Last night, just hours before President Obama delivered the State of the Union address, Ryan Evans sat down with Mira-Rapp Hooper of CSIS, Bryan McGrath of the Hudson Institute’s Center for American Seapower, RADM Mike McDevitt (ret) of CNA, and Scott Cheney-Peters of CIMSEC. Their beverage-fueled conversation ranged widely, from China’s disputes with the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan to the balance of seapower in the Asia Pacific.
Have a listen!
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Make sure you visit the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative and read RADM McDevitt’s latest report on the South China Sea!
Image: Philippines Navy ship BRP Artemio Ricarte. U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Dave Gordon
Jeff Kronie 
Thanks for a very interesting discussion. The participants demonstrated their insights into the issues relevant to the theme. With so much collective knowledge to hand, I think the opportunity to delineate and assess the core issues around which tensions simmer in maritime Asia-Pacific was lost. The discussion explored much of what is public knowledge and has been for sometime now. The core issue, on the other hand, is the systemic/sub-systemic transitional fluidity flowing from the dynamic power-balance reshaping Sino-US relations, especially since the beginning of the new century in the context of changing and mutually exclusive insecurity perceptions colouring policies on the two shores of the Pacific.
The fact that US ally and ”lynchpin” of US regional strategy, Japan, had, until 2010 maintained a measure of tacit political-economic topdog status in the region had helped to keep things calm. Since then, though, China’s economic surge to the status of the 2nd largest economy has seriously discomfited the Japanese elite as well as public opinion. Given that Chinese and Japanese elites often view each other as both superior and inferior to each other, a subject of disdain and neglect, and a source of awe and perceived threats at the same time, these changes have upset what had until then been a relatively quiescent milieu. The fact that Japan thrives as a major power comparable to China only as a US ally both angers and worries both China and Japan, though for very different reasons, is part of that fluidity. But these nuances were not apparent in the discussions.
Took a while to give this podcast a listen, but wish there could have been more discussion on military capabilities of the other Asian nations, especially in Southeast Asia. Can’t all be about what the US Navy brings and how it stacks up to the excessive Chinese spending/building. Getting some decent partner capabilities that can help share of the burden of regional and maritime security is certainly a positive direction. Key to this will how a country like Indonesia chooses to spend on military capability in the coming years, don’t think you all got to discussing Indonesia as initially intended.