Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific?

For the first time, China's coast guard is asserting sovereignty over waters beyond the First Island Chain and out in the open Pacific, far to the east of Taiwan. To justify it, a hastily assembled group of Chinese academics has suddenly declared that the Philippines' northernmost (and very much inhabited) Batanes island province actually belongs to China.
Is this a dangerous new escalation or just another day in East Asia’s highly contested maritime gray zone?
This week, co-hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso flip the script and put a reporter in the guest chair: Brad Lendon, CNN's Senior News Desk Reporter for Global Military Affairs, who's covered China's maritime rise for over a decade and authored the June 25 story that sparked this conversation, “‘Salami slicing’: How China is trying to increase control in the Pacific”
Brad makes the case that this "salami slicing" is nothing new. Beijing has spent years applying steady, below-the-threshold pressure using white-hulled coast guard ships rather than navy gray-hulls. But now those ships are radio-challenging commercial vessels east of Taiwan, mapping the seabed and settling in for what looks like a permanent presence outside the First Island Chain.
In this episode:
Why coast guard "law enforcement" ships are a more insidious tool for asserting sovereignty than warships
What China's radio challenges to commercial ships could be rehearsing, and Ray's "boa constrictor" warning about a soft quarantine of Taiwan already beginning
How the out-of-nowhere Batanes claim fits Beijing's long-game strategy
Whether the Japan-Philippine maritime delimitation talks were a real trigger or just a convenient pretext
What it all means for the U.S. defense strategy built around the First Island Chain, and whether it's the right tool for a non-military threat
Brad's unforgettable story from the bridge of a Canadian frigate threading the Taiwan Strait at midnight
A sharp, practitioner-level look at how the map of the Western Pacific is being quietly redrawn one slice at a time.
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Sponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific

We picture China as a place where no one dares speak out, but the reality is quite different. In 2025, despite one of the most sophisticated censorship machines on earth, workers protested over unpaid wages, homebuyers demanded stalled apartments, and rural communities pushed back against land dispossession.
In this episode, hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso sit down with Kevin Slaten, who leads Freedom House’s China Dissent Monitor, the only public database tracking protests across China, from its office in Taipei. Slaten’s team recorded about 40 to 50 percent more dissent in 2025 than the year before, including the largest pre-Lunar New Year labor protest peak the project has ever recorded.
The twist: US budget cuts had recently knocked the project offline for four months, and it still came back with a skeleton crew to record its highest numbers yet. Fewest resources ever, most dissent ever recorded.
Slaten explains what more than 15,000 cases reveal about the real China beneath the propaganda--an economy under strain, a “social contract” that may never have been one, and why even “local” protests matter politically in an authoritarian system. He also unpacks who protests and why, where Beijing’s red lines fall, and how protest pressure can actually produce real concessions, from policy reversals to quiet legal changes.
Key topics:
Why dissent is rising even as China tightens censorship
Who is protesting: workers, homebuyers, rural residents, and more
How Beijing decides what to tolerate, censor, or crush
The 2022 White Paper protests: anomaly or symptom?
A school bullying case that spiraled into crowds chanting “we want democracy”
If you want to understand where China is really heading, pay attention to the people already demanding change.
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Sponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific

What if the most important strategic relationship of the 21st century is the one Washington is actively damaging? In this episode, hosts Ray Powell and Jim Carouso sit down with Kurt Campbell - former Deputy Secretary of State, President Biden's "Asia czar," a key figure in building the modern Quad, and founder of The Asia Group - to ask whether the U.S. and India can move beyond damage control toward something far more ambitious: a new kind of alliance.
Last year, U.S.-India ties hit their lowest point in a quarter century: 50% tariffs over India's Russian oil purchases, a tilt toward Pakistan, and a sharp breakdown of trust. Yet at that very low point, Campbell and Jake Sullivan published "The Case for a U.S. Alliance With India" in Foreign Affairs, warning Washington risked driving India into its adversaries' arms.
Drawing on decades of firsthand diplomacy, Campbell offers a candid insider's read on what went wrong and what might still go right. He reveals why Pakistan has out-maneuvered India in navigating the Trump White House, why his own successor's speech in Delhi drew audible gasps from the audience, and why India's celebrated "strategic autonomy" masks a quiet but unmistakable tilt toward the West.
In this episode:
Why Campbell calls India America's most consequential 21st-century partner, and what "escape velocity" means
How he and Sullivan are trying to recast what "alliance" means for a country that will never host U.S. bases
How Pakistan adapted to Trump-era diplomacy more effectively than India
The surprising story of how India went from reluctant Quad participant to its driving force
How India quietly cut its reliance on Russian arms from 80% to under 40%
Campbell's new Asia Group report on the Strait of Hormuz crisis and why it's hitting the Indo-Pacific harder than markets expect
His warning that the South China Sea, not Taiwan, is the likeliest flashpoint for miscalculation
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Follow Kurt Campbell at The Asia Group or on LinkedIn.
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Sponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific

The day her BYD rideshare driver told her the dashboard screen was a “national secret” … that's when Wall Street Journal correspondent Yoko Kubota knew China had really changed, and maybe it was time to think about leaving.
What does the world lose when fewer foreign journalists are reporting from inside China? In this episode, hosts Ray Powell (35-year military veteran) and Jim Carouso (former senior U.S. diplomat) sit down with Yoko Kubota, who spent eight years in Beijing before leaving China and writing a striking farewell column about a society growing alarmingly suspicious of outsiders.
From that small, telling BYD moment, Yoko traces how a tightening espionage law, national-security messaging, and rising nationalism seeped into everyday life. As a Japanese reporter for an American paper, she also describes the anti-Japanese sentiment she and her family encountered, from a parents' school chat group to the phrases her young son began repeating, and how the 2024 attacks on Japanese children in Suzhou and Shenzhen deepened her fears.
The conversation also digs into her business beat:
Why on-the-ground reporting from inside China still matters and what we lose as it dries up
Why China can be both increasingly confident and deeply wary of outside scrutiny
How China's EV industry went from a punchline to a global powerhouse, and the "zombie" carmakers left in its wake
Why the race for self-driving cars may come down to regulation as much as technology
With the press corps thinning – underscored by the recent expulsion of New York Times reporter Vivian Wang – this is an on-the-ground account of an increasingly inaccessible country that still, as Yoko puts it, "won't go away from our lives."
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Follow Yoko Kubota on her page at the Wall Street Journal, on LinkedIn or on X, @Kubota_Yoko
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Follow Ray Powell on X, @GordianKnotRay, or LinkedIn, or check out his maritime transparency work at SeaLight
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Sponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific

Washington is engaging plenty with its Indo-Pacific allies these days … just not always on the things they want, and too often on things they don't. So how do savvy allies steer that relationship when the world's most powerful partner feels less predictable than ever?
To find out, Ray Powell and Jim Carouso sit down with Marise Payne, Australia's former Defence Minister and Foreign Minister. Marise helped launch AUKUS and grow the Quad, and navigated the first Trump administration from both chairs. Now a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, Payne brings rare insider perspective on how middle powers keep America engaged and what they must build for themselves when it drifts.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Payne unpacks:
Why "fewer Shangri-Las, more submarines" sets up a false choice, and why showing up still matters
The AUKUS reality check: what the shift from the "optimal pathway" means, and the social license challenge facing Canberra
Whether Pillar One is now on a "suboptimal pathway," and the case for driving Pillar Two harder
How the Quad found its feet again after COVID, and why the New Delhi foreign ministers' meeting matters
Reassuring a skeptical ASEAN on nuclear submarines, and the relationship-first diplomacy that made it work
China's "do as I say, not as I do" stance on Japan's remilitarization
The contrast between leading Defence and Foreign Affairs: "straight lines" versus "grasping at wisps of smoke"
It's a practitioner's masterclass in alliance management for an era of strategic uncertainty. Essential listening for anyone tracking US-China competition, AUKUS, national defense, diplomacy and the future of the Indo-Pacific.
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Follow us on X, @IndoPacPodcast, LinkedIn, or Facebook
Follow Ray Powell on X, @GordianKnotRay, or LinkedIn, or check out his maritime transparency work at SeaLight
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Sponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific