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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Pekingology · Avoiding War in the South China Sea · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

And the injury happened because as the Filipinos had already tied up alongside the BRP Sierra Madre, their vessels were violently rammed by these Chinese ribs, and a Philippine sailor had his hand pinned between two of the ships and lost his thumb.

And that yeah, that's kind of idiosyncratic, but it could have happened any number of ways.

If he had been pinned by the forearm, he probably would have bled out.

It took hours to get him evacuated.

evacuated, you easily could have had that incident escalate to actual use of those weapons that that China was waving.

So I think people are far too quick to diminish that incident, say, well, he only lost his thumb and it was eventually reattached.

Yeah.

He only lost his thumb by dumb luck.

He or any number of other personnel could have been killed in that incident.

Part of the problem is that we need to accept there aren't a solutions here, that the South China Sea is a classic wicked problem, and I have no more solutions to offer here than I do to the cross-straight tensions with Taiwan or to denuclearizing North Korea.

And so if we can set aside those fantasies that I think a lot of people come into it with, assuming that there's some clever legal strategy here or negotiation that just hasn't been tried before.

So part of it has been modernization of the armed forces and the law enforcement capabilities of the Southeast Asians, because at the end of the day, you do have to have a certain minimal credible capability in order for the Chinese to take you seriously.

We see that in the disparate way that China approaches Vietnam, which I think it does take quite seriously, and it should.

Vietnam has the most capable Navy and Air Force in the region, compared to the way it takes the Philippines.

Even though the Philippines today, after a decade of I think significant modernization, probably does have a more capable Navy and Coast Guard than some of its neighbors.

For instance, I would argue that the Philippine Navy and Coast Guard are both more capable than their Malaysian counterparts, for instance.

Yes, a significant change than just a few years ago when they were by far the weakest in the region.

But how

serious China takes the Philippines, both operationally and politically, is a lagging indicator.

I think it's gonna take a while for China to internalize the idea that the Filipinos are not a pushover.

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