Brian Carter
speaker
98 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Brian Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Pleasure, Mike. Thanks for having me on.
Well, the most recent one involved what we're told is about 90 vessels, which is a pretty significant uptick in total numbers. There's been an uptick in number of kind of encroachments of Taiwan They all seem to fit a pattern of encirclement, trying to demonstrate an ability to have a blockade, whether that is a short-term shock or something they'd like to try to do long-term.
This is a little bit of what people tend to talk about a gray zone operation that isn't full-on attack, destruction of Taiwan, and also not just sitting back behind the middle line of the Taiwan Strait and counting their ships. So it's pressure, it's intimidation, It also touches our allies. You can't have a blockade against Taiwan without encroaching on Japan or the Philippines.
And Xi Jinping, in his infinite wisdom in recent years, has been kind of picking fights with them. So there's a lot in all of this. We often just think of it as it's just China and Taiwan or it's something of the United States. I think whatever's going on with Xi Jinping right now is kind of bigger.
And in some ways, it's harder to try to counter because a lot of our policy habits would just look at this and say, okay, well, can't the president talk to Xi Jinping? Or is there something going on in Taiwan we have to address? China's got a lot of capabilities now. We've given them a lot of money. They've taken a lot of technology and we've been really distracted.
So this is not a great set of circumstances coming together in these headlines.
Well, that's the money question. And we don't really get the luxury of knowing the answer. They're kind of able to go pursue both at the same time. They get a lot of what they would really want, we think, by just pressuring Taiwan and allies in the United States to sort of back off and make a deal and just concede that this area of responsibility is China's jurisdiction. And they push
allies and the United States out beyond the first island chain to the Pacific impacts an immense amount of global trade, the likes of which I don't think people have really digested. But you don't have a tech juggernaut out of South Korea and a huge amount of economic exchange with Japan without encroaching on the territorial sea and airlines and communication around Taiwan. So a lot's at stake.
But I think it's really ultimately a pressure campaign and a messaging campaign. But when you're playing with big ticket items like aircraft carriers and things that can go out in the deep blue water areas, you have to take it at face value. You can't bank on it just being a comms exercise.
Yeah, I don't think a lot of the world stage has really paid as close attention to China's military modernization as our intelligence community and a lot of specialists and policy areas have. And so it might be news to a lot of people how many big ship platforms they have. Now, this is kind of one of the dilemmas we've faced. This is a big, new material navy that they have.
It's untested in combat. You know, China has had a perfect record under the Communist Party of killing other Chinese people. They don't really have much of a track record in modern warfare. I don't think we can afford to be overly hubristic about that. This is this is a tough challenge, but they should also be a little bit cautious. We've.
We've come up across some big navies when you look at order of battle or armies when it comes up to order of battle. That doesn't mean they stand up in combat, but I don't think we really want to try to find that out anytime soon.
Yeah, and that's one of those areas that's extremely frustrating where I think we've gotten in our own way. I don't understand whether it's overregulation on environmental issues or if it was sort of globalization of supply chains. But America really pulled back from refining of energy and building proper supports and And when it came to submarines and big vessels, we really pulled back.
China jumped way ahead. South Korea's still got some significant capabilities in this area. But we have to figure out how we're going to work with our allies to rejuvenate these supply chains. We should do more in America, not quite on off switch.
And maybe we ought to consider a novel idea about not transferring immense wealth and technology to a country like China so they can put it into jumping ahead in these kind of areas.
And it's done. So they've received the data, the input, the plans.
Part of the answer is just the tough reality that we've lived with this kind of a threat for decades. And just the tools for Beijing being able to test us or impose its will or try to do things with Taiwan, their range of options have expanded. Their capabilities have gotten bigger and stronger.
But really, even going back from the missile exchanges in the 50s and the threat from the Taiwan election in the mid 90s, where they had tests and splashdowns, we've lived with this all along. I think that really the main factors are, are we doing anything when I say we, anybody that is on the receiving end of the CCP, do we doing anything to increase doubt? with inside China?
Are we doing anything to increase concern that should they behave irresponsibly, they pay a price that's too high? I mean, when they look at what's happened with Russia relative to the Ukraine conflict, do they think that they would fare better or worse than Russia has with the threat of sanctions or cut off from the wider West in certain ways.
I think, unfortunately, Beijing probably is more optimistic that they would fare better than Russia has. But if we do better at sowing that doubt and that credible pain to be imposed, I think that we buy more time and deterrence improves. Second variable is Japan. Japan is a much more powerful country.
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