Be Concerned. Very Concerned. Josh Rogin Talks to A&G

Josh Rogin (Global Opinions columnist for the Washington Post) joined Jack Armstrong & Joe Getty to talk about what he learned at the recent Shangri-La Dialogue--and why we need to be more concerned about China's brazen efforts to expand their control in Asia.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's always a pleasure to welcome Josh Rogan to the show.
Josh is a global opinions calumnist for the Washington Post.
Came across a piece he wrote recently about China's military
expansion that I thought was just a home run and
it's not getting nearly enough conversation. But Josh joins us, Now,
how are you? Josh? Great? Guys, Listen, if the rapture happened,

(00:22):
I'd rather be down here with you guys. It's gonna
be a lot more fun here. You go an idea. Well,
I wasn't gonna, you know, put two fine a point
on that, but you appeared to to be here, so yeah, well,
experts have had concerns about my soul for quite some time. Yeah, yeah, anyway, Josh,
it's yeah, no kidding. It's always great to talk to you.
I loved your piece in the Post. As I mentioned,

(00:43):
uh tell us about China's military expansion. How notable is it? Right? Well,
I had a travel nightmare of my own getting back
and forth to Singapore last weekend. If you think it's bad,
if you think that domestic flights are bad, wait till
you try to catch your forty minute layover in Munich
and then you find out the entire flight is well,

(01:03):
that's that was like Saigan, okay, and it was. It
was a disaster. But eventually I did make it to
Singapore for this conference called the Shangoli Dialogue. They had
it every year, except they didn't have it during the pandemic.
So this is the first time in a few years.
All of these diplomats and generals and animals were all
these countries all over Asia got together. The Chinese People's

(01:24):
Liberation Army leaders were there. They were meeting with our
defense secretary. It was a big, big fin deal, okay.
And after spending three days from there, I came back
pretty scared, Okay, pretty worried, very concerned because the level
of Chinese government aggression, military expansion, coercion UH in the

(01:46):
region has gone way up since the last time I
was in Asian three years, according to everybody in Asia, okay.
And they'll all tell you the exact same thing. And
the Chinese military is happy to tell you the same thing,
which is that they're expanding and they're being more threat
thing and more coercive, and they're looking at Taiwan and
they see lunch okay, and they're gonna try it if

(02:06):
they can. If they get to the level where they
think they can get away with it, they're going to
attack Taiwan and subject those poor people, twenty three million
people who have been living in freedom since nineteen fifty
nine or whatever, to the worst cruelty you can imagine.
And so that's why I wrote the column, is like,
we better wake up to that. And I get that,
you know, the stuff happening in Ukraine and the Middle East.

(02:26):
The world's a complicated place, but this is a thing
that's going to happen sooner or later. We better start
preparing for it now. That's my warning. Yeah. I remember
when we were talking to you about this surround Hong Kong,
and it was a similar sort of conversation. It looks
like it's gonna happen, and then it happened, and it
has happened, and it's over in. Hong Kong is part
of China, and we don't want the same thing to
happen here, right. I mean you could even say, well,

(02:49):
Hong Kong was actually a Chinese city, so babe, we
didn't have any right to stop them, but I thought
we should have stopped them, and we didn't. And those
eight million people's lives are much worse than you to
breathe the error freedom, and now they're not all. If
they go into the town square and say the wrong thing,
they'll disappear, and the whole family will disappear just like that.
It's not now be gone from being a free society

(03:10):
to a fear of society. And I can't remember that
really happening on that scale in my lifetime. It's pretty shocking.
And I know a lot of the people who escaped,
who fled Hong Kong, their lives are ruined. Not to
mention the people that are in prison, do we really
want to see that for Taiwan? And the Chinese saying, oh, well,
that's our country, that's our that's our province. Taiwan belongs
to us. But I've been there, okay, And there's those

