Beijing’s Hidden Strategy to Place Assets inside American Territory | Cleo Paskal

There's actually one place in America where Chinese nationals can come without a visa and almost nobody is talking about it. I'll give you the example of one guy. He set up a birth tourism industry where at least 200 Chinese came in and gave birth to little Americans. Then he illegally went to Guam, where the military base is. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party has spent decades expanding its influence across strategic Pacific islands, areas critical to U.S. defense in any Taiwan conflict. Two of them are U.S. territories. Three others are currently bound to Washington through compact treaties, giving the U.S. military exclusive access. But Beijing is determined to flip them. You're starting to see much more across the region the use of medical access and medical care as a component of Chinese political warfare. Today, I sit down with one of the world's leading experts on the region, Cleo Pascal, a senior fellow at Compass Point Institute in Palau. There's a Chinese medical team now currently in the United States of Micronesia providing medical care to U.S. veterans and getting whatever information they can out of them in the course of their treatment. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Cleo Pascal, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. It's great. Great to be here. Good to see you again. Thank you. Recently, there's been a lot of discussion about birth tourism in America. There's actually one place in America where Chinese nationals can come without a visa, and you are deep into understanding what's going on there. Tell me what's happening. The U.S. has 50 states and five inhabited territories. One of them is the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, which is just north of Guam. It's contiguous to Guam. In fact, Guam is the southern of the Southern Mariana Islands, and then this is the Northern Mariana Islands. It's an island chain. It's the newest part of the U.S. It joined the U.S. in 1976. When it joined in 1975, the year before, was the time when the Vietnamese refugee situation was at its peak. Guam had about 100,000 Vietnamese refugees on it, waiting to be sent to other parts of the United States. When it joined, it said, we'd like to join. They had a referendum, but we're a little bit concerned that our population of tens of thousands might be overwhelmed, and so could we please have some control over immigration and our labor laws, because also they had a very different economy. That initial control over immigration was designed to keep the population stable in the context of the Vietnamese refugees, but then evolved into a situation where they started letting in Russians and Chinese without visas for tourism reasons. The visa-free entry for the Russians was revoked for national security reasons, but the Chinese one wasn't. So the Chinese continued to come in without a visa, creating all sorts of issues. I would just say right up front, the justification that's still used is they need the Chinese tourists, but the Korean tourists have vastly outnumbered the Chinese tourists for at least a decade, even though the Chinese tourists don't need a visa. So the tourism argument doesn't really make that much sense to me. In fact, what they're actually saying is that we want the Northern Mariana Islands to appeal to the Chinese that can't get a visa to the rest of the US. So their unique sales point from a tourism perspective is, you can't get a visa to Michigan? Come to CNMI, where you don't need a visa for the two weeks. And not everybody stays in CNMI when they arrive there. So this has contributed to a whole vast array of problems. And I'll give you the example of one guy who's now in jail. He came in without a visa through this visa waiver thing in 2016. He overstayed his tourist visa. He set up a birth tourism industry where at least 200 Chinese came in and gave birth to little Americans. Then he started dealing with methamphetamines. Then we think forged documents went to Guam, where the military base is. And this is a consistent problem where you have people coming in from China without a visa, and then illegally going to Guam because they're not supposed to leave the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, but it's only 60 miles to Guam by boat. And we've seen that happen in the hundreds, including showing up on military bases. And that's what he did. And then he went to the neighboring country of Palau and was involved in a murder, and was finally extradited back to the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, where they threw him in jail for importing methamphetamines in liquid form in lava lamps. So this is a guy, started off with the visa waiver, sold meth, brought in birth tourism, was involved in a murder. None of that was caught in the US. That was only caught once he was in Palau, and then now he's in jail. But it gives an idea of how not just this is coming in and bringing in criminal activity, but it's contributing to birth tourism and it's contributing to insecurity in neighboring countries and potentially compromising the security of US military installations in Guam. I want to dig into CNMI a little bit more. But just on the issue of Palau, what does Palau think of this waiver program and the fact that people like this have made it to Palau? A lot of the criminal activity that they're seeing in Palau comes into them through the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands and through Guam. So the US is seen as a security risk to its neighbors in the region. Palau has better border security than the US does in the same location, in the same part of the Pacific. This is also particularly relevant, I think, because the Chinese Communist Party has a particular interest in Palau for a whole suite of reasons, but especially because Palau recognizes Taiwan. Yes. So Palau is just the other side of the Philippines. So if China wants to break through the first island chain and hit the second island chain, they can squeeze the Philippines from both sides if they have ability to do so from Palau. Palau is highly strategically important, which is one of the reasons why the US is engaged in things like putting in an over the horizon radar installation there. But also, this is a location where a lot of Americans died. So if you know your World War II history, Palau is the Battle of Peleliu. Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands is the Battle of Saipan and Tinian. We know from what happened just over 80 years ago that this is an area of high strategic importance if you're dealing with an aggressive Asian power that is trying to get across the Pacific. With a massively growing Navy, for example. For sake of argument. But the vast majority of these people that are getting the visa waiver are not like this criminal, presumably. Presumably. But the thing that is confusing to me is this has become a major issue on the Hill. So there have been multiple congressional letters. So this visa waiver thing is strictly the Department of Homeland Security. It can be changed in a stroke of a pen. And throughout multiple administrations and multiple congresses, there have been letters, congressional letters to Secretary Mayorkas, Secretary Noem to ask for this loophole to be closed. And there is a persistent push to keep it open. And that's perplexing to me. I don't understand why. Because the argument that is consistently presented is it's necessary for tourism. But as I've said, that's not reflected in the numbers. Chinese do not need visas to go into CNMI now. And yet still, they're being outnumbered by tourists from Korea. So why not work on tourism markets from Japan? Why not work on Cabotage, which would allow other carriers in the region to hop from one US administration to another so that they can jump from, for example, CNMI to Hawaii, which would increase tourism from other locations. There are all these other solutions. Ferry from Guam to CNMI to increase tourism within the region. There are all these other answers, but those aren't the ones being pushed. It's consistently letting in Chinese without a visa. If you're an American Thought Leader's regular, you know we spend a lot of time digging into the powerful forces trying to reshape America and the Western world. Everything from censorship and central banking to the growing economic pressure coming from Beijing. I'm not a financial advisor, but in uncertain times like these, owning something real, something you can hold, can provide stability and peace of mind. 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A lot of focus on Taiwan for obvious reasons. But what's less discussed is if China moves on Taiwan in whatever capacity, it has to take Guam and the Marianas, Northern Mariana Islands, off the risk map, put it that way. These are places that are maybe, for example, the U.S. is only 1,700 miles from Taiwan. That's how far Guam is from Taiwan. How far is it from Hawaii, for example, just to give perspective? It's an eight-hour flight from Hawaii to Guam. And it's about four hours from Guam to Taiwan. The U.S. is very close. And if China's going to move on Taiwan, it has to make sure that Guam can't respond and CNMI can't respond. Part of that is, I think, likely going to be cyber. I think they would prefer not to kill Americans. That's the lesson learned from Pearl Harbor, is once you kill Americans, then it becomes, you know, the American people very rightly want to do something about it. So if they can just disable Guam and CNMI and the military installations there, and by time, then that may be preferable. To do that, it helps to have people in place. And so we're starting, we are seeing, you know, Volt Typhoon is already in the cyber, it's already affecting their critical infrastructure. But having people on the ground in place to do other things would be very helpful. And you're seeing, for example, in the CNMI, the woman that ran the Bureau of Motor Vehicles selling U.S. driver's licenses to Chinese, which is the first step towards a whole bunch of other things. And the birth tourism issue is already coming into play. So the first fentanyl case in Yap, which is in another country, but right nearby, was an ethnic Chinese guy who was born in CNMI. So he's now an American citizen, which makes it much more difficult to prosecute. And you certainly can't deport him because he's an American. So you're starting to see that criminal activity overlapping with targeting of critical infrastructure and getting people in place that if I was the PLA, I would want to have already in case something was moving on Taiwan. And there is, you know, clear interest from the U.S. military and obviously Guam, where there's a base, but also CNMI, from what I'm hearing. Yeah. So there's a massive rebuilding of the Northfield site, which is where Northfield on the island of Tinian was the busiest airport towards the end of World War II in the world, because that's where the B-29 bombers were taking off from to hit Japan, including ultimately the Enola Gay boxcars. That's where those flights took off from, because they can range Japan. It's only a little bit over a three-hour flight from Tokyo to Tinian or Saipan today, which is good for tourism. Those fields are being rehabilitated, and the main runway