

Trump's going to bargain away Taiwan security in exchange for a good trade deal with China. I don't think that can happen. There are too many Republican congressional members who are China hawks who this would be a real red line for them.

So, you know, I don't worry so much about that. I think that when it comes to Taiwan, yes, President Trump has sent some mixed signals. You know, he's ranted about the semiconductor issue and robbing us of semiconductors. However, I think TSMC's $100 billion investment was brilliant that Taiwan announced that. And so I think that's going to help with that whole issue. You know, I think the Taiwan's themselves are

When they saw sort of the treatment of Zelensky in the Oval Office, the cutting of the military aid to Ukraine, I think they really panicked and were worried that Trump could do something similar to Taiwan. But I don't see that. I think there's a big difference in the administration and, you know, all the people who are surrounding Trump, Rubio, Waltz.

And all the Republican congressional leaders are very supportive of Taiwan. And I think that they would put their foot down, that this would be a red line if somehow Trump looked as if he was going to leave Taiwan in a lurch or not defend Taiwan.

There are some great people in the White House who are big supporters of Taiwan. I think the challenge, though, is that the president's instincts, as I read what he said, is I think he thinks of the world in terms of spheres of influence now. And he seems really focused on the American sphere of influence in the Americas.

He seems to want to give the Russians some form of sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. And I think it would be logical then for him to give China some sphere of influence in East Asia. And if you ask, well, what would that mean in practice? What would change? The only logical thing that you can come up with, it would have to start with Taiwan. And so I think in the big picture, if

If I were sitting in Taipei right now, I would be pretty worried about that. And obviously, Trump hasn't really gotten to Taiwan. He hasn't focused on it yet. But I worry that a year or two years from now, his instincts are going to push in that direction. And I agree with Lisa, there will be some pushback. I just don't know how effective that will be. I disagree on the spheres of influence thing. I think that something that gets lost in the Zelensky meeting, two things that he said.

One, in response to a question from a journalist, is he committed to the security of Poland and the Baltic states? That's right next door to Russia. I think Ukraine's in a different category for him. And maybe you can write that off to sphere of influence, but either the sphere of influence includes a lot of these former Soviet states or former Soviet bloc, or it doesn't. And I think if it only includes one, but not the rest, it's not a sphere of influence really. I don't know.

I think it depends on where you draw the line. But I think that the question is not whether Trump will give Taiwan to China. It's not his to give, but whether he is going to make a affirmative statement that he will not defend Taiwan. And you have a big political issue right now with the KMT, the opposition party that controls

effectively the legislation in Taiwan, cutting the defense budget by 3%, something that I'm not sure has gotten to Trump's radar yet, but certainly something that Bridge Colby and others are very well aware of. And I fear that once the president learns about this, he's going to make a truth social post that, you know, if they're not going to defend themselves, I'm not going to defend them, which will have a devastating effect on Taiwanese morale and obviously embolden the Chinese. There's also this problem of late orders from U.S. defense companies to Taiwan.

Taiwan. It's pretty ongoing. Let's talk to our listeners about that, because I feel like this doesn't get as much attention as maybe it should. Oh, it's a huge issue. I keep hearing about it on every visit. We've placed orders for HIMARS. We've placed orders for air defense systems, Patriots, and the rest of it. And the delays keep increasing. The Harpoons are now going to be delivered in 2028, 2029, anti-ship missiles that they really badly need. So they're very concerned as much as they want to support Ukraine.

that the Ukrainian conflict has delayed some of this and has put pressures on our defense industrial base. So this is a huge issue for them. Well, and you've got Trump saying that Taiwan should spend 10% of its GDP on defense. But the question is, how can it spend 10% of its GDP, even if they hit that number, which they're not going to hit? It's not clear that they could get weaponry, right? No one else other than the Americans will sell to them. And the American companies haven't been able to deliver, as Dimitri was just saying. So

So I think this is going to be one real challenge. Everyone knows that part of the way you appeal to Trump is with an economic offer. TSMC was part of that. The second half of that is a big defense offer. And yet we would be the ones having to follow through. And it's just not clear that we can do that quickly. We're late also on F-16s, right? Very, very late. Which Ukraine got.

But Taiwan can't. Well, not ours. Yeah, but still, it's a signal. There was a lot of political will spent getting Ukraine those F-16s. Well, I was just going to say the idea that any country can spend 10% of its GDP, I think that is really unreasonable. And I think it's hyperbole by President Trump.

