“Each country has a comprehensive national power numerical value,” says Cleo Paskal, a leading expert on China and the Indo-Pacific region, “and the overt goal of China is to be No. 1 in the world in comprehensive national power—economically and militarily.”
In this episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek discusses the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) strategy in the Pacific with Paskal, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Paskal breaks down the CCP’s moves in the region, from promoting division, and buying off the elites of small island nations, to its ultimate ambition of taking control of Taiwan.
It’s a term that the Chinese use to rank countries; an empirical metric. Each country has a comprehensive national power numerical value, and China’s overt goal is to be No. 1 in the world in comprehensive national power—economically and militarily. If you have a rare earth mineral mine in your country and a Chinese company is mining it, they count that toward their comprehensive national power, not yours, because it’s feeding into their systems.
It’s very empirical, and it’s a little bit insane. The Chinese Communist Party thinks it can break everything, even humanity, down into numbers. But it’s an important driving force. According to this view of comprehensive national power, there are two ways of improving your relative ranking. One is the typical American way, where you work hard and get better. The other is you knock everybody else down. If you’ve knocked them down, you’re doing better than they are.
From a comprehensive national power perspective, this explains why it is beneficial to the Chinese Communist Party to pump fentanyl into middle America, because it destroys communities and families. Entropic warfare creates this disintegration within a target country.
Unrestricted warfare is another Chinese term. It’s the name of a 1999 book by two PLA [People’s Liberation Army] Air Force colonels about methods of warfare against enemies like the United States. They listed 24 different types of warfare, including drug warfare.
So, we’ve got two Chinese terms: comprehensive national power and unrestricted warfare. They look at a country and if they can do elite capture, they prefer to do that. They get the country through the elite leaders. If they can’t do that, then they use unrestricted warfare to wage entropic warfare to disintegrate and weaken those societies, so that resistance to Chinese coercion is lessened.
They tend to identify authoritarian leaders and then back them. In the case of entropy or civil war, an authoritarian leader has an advantage, especially if they’re backed with PRC assets and intel. This is exactly what happened in the Solomon Islands during a three-year period. In 2019, the Solomons switched from recognizing Taiwan as China to recognizing the People’s Republic of China [PRC].
That movement was very closely studied by the Chinese. They learn a lot from history. They’re trying to do with political warfare what was bought in blood by the Americans during the liberation of the region.
This time, China got the Solomons by buying off the right people. At that 80th commemoration of Guadalcanal, all these high-level people came for this commemoration. There were Japanese and American representatives. But the prime minister of the Solomon Islands didn’t show up, because he’s so deep in China’s pocket.
The Solomons switched in 2019 from Taiwan to China, and also signed a security agreement with the PRC allowing the deployment of Chinese military personnel to protect Chinese citizens and assets in the Solomon Islands at the request of the Solomon Islands’ government.
They also bought off 39 of the 50 members of Parliament, which was enough to change the constitution to delay elections. This is what happens. A pro-PRC authoritarian leader sets the groundwork to delay elections, and if there’s a civil war because of it, that’s fine with him, because his Chinese backers will keep him in power. That’s entropic warfare.
Three countries—Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia—through the voluntary Compact of Free Association have given over their defense and security to the United States. They literally trust their lives to the United States. These Pacific Islands are small, but when you look at the zone they cover, they are as large as the continental United States.
If you have that zone and Guam and the Marianas, which are part of the United States, the security perimeter of our country goes from Hawaii all the way to just behind the Philippines. It’s very important strategically. Those countries are independent countries, and they have these Compacts of Free Association with the United States.
If they take Taiwan, then what will the American allies in the region think? Will the Philippines think the United States is going to back them? What will the Japanese do? What will the Malaysians and Indonesians do? You’d get a whole band of failure in the U.S. ability to protect allies and partners in the region.
And the Chinese Communist Party is fundamentally expansionist. They don’t know how to not expand. And if China takes Taiwan, the United States will have demonstrably failed at defending a successful democratic society. That is a key component of the strategic architecture of the Indo-Pacific. It’s a very, very big win. Taiwan is incredibly important strategically, philosophically, economically, and any way you can imagine. That’s why China wants it.
They turned a domestic epidemic into a global pandemic. Because if your mentality is comprehensive national power, you’re going to take a hit when you know you’ve got a problem. But if everybody else takes a hit, and you use that moment to position yourself, you can come out relatively ahead, which they did. The same thing with the chips. If the chip manufacturing is destroyed, it hurts China, but it also hurts everybody else. If they can be in a position where they’re hurt relatively less, they come out ahead.