in Tinian is being rehabilitated, and there are increasing exercises being done in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands. In Guam, you're also seeing a substantial shifting of some of the resources from Japan to Guam, and a building up of capabilities. Because if you're the U.S., you have Hawaii and you have Guam, that's eight-hour flight, right? If there is a battle over Taiwan, that is really far to get supplies across the center of the Pacific. This is what caused the problems during World War II, that distance. The buildup in Guam is critical, and I would argue you're going to have to see the ability to manufacture as well, because you can't ammunition and things like that. The supply chains are really, really long. I don't know if we're going to talk about it, but countries like Palau, Faroe Seas, American Asia, Marshall Islands are in the middle between the two, and if the Chinese can make that a hellscape, for want of a better term, than being able to resupply, the Americans sitting on that front line becomes increasingly difficult. So it's increasingly important, it's increasingly contested. The U.S. has this open door to China, right into that location. Well, and there's been a lot of Chinese money coming in to CNMI as well. So this is where you start to realize how kind of off the chart crazy the situation at CNMI is. A Chinese casino set up in CNMI opened in 2014, 2015, and in the first three months of operation, Chinese casino, Chinese operated, most of the money coming from China, they had $5.3 billion worth of money passing through that casino in the first three months, and billions more after that. In three months. Okay, so spell out to me what that means, please. So Bloomberg did an article about it in 2018, very good article, where they interviewed people who know how casinos work better than I do, and their assessment was, it's very difficult to see how this isn't a money laundering operation. Maybe it's not, but it certainly is a very peculiar thing. And of course, as you know how the Chinese Communist Party works, they're not about to let billions of dollars of money out of the Chinese economy unless they've got some sort of at least okay with it. And this actually coincided with the cracking down on some of the Macau casinos. And so this seems to be another way of getting money out of the country at the very least. And there were some very high-profile Americans associated with that casino as well, including the former director of the CIA, James Woolsey, was on the board of the casino. Louis Freeh, former director of the FBI, was one of the advisors. As soon as the Bloomberg article came out, Louis Freeh cut ties, as did several others. But it gets into this linkage between what happens in the Western Pacific is actually not staying in the Western Pacific. A large part of it is about what happens in Washington. Everything that I'm describing, this keeping the loophole open, the easy access for the Chinese, the lack of prosecution around a lot of these issues, comes back to Washington, I would argue, happy to argue. I remember there's a case where the former governor was impeached. And there's just a whole lot of dodgy activity around that. Where to start? The governor that you're talking about is Ralph Torres. The people of Siena Mai, Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, never wanted a casino. They had referenda where they voted against a casino. He went on a trip to China, and he came back a big supporter of the casino. And helped put in place legislation that helped the casino get stood up. And again, according to the same Bloomberg article, the people associated with the casino did quite a few land deals with his relatives and stuff that just doesn't look good. And if I were him, I would like it investigated and cleared up. He was the governor up until 2023. There was a lot of ARPA funding and boost funding, COVID-related funding, over a billion dollars that went into Siena Mai at that time. There's on the record available invoices for things like sanitation services at $4,000 an hour associated with this funding. Very peculiar, very large amounts of US taxpayer money that was never properly accounted for. And when a new governor came in, in 2023, Governor Arnold Palacios, he immediately, publicly, in congressional hearings, requested investigations. He went, he said, please, I've never seen an American government official, elected official, say what he said, which was just look at all of our books, rip it apart, let the chips fall where they may. And Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands is a very small place. It's about 40,000-50,000 people. Everybody's related to everybody. They're very tight. He knew that if an investigation happened, it's very likely some of his relatives might get caught up in it. But he was so concerned about the future of his community that he was willing to do it. And no investigation was ever brought to completion. He sent a letter in April of last year, of 2025, saying that he had proof to give of high-level corruption in the government. And he wanted that letter to go to Director Kash Patel of the FBI. But subsequently, that investigation didn't come to anything, and he died suddenly in July of 2025. Ralph Torres had an investigation into him domestically recently. The assistant attorney general who was charging him in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands cut a deal with him where Ralph Torres paid $20,000, $25,000 in fees and then was given immunity for anything he did while in office. That was such a clearly bad deal that that assistant attorney general was subsequently fired, but the Senate of