So I think, yeah, that number, I don't think any government... Why not 50%, Lisa? I just was going to say, I think that's obviously asking way too much of Taiwan. Nobody should expect that they would spend...

10% of their GDP on defense. I think it's more a signaling that in general, you know, President Trump wants to see countries stand up for their own defense before the U.S. commits to helping them. But, you know, the truth of the matter is defending Taiwan is defending U.S. national security.

And, you know, it would be bad for the U.S. if China was able to unify Taiwan by military means. It would be bad for the signal that it sends to other countries in the region, for China's desire to be a hegemonic powerhouse.

power in the region, and it would cut off the U.S. ability to have strong defense posture in the rest of the Indo-Pacific region. So it's not just about Taiwan. This is also about U.S. national security and defense security. Yeah, this isn't some island in the middle of nowhere. This is key geography in the heart of the most important economic region in the world. Taiwan is the quark that keeps China bottled up.

We're able to contain China within the first island chain because of Taiwan, primarily. One more point on the GDP issue. I think it's completely nonsensical when it comes to Taiwan, Europe, or anyone else to talk about this GDP, percentage of GDP on defense spending.

First of all, GDP contracts during a recession. Does that mean that if your economic situation is not going well, you're going to spend less on defense? That's why when Greece went to 4% of GDP, it was because of the Eurozone crisis. It wasn't because of Greece all of a sudden. Of course. It's nonsense. If you want to use a percentage metric, a much better one to say is what percentage of your budget federal appropriations are going to be spent on defense, and we can talk about what the right metrics are. But GDP is just a nonsensical metric. Exactly.

Zach, you mentioned earlier that the US is the only one that'll sell defense to Taiwan. Given that Japan is increasingly, in part due to US pressure under the last administration, we should say, and now Japan is sort of leaning on this administration to be down for defending Taiwan, which is a bit of an irony. Do you think there's ever a world in which Japanese defense companies would sell to Taiwan, or is that just outside of their Overton window right now? Well, there's some legal restrictions in Japan on export of arms.

So that would be one issue that they would have to get over. I think that's manageable. Obviously, Prime Minister Ishiba has a good relationship with Taiwanese. He was actually in Taiwan shortly before he was selected as prime minister, met with Lai Ching-da. So if anyone was going to do it, and he's a former defense minister also, it would be him. I just don't think it's in the cards anytime soon. But what I do think we should be talking about, and I've tried to advocate for this,

is the idea of a Taiwan contact group. So in Ukraine, we've had this Ukraine defense contact group, which has provided weaponry to the Ukrainians

that was set up after the invasion. We can't do that realistically after an invasion of Taiwan. We have to act now. And so I think we need a coalition of countries that are willing to help Taiwan. And it doesn't have to just be weaponry. It can be resilience, which is probably the key thing, as Dimitri has talked a lot about, that Taiwan needs to do right now. So if you're a European country, that doesn't mean necessarily selling missiles to Taiwan. It could be energy

infrastructure. It could be food supplies, stockpiling. All those things are absolutely critical. I'd like to talk for a few minutes about South Korea and the Philippines, and then I want to talk about sort of general military readiness issues. South Korea just went through this major crisis of democracy. Yoon is out. Maybe. Probably, I think.

We'll see. What do you think are the general trends for U.S.-South Korean relations? So my view is that if Yoon were to have stayed in power, that he and Trump would have had a very good relationship. The most likely replacement for Yoon, if he is impeached and then not reelected, which is a debate we should have, is Lee Jae-myung. And the reality is that Lee Jae-myung is a real challenge, I think, for Trump.

somebody who's talked very publicly about wanting to lean more towards North Korea and China. He has recently said other things that I think were meant mainly to

reassure Americans, but I'm not sure they've done so. And so I worry a lot that the U.S.-South Korea relationship is going to fracture. I think you could have President Trump talking about pulling significant numbers of troops off the peninsula. I think you are likely to have South Korea talking more and more about acquiring an independent nuclear capability, or at least very public nuclear latency, the ability to get nuclear weapons quickly. I think the relationship is headed in a really challenging direction.

I would agree. But we can't entirely count Yoon out yet. I think we all thought that the courts would vote to impeach him shortly after he called for martial law. It seemed ludicrous.

a really unwise thing that he did. However, more recently, there's been popular support for him, which seems unbelievable. You can't really predict the internal politics of any country anymore these days. But I think that Zach is right. If Yoon does not come back, I'm not saying he should. I mean, that's for the South Koreans to decide. But if he did, then yes, I think that he could have a good relationship with Trump.