(03:30):
twenty three million people who don't agree with that. They
don't think, they don't want to be part of China,
they don't want to, you know, be governed by the
Chinese Communist Party. They liked their democracy, and we did
make a promise to help them defend it. And if
you looked at Hong Kong. You would have to think
that that promise is losing its credibility. And what I
argue in my column is that we're also losing credibility
because the Chinese military expansion is not being met with

(03:52):
a proper response. So, you know, if there's one thing
we should have learned from this whole Ukraine mess is
that the only way to deter are these aggressive totalitarian
dictatorships from scooping up democracies is to make sure that
they know they can't get away with it by putting
an opposing force on the other side. That's not a
perfect solution. You know, we should also have diplomacy and

(04:13):
economics and all that stuff. But if they get too powerful,
if they think they can just swallow up Hong Kong
and it's they're too uh, they're gonna try it. I
think they're gonna try it, and I think we're gonna
regret it. By the way, we have a link to
Josh's colument Armstrong and getty dot Com under hot Links.
But Josh, what are American military officials saying about the
Chinese build up and how does it square with reality? Right?

(04:36):
And again, you know, I get it, like you know,
there's a you could over overreact, right, and you don't
want to spend every sub cent in our treasury on
military Stuff's not a good idea. But I interviewed the
top commander of the U s Indo pay come into
a Pacific Man's guy named Admiral Aquilino. Serious guy, okay,
four star admiral. He's got to manage all of this stuff.
And he said he's watching the largest military build up

(04:58):
in history on the Chinese side, nuclear silos by the hundreds.
Why are they doing that? Are they gonna nuke us? No,
they're trying to make sure that they can blackmail us
if we try to get in the middle of them
in Taiwan. Then they've got hypersonic missiles. Then they've got
anti satellite laders. There's then they're building new bases all
over the region without telling anybody's secret Chinese military basis

(05:19):
all over Asia. So that sounds like a really good development.
So all he's saying is like, hey, guys, you know,
if you really want to stop this, we better start now,
because you know it's only gonna be a few years.
It won't say exactly how many, but some people say seven.
That's probably the deadline when Juan King is gonna make
a run at this thing. And if we wait till

(05:42):
then to start to think about it, uh, we're gonna lose. Man.
This is some serious world history making stuff. These are
some major decisions that are or aren't being made. Yeah,
I mean we're sleepwalking past the graveyard here. It's like,
you know, we're we're always is reacting to these crises
when it's too late, Like you imagine if we get it,

(06:04):
like you know, people were worry about arm in Ukraine,
but imagine we had armed them sooner. Maybe a lot
of less people would have died right now. It would
have cost less, by the way, you know, if you
wait for the crisis to come, it's gonna cost more. Right,
This is an insurance down payment to give the Taiwan
ease for just, for one example, enough weapons to defend themselves.
They're gonna need some stingers and toes and all this stuff,

(06:25):
and we're gonna have to make it and sell it
to them or give it to them or something. And
all you hear out of sort of the Button administration
is like, oh yeah, we're gonna pivot to Asia. It's
gonna be beautiful. But then the stuff never really arrives
because they're too busy putting out fires on the other
side of the world. So we gotta walk into gum
on this thing. Okay, we can't just be leaders in
Europe and not Asia, and we're gonna have to be

(06:47):
a global superpower with global responsibilities. And it's not gonna
be I'm sorry to say, it's not gonna be cheap.
I wish it. We're gonna be cheap, but it's gonna
be much more expensive if we, like the dictatorships expand,
because then we're gonna have to deal with them when
they're much more powerful. Josh Rogan of the Wampo is
on the line. Josh, what's the state of the free
navigation of waters? Say in the child South China? See
with those those brand new military bases, et cetera. How

(07:11):
belligerent are the Chinese getting. They're getting more and more
belligerent every day as there they expand. You know, and
right now, you know you have a U S policy
where we just okay, we're gonna agree to disagree. We're
gonna sail where we want, and they're gonna get yell
and scream about it. But at some point they're gonna
start to escalate this. They're gonna start bumping into our boats.