the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands has now hired him as legislative. That same fired assistant attorney general has now been hired as legislative counsel for the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands. And Ralph Torres is positioned to run in the 2026 gubernatorial elections in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands. So I would just say there is this cloud of perception of corruption over the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, which dates back to the garment factory days and Jack Abramoff and all that sort of stuff. And it is impeding investment. Jack Abramoff, you mean like sort of lobbying efforts around facilitating cheap labor? I just want to kind of flesh out a little more what you're... So to go way back to our discussion from about 15 minutes ago, when we talked about how they had control over their immigration, one of the things that happened was they used that control over immigration and labor to set up mostly Chinese linked garment factories, which had very poor working conditions. And this was before China entered the WTO. So by setting up these very poor condition garment factories on US soil in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, they could stamp it made in America and send it right into the US market. And there were human rights investigations into it and attempts to shut it down. And one of the most prominent of the companies involved had links to China. And you can see it on YouTube. The main guy involved, Willie Tan, talks about how Tom DeLay, who was very influential in Congress at that point, wasn't going to be pursuing that legislation. And the implication was that Jack Abramoff, who is this lobbyist who subsequently ended up in jail, was brokering some sort of lobbying to impede that sort of investigation. So for decades, this is the 90s, for decades, you have influential people within the CNMI knowing how to use lobbyists who... This is all legal. I mean, except for some of the other stuff Jack Abramoff did, which got him incarcerated. But using lobbyists is legal to affect legislation that would advance their interests. That's been going on in CNMI for decades. And it seems to be continuing to this day. Basically, you're saying that the Chinese Communist Party has been affected. So how is the Chinese Communist Party involved in all of this? So you know what it's like. It's always hard to get the fingerprints, although I think we've got something in Solomon Islands, which we can talk about after. What I can say is that CNMI has been enacting policies that are not in the best interest of US national security. But if I was in MSS or the CCP, I would think that this is a great thing, and I would like to see it continue. So let's talk about the Solomons. There was a pretty significant election in the Solomon Islands. And again, let's start by just geographically locating the Solomon Islands for people, the reality there. This is not an American territory. This is a separate country, but with a lot of Chinese Communist Party influence documented. But remarkable election. And so just tell me a little bit about this. Right. So the Solomon Islands is where the Battle of Guadalcanal was, for example. So a lot of Americans died there. It's off the coast of Australia. So now we're talking about the southern Pacific. In 2019, it switched from Taiwan to China. And there was remarkable resistance on the ground by some who were very concerned about what the full force coming in of Chinese Communist Party operations would do to their societies. And one of the incredibly courageous people involved in that, you interviewed a man called Daniel Sudani, who was the premier of one of the provinces in the Solomon Islands. And they put out the Aukey Communiqué, A-U-K-I, which is the name of the capital, which put a moratorium on CCP-linked businesses operating in the province. And there was a whole list of things that they were concerned about. And one of them was freedom of religion. They didn't want a systemically atheist operation operating on the ground there. That was a very serious cognitive warfare impediment for the Chinese Communist Party, because it called them out in a way that people in Washington wouldn't. But also, it was an operationally difficult thing for them, because they, for example, were putting in Huawei towers everywhere else in the country, but they couldn't put them in in Tamaleita. And so they went after Sudani. One of the first things that happened was he needed an MRI. He got sick. He needed an MRI. There's no MRI in the country. The national government said, okay, well, we'll fund your trip to go get an MRI if you let the Chinese in. Chinese Communist Party. And he said, no. Just to give you an idea of his sense of principle and courage, he ended up through friends in India getting to Taiwan for the MRI. But in the meantime, I think this is the first case this happened. The federal government took away his elected seat because he wouldn't recognize the one China principle. So this is the first time I've seen that Beijing had a veto over a democratically elected representative. They law-fared him. They flipped his legislature. And his health was very severely affected. And throughout it all, he had a man who you also talked to called Celsus Talafilu by his side, who is one of the best geostrategists I know. Daniel Sudani fell ill again recently, I think partially the stress from the law fare. And he went into kidney failure and he went into the local hospital. There was only one dialysis machine. It was a machine donated by China and run by a Chinese doctor. And he didn't get dialysis. And he passed away. That