Greg Poling
speaker
344 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Greg Poling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The other danger here is I think we have reason to believe that Chinese officers on station, the ones who are actually in charge of these dozens of vessels, or the South Sea fleet commanders who are in charge of the overall campaigns, are also growing.
Yeah.
And I've heard I think there's reason to believe this just looking at the activities on the ground, but I've also heard this from Chinese interlocutors that they think they're growing frustrated as well, because they're really given an impossible mission.
They have been told, you know, you must stop all of this activity.
Stop the Philippine resupplies to Second Thomas, stop the Philippine patrols at Scarborough, stop Vietnamese and Malaysian oil and gas exploration.
And over the last five years, as I said, the South Asians have actually gotten quite good at ignoring Chinese gray zone coercion and doing what they want to do, which is why the disputes in a sense have plateaued.
But then the flip side of that is the Chinese forces on the ground are being told, but don't open fire, don't escalate.
And what we saw at Second Thomas and what we see at Scarborough is that leads to dangerous iteration on non-lethal force in a way that really
starts to blur the line.
Non-letals are only non-lethals in a statistical sense.
Sooner or later somebody dies.
And the more that these actors on the ground are facing
impossible contradictory orders from Beijing, the more I think they get kind of desperate and they do things that should be considered unprofessional.
And we saw that play out most explosively in the June 2024 incident at Second Thomas, where I think the Philippine Navy really took the Chinese commanders on site by surprise, and the response was somewhat harried and dangerous, and probably got whoever made the decision in some serious trouble in Beijing when eventually it had to be de escalated.
Yeah, and so to remind people what happened, so you had a year and a half long buildup of forces where every month's like clockwork the Philippines would send out two vessels, two civilian vessels with a Coast Guard escort, and by the end of 2023 we had a time seventy Chinese ships around the shoal.
So this like kinda blockade that the Filipinos were running, getting rammed, water cannoned, etc., you had multiple significant injuries, including
To a Philippine general officer at one point who I think broke a collarbone when his vessel was hit by a water cannon.
In June twenty twenty four, the Philippine Navy took over the operation and sent ribs, rigid hold inflatables, racing into the shoal to try to avoid smaller vessels.
F smaller, faster, more maneuverable.
And it kind of broke the pattern, and I think China panicked, so China sent out its own ribs, except the Philippine soldiers had their weapons locked underneath their seats, and the Chinese Coast Guard personnel were waving boat hooks and axes.
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