(07:34):
They're already bumping into our planes. They're trying to like
shoot down Australian spy planes with lasers. They're doing a
lot of really aggressive stuff. And what they're doing is
they're testing us. And the more aggressive they get, they
see if they can go a little bit further, a
little bit further and see what are responses. And so
that's why we have to respond, unfortunately, because if we
don't respond, they just get worse, they get more aggressive.

(07:56):
So you know, that's a really big problem. But it's
not getting any better. And this again sort of go
to the region, talk to all the people in all
these different countries. Uh, that's what they're saying. They're saying,
this is gonna get worse before it gets better, and
we can't ignore it anymore. Yeah. Well, the history of
the world, as we all know is Hitler takes poland
he doesn't stop there. Putin takes crime, doesn't stop there.

(08:19):
And there's no reason to think that the end game
is Taiwan. And even if they you know, we allowed
that to happen, that that's the end there's nobody believes that,
do they, Well, some people do. I mean, there are
there there are people both on the left and the right,
as you know, who think we should just like pull
up the drawbridge, uh, you know, build a huge missile

(08:40):
defense for our country and tell the rest of the
world to go through itself and that will be fine,
you know. And I hear that a lot. And I
get that people are tired of military interventionism. It's very expensive,
it's hard to balance against the things that we need
to do at home. Those are all real concerns, but
we should have learned in the twentie century that eventually,
if you ignore the aggressive, expansionist, totalitarian, militaristic dictatorships, they'll

(09:04):
come knocking at your door. It's just too it's just
a matter of time, and either you know, the free
world is expanding or it's contracting and ever stays static.
So the more that they advance, the worst position that
we're in. So, unfortunately, freedom isn't free. And unfortunately the
work of you know, fighting thugs and dictators and just

(09:27):
mad men like Puno are willing to kill millions of
people for no reason. That work is not over, you know.
So We're gonna have to do it because if we
don't do it, nobody else will. Yeah. Boy, And if
I'm in some western Japanese island or the Philippines or
something like that, I'm not content to think, Yeah, China
will halt its expansion after Taiwan, not for a second.

(09:48):
Josh Rogan, Global Opinions columnists with The Washington Post's the
author of a terrific book, Chaos Under Heaven Trump she
in the Battle for the twenty one Century. You're working
on anything right now, Josh book? Why? Uh, we're all
looking at the president's trip to the Middle East where
he was going to uh takeing a cows out to
the Saudi clown Prince Mohammed Ben Solmon. That seems to

(10:09):
be the next big foreign policy story. Uh, you know,
it's it's sort of like the administration has been talking
about human rights, but they don't walk the walk. And
now we're gonna everyone's gonna see it on national TV
when the President States goes hat in hand to beg
for oil from a dictator. And that's going to be
a pretty demoralizing moment in units form policies for it's

(10:30):
not concerned Josh Rogan, Global opinions columnists with The Washington Post. Josh,
always a pleasure, always enlightening. Thanks a bunch of the
time any time. Yeah, smart guy, interesting to talk to,
and and and none of that hyperbole or an exaggeration
or this is some high stake stuff. And then you've

(10:51):
got the complicated you know, I would never pretend that
these are easy decisions, because there's two ways to look
at it. There's the um great empires have collapsed because
they got overextended, Roman Empire, Soviet Union, whatever, get involved
in various places around the world over extending. Okay, you
could go with that narrative, or you can go with
the the one I laid out, the letting a Hitler

(11:13):
take Poland and putin take crime or whatever, and they
don't stop, and then you end up facing them when
they're bigger and more powerful. Which is it? I don't know.
I think it's the latter. Well, you have a superpower
that is openly declared its hostility to the United States
arming itself as fast as it can. I mean, you
need not have a pH d in international relations to

(11:34):
realize we gotta pay attention to that. Yeah, there's a
lot of people who pointed out they're not hiding their
ambitions to become the global hyperpower at all, and we're
either going to try to stop them or not