was the state of how things were in Solomon Islands. I would argue that this is an exporting of the social credit system that you see in China. And you're starting to see much more across the region the use of medical access and medical care as a component of Chinese political warfare. So, for example, in the Federated States of Micronesia, there are a lot of U.S. military veterans that can serve in the U.S. military. The U.S. VA is supposed to provide medical care and isn't. And so there's a Chinese medical team now currently in the hospital in the Federated States of Micronesia providing medical care to U.S. veterans and getting whatever information they can out of them in the course of their treatment. Sounds kind of outrageous. Does the sound of what you just said, does that sound outrageous? Yeah, it's wrong. I mean, it's morally wrong and it's strategically wrong. So back to the Solomon Islands, the point is that things have gotten very bad. And you would often hear people say, oh, the Solomon Islands is lost. And I know the people of the Solomons. And my argument was always, it's only lost when you give up, when you quit. And the people of Solomons didn't quit. And there wasn't an election. What happened was there was a reconfiguration, there was a vote of no confidence, essentially, in a reconfiguration of the existing parliament. And a new leadership came in under Prime Minister Matthew Walley. And his special advisor is Celsus Talafilu. And his current minister or secretary for development is Peter Canellaria, who was given the Courage Award from the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China last year, is now a minister in their government. So it's a transformation. And they'll be in Washington this month. We're in July. And there's this little window where the Chinese Communist Party response isn't quite in full action to cut the legs out from under them, where they're trying to create all sorts of other relationships. They'd like to set up an embassy in Washington. They're going to be going to Japan. They visited Australia, Papua New Guinea. They're reaching out. I have to be very clear, because this is often presented as, are they pro-China or are they pro-the US? They are pro-Solomon Islands. And if you are pro your own country and your own sovereignty, you don't want to be associated too closely with the Chinese Communist Party, because their goal is to create vassal states. So what they're trying to do is bolster their own sovereignty through a whole new range of relationships. And if you expect them to openly say aggressive things about China, you don't know their operating environment. They are a very delicate situation. So their foreign minister recently just went to China, for example. They're going to try to increase their sovereignty, but they're coming to US. So far, they're not being met by Rubio or Vance or the president. This is a prime minister of Solomon Islands. They can't move like a big country could move. They're doing the best they can in the circumstances they have. But expecting them to make stands that the US doesn't make is unrealistic. I mean, the president of the US went to China. And so how can you expect them to just suddenly make these very open statements? They are trying to increase their own sovereignty for the sake of their own people and not to act as a proxy for Western interests or anything else. So it's very important to understand how it looks from their point of view. But this is, to me... Yeah, but they understand what it means to be under the CCP umbrella. So it sounds like what you're telling me. Celsus Talafilu was a key component of the group that put together the AUKEY communique in 2019, which was such an incredibly powerful and eloquent statement about the dangers of letting the CCP into your economy and society. So they certainly know it. But when, for example, Daniel Suidani was ill, the Australians didn't help him. They know that they can be left hanging very quickly if allies' economic interests are involved. And the bottom line is that someone's going to have influence there. I guess it's a question of who steps up to do it. Well, they're going to... So we tend to think of the US and China as kind of being the only options. But for example, the fact they're going to Japan is very interesting. And perhaps Philippines or India or whatever, but basically the free world. There are a lot of different components of the free world that can be helpful. I mean, it's a country of less than a million people. They don't need that much, but they do need protection. And a lot of this is happening in the cognitive warfare domain. Okay, explain what you mean by that. So one of the things that she has said is on the record, we've got the quote, is that if you can break down people's mental resistance, then everything else becomes a lot easier. So that's kind of the cognitive, getting into your head. Like resistance to having the CCP dominate. There's that, and seeing the world from the CCP. So the one that drives me a little crazy is the Thucydides trap stuff. Yeah, that drives me a little crazy too. And what I do when China... I'll spell it out, right? So that China is the rising power and the US is the declining power. I mean, that's the subtext of saying Thucydides trap. Yes, and that it's natural that a rising power would militarily overtake the declining power. So whenever China does something like that, I always go, what about India? Because India is also a rising power. I mean, in fact, it's got a larger population than China. Its economy is growing faster than China's. It is, in all those other respects, a rising power, but it's not putting together a