Lawrence Dressler
U.S. Coast Guard Cmdr. Karl Mueller, right, Coast Guard advisor to South East Asia, speaks during an Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing (IUUF) exchange at Cam Ranh International Port, Vietnam, July 10, 2024. Coast Guardsmen and U.S. Navy Sailors, assigned to Coast Guard Legend-class cutter USCGC Waesche (WMSL 751), came together to discuss issues caused by IUUF with their Vietnamese partners, and how to counteract them. The Coast Guard has operated in the Indo-Pacific for more than 150 years, and the service is increasing efforts through targeted patrols with our national security cutters, fast response cutters and other activities in support of Coast Guard missions to enhance our partnership.
The essay “The Missing War: Why the 2025 NSS Needs a Political Warfare Strategy to Defeat the CRInK in the Gray Zone” by Col. David Maxwell advocates for a more explicit political strategy to confront China as was done in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. But China presents an economic challenge as our peer that the Soviet Union never did. Our economies and supply chains are interdependent, and China has weaponized rare earth and pharmaceutical choke points for negotiating leverage. As shown by President Trump’s recent compromise to allow the export of Nvidia H200 AI chips in exchange for China loosening restrictions on rare earth elements our economies are still too interdependent to fully duplicate the confrontation with the Soviets. The challenge now is to align our gray zone activities with the economic focus of the new National Security Strategy (NSS) to strengthen the homeland, both territorially and economically, increase support from our allies, and shift the focus to maritime domains and great-power competition in the Indo-Pacific and Western Hemisphere.
No comments:
Post a Comment