But if you have a South Korean government that is leaning more toward North Korea or China, for that matter, then we could be in for some rocky road. Because put that aside, Trump still, his instincts are to try to remove troops from

When you both say leaning towards North Korea, I think it's important. I understand what you mean, but I think it's important to tell the audience exactly what you mean by that. Because you don't mean like aligning with North Korea. What you mean is being a little more accommodationist. Yeah, basically trying to have peaceful relations, talking about unification as if that is something that could actually happen. I think most people who are looking at the situation think that's pretty unrealistic. Yeah.

But yeah, much more accommodationist approach by the party that, you know, has been in the opposition. And the conservative party just is much more aligned, I think, with U.S. goals in the region.

and shares a similar perspective of the region. Now, I say that, but at the same time, Trump has a slightly different viewpoint. He's got an unconventional approach to North Korea. Now, having served in the first Trump administration and seen

how he pursued the talks with Kim Jong-un. I would say that Trump's approach comes from a good place. I think what he wanted to do when he reached out to Kim Jong-un was calm tensions down. He had a lot of people surrounding him at the time who were hawks, who were talking about giving a bloody nose to North Korea. And I think Trump just said, whoa, I don't

want conflict here. I'm going to try my own approach. And that's when he reached out to Kim Jong-un. Now, it didn't work out. The strategy didn't play out how people had hoped. And, you know, we didn't really get any closer to denuclearization.

Although you could argue that it did calm tensions down, there were less missile launches. But yeah, given that Trump has that inclination, and I think eventually he'll get around to North Korea and probably try to reach out again, that would be my guess. Then perhaps if there is a more accommodationist government that comes into South Korea, perhaps

perhaps there would be more of a basis for the two sides to deal together. I agree. I think this is more of a feature than a bug. I actually wrote a piece with Sergei Rachinko of SAIS on this in New York Times right before the inauguration. I think what no one's focused on is that Trump really wants to deal with Kim. I think he's probably the only president that could get a deal with Kim done this term. And it's probably going to be a lot easier than ending the war in Ukraine or figuring out the better relationship with China.

So when he hits rocks in those rough seas, he might turn to Kim. And what we proposed in our op-ed in December is that if we abandon denuclearization, which was never real, North Korea probably has 100 nuclear weapons right now. It is building a triad.

It has never abandoned the ultimate guarantor of the regime's security. But if you set that aside and say, can we have a peace deal on the peninsula? Can we decrease tensions? Can we stop the aggressive missile launches, stop the aggressive cyber attacks and work towards demilitarization of the border? I think that it is possible to do a deal there. I think it would be a good deal for the United States in the grand scheme of things.

And having more accommodations government in South Korea could be very, very helpful to that. We're going to give a little short shrift to our friends in the Philippines, and I apologize to them. But I think one of the most important things that the last administration did was the spacing infrastructure deal with the Philippines. Zach, could you talk a bit about it?

The United States now has some degree of access at nine facilities in the Philippines, which is absolutely critical if we're talking about not just a Taiwan scenario, but even a Japan scenario. These access locations are vital.

I will just say the challenge I think the Trump administration will have is that that arrangement is dependent in part on something called the Luzon Economic Corridor, where the Philippines was expecting the United States to put money, development funding, infrastructure funding, along with Japan, into this area around Luzon, which was supposed to be sort of a win-win, right? We get Beijing...

They get some economic development. I think the Luzon economic corridor is going to be a pretty hard sell within the Trump administration. Was this USAID money? It's largely not USAID money, but I think you can imagine Doge finding out about this and it being...

a series of Elon tweets. So I think the challenge is... They just did. Yeah. Did they? Did they really? I didn't see this. Oh, yeah. No, I did. Sorry. So I think that's going to be the challenge. The logic of the facility access makes sense, but can we keep the Philippines invested if we're not willing to put our own money into it? Well, I think, look, the Luzon Economic Corridor obviously makes strategic sense.

So I wouldn't put it in the same category as a lot of the USAID money that was just cut. It's not democracy promotion. It's not purely just soft economic money. It's really transportation linkages. It could help the U.S. in terms of, you know, if we are doing logistics in these bases, that helps us if there's better transportation, better roads.

better electricity, what have you. And also, don't forget that this is a trilateral agreement with Japan. So Japan's also invested in this. And Japan, you know, has already talked about how important the U.S.-Japan-Philippines dialogue is. It was even mentioned in the joint statement, the Japan-U.S. joint statement after the recent visit of the Japanese prime minister. So I'm not sure that I agree that the Luzon quarter will be pronounced dead in

It may take a different form, and I don't think the Japanese are going to sort of let it die easily. I think they'll continue to try to keep the U.S. invested. Yeah, it's ostensibly the kind of deal that this administration would proclaim to champion, is it's sort of very self-interested, actually. It's like, we get this base and you get this. It also helps us access this base. So that's a very good point, Lisa. Thank you. Although usually they want the allies to pay for the base. Yeah. So this brings me to something that I think is a great failing of the last administration is

investing in the capabilities and capacity of our armed forces. There was a real, several missed opportunities, I think, to spend more, especially on our Navy and defense industrial base in the last administration. The new administration says they're going to do more on this. I'm sort of taking a wait and see approach. And so I often use these bases that we have access to in the Philippines as an analogy is like, think of these great bases that we have, but they're empty. Are we going to put anything there? Are we going to have ships to put there?

Zach, you have this great book out called Tides of Fortune, which is about the 20th century and about how militaries basically build themselves to square off against each other, to put it in the simplest terms possible. But it has a lot to tell us about

how the United States and China are squaring up to face off against each other. So do you want to go into that a little bit? Yeah, I'll just say briefly, Ryan. First, thanks for the book plug. Second, I think the challenge now for the Trump team is if they really want to change what the U.S. is doing in terms of its mix of defense capabilities, they're going to have to spend a lot more money. There's not a lot of fat to cut. I just did the exercise of trying to cut 8% from each of the service budgets.

It is insanely hard. And oh, by the way, when you can't touch the 17 things that Pete Hexeth said you can't touch, including readiness and shipbuilding, it's basically impossible. If you can't touch readiness, that means there's so much you can't touch. Yeah. Well, and just, you know, in the next year, where's the money? The money is in readiness. That's the stuff you can touch quickly. So I think the administration is really going to struggle to move funds from old accounts to new accounts. And I'm

I'm one of those people that does think we have to spend money differently. And we have to spend on the many, the cheap, the expendable type of systems, not just on those systems, but we have to invest more in those systems. And that's part of what my book argues. But I think the challenge for the Trump team is they clearly have people who are supportive of that, right? But is there going to be enough cash there to do it? I don't know. And if you listen to even Republicans in the Congress,

there's some deep division among the budget hawks and the defense hawks about where they're going to end up on defense spending. This is where Congress will have a say one way or another. They may not fight the White House on policy, Ukraine and other things, but they will fight for jobs in their districts very severely, particularly military contracts. And we saw this before with the first Trump administration is you had someone running OMB who did not want to hire defense budget.

And you had a president talking a big game about more shipbuilding, this, that, and the other thing. And, you know, at the end of the day, the budgets went up during the Trump administration, but not nearly as much as we were led to believe. So we'll see what happens this time. Lisa? Yeah, I agree with Zach and Dimitri that you're going to have some, you know, knock down, drag out fighting between

the budget hawks and the defense hawks on the Hill. But I would also note that they are prioritizing shipbuilding. They're doing a shipbuilding directorate inside the National Security Council. So that says something about their priorities. But, you know, do we need to see investment in other lower cost technologies like

drones? Is there room to shift the budget around in the kinds of technology that you're investing in? So again, I think we're going to see a lot of tension here, and there's probably going to be a lot of time spent on these debates, both within Congress, but also within the new administration. One thing I want to say about drones, everyone's enamored with drones, and obviously autonomous vehicles, both loitering munitions and ISAR assets are very valuable. But the

But the one thing that I see no one talking about, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, is the distances are really, really huge. And the primary basing for those drones in a China contingency is Taiwan, the one place you can't put them on. And Japan is pretty far away. Guam is even further away. So we have this really fundamental divide between the capabilities that are being procured and the policy that prevents us from basing on Taiwan where this capability really needs to live.

That's why the Philippines is so important in this new basing, including in the northern Philippines, you know, just a couple hundred miles from Taiwan. But as you know, Lisa, there are real questions about whether the Filipinos in a real contingency would let us operate from there. I think this is a great setup for our next episode that we have you all on. Please read World on the Brink by Dimitri. Please read Tides of Fortune by Zach.

And whatever book that Lisa comes out with, which I'm sure will be brilliant, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for listening to the War on the Rocks podcast. Do not forget to check out our membership program at warontherocks.com slash membership. Stay safe and stay healthy.