military designed to destroy the United States. So the logic makes no sense. And that's the same for that century of humiliation. India had like three, four centuries of humiliation, if you're talking about colonization, and they're not using it as an excuse to attack the United States. I'll just mention this because we were talking about Japan. There's a big reason why, let's see, China didn't suffer a lot more at the hands of the Japanese as the United States. And they often don't mention that. Because it doesn't help with the cognitive warfare. Right. Yeah. So I apply the India test to a lot of those grand statements about Chinese aggressive inevitability, Chinese Communist Party. And they fail on all those counts, right? Yeah, so that's cognitive warfare. Getting into your head to, first of all, justify the behavior, aggressive behavior of the Chinese Communist Party, and to lower your resistance to their influence operations. And we saw a kind of very interesting case of cognitive warfare in Solomon Islands recently, when the exact same article with the same title and the same content appeared in two different Solomon Islands newspapers under different bylines. They call it the smoking gun. Yeah, I read the piece. Yeah. And what was the article about? It was about how Palau needed to de-recognize Taiwan, especially in advance of the big Pacific Island Forum meeting coming up in Palau. But it was specifically a Chinese Communist Party talking point. The authors in both cases had vague anglophone sounding names, and the byline said they were from Australia. So I talked to the editor from one of the newspapers. One of the newspapers, Solomon's Star, is known to have taken Chinese money. On the record, known to have taken Chinese money. The other one's a very good newspaper or news site. So I asked them what happened. They said, well, actually, what happened was they got this anonymously submitted from a WhatsApp number in Australia. They didn't say this, but I know that they often need content, right? Because if you're a newspaper or news site operating in the region, it doesn't pay much, if anything. And so getting content sometimes is difficult. And if it looks like it's vaguely about the region, they might have lower standards for including it. And the Chinese know that. So they flood pieces into the kind of smaller regional newspapers that then feed up into sometimes larger ones. Sometimes the story gets picked up. I suspect also sometimes if they do it enough, it'll feed into AI type narratives and things like that. And that's what happened to them. Part of the cognitive warfare. Yeah. And as soon as they found out what had happened, they pulled the piece. But the other news site has since published two other pieces by the same non-existent person, again, on Chinese talking points. So again, sort of feeding into that cognitive domain. So the point of that is we've got this never give up, right? The good guys in the Solomon Islands never gave up. They've got a small window. But even now, with that small window, there's such penetration on the ground by Chinese operations that they're getting into the local media and using Solomon's local media to attack countries that recognize Taiwan and other parts of the Pacific. We've talked about how you view these small islands as a kind of, because the populations are so small relative to say the United States, the Chinese influence operations are a lot easier to see in a sense, right? Because they're much more acute in a sense, not sort of spread across the giant population. So this is kind of a window into not just what happens over there, but what's actively happening over here. Yeah. And more than that, I mentioned that the articles in the Solomon's papers, news sites were about this upcoming Pacific Island Forum meeting in Palau. That'll happen at the end of August, beginning of September. The Pacific Island Forum is a very important target for the Chinese Communist Party. They've repeatedly tried to manipulate it. The last meeting was actually in the Solomon Islands under the last pro-China administration. And they put pressure on that government to block the visas of the Taiwanese. And then in order to justify blocking the Taiwanese from coming, the Solomon Islanders basically blocked everybody else from coming, all the development partners from coming. So the US couldn't come, India couldn't come, nobody could come, but the Chinese were already on the ground. So it basically cleared the way for the Chinese to have a large amount of access during the Pacific Island Forum meeting in the Solomons. We've seen this pattern of focus from China on trying to ensure that Taiwan doesn't have a role because three of the Pacific Island countries recognize Taiwan, Palau, Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu. So we have this very unusual situation where we know where there will be an attack. We know that there will be a multi-pronged political warfare attack, which can include cyber, cognitive warfare, all sorts of stuff, on Palau around the timing of the Pacific Island Forum meeting at the end of August, beginning of September. This is a good place to start to practice how to counter it. We know there's an attack. What are we going to do about it? It's a country of 18,000 people. Palau is a country of 18,000 people. Let's put together our counter-political warfare team to try to protect this close ally of the United States, country that recognizes Taiwan. We know there's going to be an attack. It's a good place to see how the operations work, but let's sandbox how to counter those operations so that when they happen in other places, we've already refined the techniques and the approaches for doing that. I'm just recalling my interview with President Panuello, the former president of the Federated States of Micronesia, who was telling me how the Chinese ambassador had the gall to be telling him who he should be allowed to talk to and not, as he was at prominent Japanese function, if I recall. It's astonishing the gall that some of these officials have. There have already been direct threats made by Chinese officials to leadership in Palau about how they should be hosting this Pacific Island Forum meeting, including threats of retaliation if they invite Taiwanese officials over a certain rank, for example. Palau has a phenomenal president who is going to do whatever he wants to do that he thinks is in the best interest of his country. There have been apparently some semi-public fiery exchanges already, but the Chinese Communist Party officials are already threatening economic retaliation and other things. We know there's going to be targeting. We see it happening. I think that probably there's some protection on the cyber front, but the cognitive warfare domain is something that the U.S. really hasn't been focused on. This used to be something during the Cold War that the U.S. was quite good at, and the advantage that the U.S. has is it has truth on its side. Actually, this is something that makes its way through Congress and then doesn't really get very far, but one of the things that petrifies the Chinese Communist Party is the idea that the financials of its leadership would be exposed. How much money does Xi Jinping and his family actually have? That sort of thing is cognitive warfare domain stuff, and in that context, truth is on our side. It's on the side of the free world. So exposing all of this, which used to be what journalism did, is the best defense. And we are hearing that something like that is in the pipe, right? Hopefully, yeah, because the first piece of legislation produced a very anodyne report that was largely a kind of a rehash of an old Bloomberg article, so hopefully there's a better investigation that will be done. This stuff isn't hard, but you see it all the time. So if you don't do it, even the best laid plans get twisted. So the president of the Senate of Palau, so it's a country that recognizes Taiwan, the country we're talking about. The president of the Senate was designated by the State Department recently. Designated means that he and his family can no longer travel to the U.S. specifically for being tied to Chinese corruption operations. So you'd think that that would be beneficial for the side of good. However, the case files were never transferred to the Attorney General in Palau, and no charges have been laid. So he is in a position to say, this is just a political hit job from the U.S. If you think I'm corrupt, prove it. And so it makes it, instead of being a story about going after corruption and cleaning up the systems, it becomes a story about how the U.S. is trying to use the State Department to punish people who are standing up to U.S. policies. I mean, these files could still be transferred. Yes, and they should be transferred. I mean, if you're serious about it, you coordinate across government. This is the block and build strategy that we've talked about, where if you want to build up sovereignty and resilience, you need to block what the Filipinos call a legal course of aggressive and deceptive activity, specifically from the Chinese Communist Party at the same time. You need to do both at the same time. And the U.S. has tried to do this in Palau. At the end of December, it signed a series of agreements where it said it would send investigators to help the Palauans go after corrupt activity. It hasn't quite happened yet, but they said it would. And at the same time, it helped stabilize the pension fund and promised to build a new hospital. So there is an understanding within U.S. government of what needs to be done, but it hasn't quite got there yet. So now it's the follow through is the key. It sounds like in a whole suite of areas that we've just been discussing. I think there's definitely an understanding of what the problem is, but the connective tissue is missing or weak. Is it just simply that because the U.S. has really ignored this area for too many decades, and we almost forgot to fund the compact, maybe just quickly tell me what that is. So there are compacts of free associations with three countries. If anybody asks you which three countries are the closest allies of the U.S., it is Palau, Federated States of Micronesia, and Marshall Islands. Contiguous center of the Pacific, from Hawaii to the Philippines, more or less, are these three countries. This is where so many Americans died during World War II in battles like the Battle of Peleliu, Kwaj, Kwajalein. This is an area of such strategic importance to the U.S. that they were given these compacts of free association, which are agreements the U.S. has with nowhere else. These are citizens of their own countries. They're Palauan, Micronesian, Marshallese, but they can freely live and work in the U.S. They can get off a plane in Oregon and get a job. They can study at in-state tuition rates anywhere they want in the U.S. Their mail is considered domestic mail. The FAA runs their airports. And the U.S. has strategic denial over that whole area so they can say no other militaries can dock here. And the U.S. can put in bases, which they have done in places like Kwajalein, and which they're starting to do in other places. Like they're not bases, but there's an over-the-horizon radar installation in Palau. There are Marines currently now on Peleliu rebuilding the airfield on Peleliu. That's how close these relationships are and how critical they are to U.S. strategic infrastructure. You can't get to the first or second island chain unless you can get across the center of the Pacific. And this was every U.S. president from 1961 to 1981 was in the Navy. And all of them except Carter served in the Pacific during World War II. They knew people who died in the Pacific. They didn't want it to happen again. And so, and along with George Bush Sr., who also served in the Pacific, they created this very unique arrangement, these compacts of free association with these three countries. The financial component and services component comes up for renewal every 20 years. It was up for renewal recently. And as you said, it just, it kind of languished. To the point where they actually expired and had to be put into continuing resolutions until finally some great congressional staffers got it all figured out and got it renewed. But it was a very close run thing. So yes, even in that context, there hasn't been an awareness of the Pacific. And including the Americans in the Pacific, in Guam and Siena Mai, which is how you end up with these huge gaps and awareness of what's going on in places like the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas, where people can arrive, Chinese can arrive without a visa and all that sort of stuff. So bottom line, as we finish up, you just mentioned this lack of awareness about U.S. territory far, far west. Why is this important to America? Just briefly spell it out. Okay, so these are not accidental pieces of geography. It is, the U.S. is difficult, it's difficult for the U.S. to accrue parts, new parts of the U.S. There has to be fundamental strategic importance to that piece of geography for not just the president, but Congress to say, yes, we're going to make this part of the U.S. Greenland aside. But in fact, not Greenland aside, because that is part of the thinking that goes into Greenland. And so Guam came into the U.S. as part of the Spanish-American War. McKinley made it very clear that was because first, the U.S. needed a place to refit on that side of the Pacific for the Navy to base. And so he took the Philippines and Guam, but he didn't take the center of the Pacific. And this Commonwealth of Northern Marian Islands became part of the U.S. in 67 was offered that membership. As in fact, were all of those compact countries, Palau, Federese, Micronesia, Marshall Islands, were all offered to join the U.S. because of their strategic importance. But there was an awareness since the McKinley era. And in fact, since before, and it was part of the annexation of Hawaii, also in 1898, that if a hostile foreign power was in the Pacific, mainland U.S. wasn't safe. So at the time, it was the European colonies. It was the Spanish, to some degree, the French in the 1850s. Then it was the Japanese. Now it's the Chinese Communist Party. So there is an awareness that mainland U.S. is not safe without a secure perimeter on the other side of the Pacific. And if you look at an actual map of the U.S., the easternmost point is the U.S. Virgin Islands, northernmost point is Alaska, and Alaska is a Pacific story. If you look at Billy Mitchell and the whole kind of Air Force thing, control over Alaska is very much control over the Pacific approaches. The southernmost point of the U.S. is American Samoa. And the westernmost point is Guam and the Commonwealth under the Mariana Islands. So if you do those points on a map, if you've got U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and Marianas, Alaska and American Samoa, you can see the heart of the U.S. strategically is actually around Hawaii. It's the Pacific. And that was the conceptualization that was very clear very early on to American strategists that the economic development is going to be to the west and the economic, that those sea lines of communication need to be secured through naval power and you need positioning on the western side of the Pacific for that to be possible. And so the Chinese know this. The Chinese know that the U.S. vulnerability is the center of the Pacific, which is why Admiral Keating testified before the Senate in like 2008 that some Chinese official had told him, why don't you take Hawaii east and we'll take Hawaii west and don't worry about it. We'll keep that whole zone secure, right? Ignoring the Americans sitting in CNMI and Guam. The strategists and political leaders of the past didn't want us to ignore the center of the Pacific. That's why they invited Guam and CNMI. Well, they took Guam, but they invited CNMI to join the U.S. so that there would be this kind of marker to say this is all the U.S. All of this needs to be secure in order for any of it to be secure. So those Americans that are sitting in Guam and CNMI, they know everything I've just told you. They know that they are on the frontier of American security and prosperity. And many of them have been through hell and their families have gone through terrible things. Guam was occupied by the Japanese. The people of CNMI had to hide in caves during the American bombardment. They have witnessed war on their own soil, which is now American soil, in a way most Americans never have. They know what it means. And they are, many of them, fighting for their own independence and security in the face of this onslaught that's coming in through political and cognitive warfare. And they need and deserve all of the help that the rest of the U.S. can give them. Well, Cleo Pascal, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Thank you very much. Always good to be here. Thank you all for joining Cleo Pascal and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.