Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific?

America’s mid-term elections delivered a Democratic sweep. Does Donald Trump change course or double down? In a special in-person episode, Ray Powell and Jim Carouso examine what went wrong for Republicans and what the result could mean for tariffs, Taiwan and America’s allies in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.Their starting point: voters expected lower prices, controlled borders and no new foreign wars. But tariff chaos, the cost of the Iran war and the administration’s immigration crackdown excesses helped turn those expectations into a backlash. Still, rejecting Republicans isn’t the same as embracing Democrats, and this week’s winners now have two years to prove they can provide a credible governing alternative.For the Indo-Pacific, Trump’s response could matter more immediately than the change in Congress. With the ASEAN and APEC summits approaching later this month, Jim expects a president blocked at home to seek a foreign-policy win abroad. What might Trump offer to secure a deal with Xi Jinping, and what could that mean for Taiwan? Could there be an opening for partners in negotiations as U.S. voters demand relief from high prices, or will Trump’s longstanding commitment to tariffs override their concerns?Ray and Jim also consider whether ending U.S. military financing for Israel could leave more money for Indo-Pacific partners. Congress would have to decide; the money wouldn’t simply become Trump’s to spend elsewhere. Meanwhile, Iran presents a harder problem: how does he end the fighting, help bring down energy costs and still claim to have prevented an Iranian nuclear weapon? Wanting to end the war and actually ending it on acceptable terms are very different things.At home, Democratic control brings investigations, possible impeachment and budget confrontations. The 2028 campaign is already taking shape, too. Ray and Jim discuss Vice President Vance’s efforts to separate himself from the Iran war, Marco Rubio’s possible presidential ambitions and the competing candidates and factions seeking to lead the Democrats. They close with Jim’s memory of hosting an election-night party in Australia in 2016, and explaining the wonders of American democracy as bewildered guests headed for the exits.Be sure to subscribe for your weekly Indo-Pacific briefing.Follow us on X, @IndoPacPodcast, LinkedIn or FacebookFollow Ray Powell on X, @GordianKnotRay, or LinkedIn, or check out his maritime transparency work at SeaLightFollow Jim Carouso on LinkedInSponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific

Eight words. That was the evidence: "No growth target. GDP. 9 million jobs target," texted to a friend at Bloomberg minutes before China's premier read out the government's annual work report. For that (but not really for that), Chinese-Australian journalist Cheng Lei spent 1,154 days in Chinese custody.Lei, a former CNBC China correspondent who then spent nine years as an anchor at China's English-language state broadcaster CGTN and now presents for Australia's News24 (formerly Sky News Australia), joins Ray Powell and Jim Carouso from Melbourne to describe how China's security state and hostage diplomacy work from the inside. She traces her surveillance to April 2020, days after Australia called for an independent inquiry into COVID's origins, and recounts being lured into the office with the promise of a meeting about a new show, only to be told she was under investigation for leaking state secrets.What followed was six months of what she calls "solitary with Chinese characteristics": two guards, rotating every four hours, who stood and sat so close they watched her "s**t, shower and sleep." She didn't see a lawyer for nine months. More than a year after her arrest, she says, investigators produced a document retroactively classifying the report. Her 90-minute closed trial drew laughter at a lawyers' conference ("what can you do in 90 minutes?"), while the 18-month wait for a verdict was considered fast; in Ministry of State Security circles it's called "going on a rocket."For her eventual release she credits Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who raised her case 14 times, until her Chinese counterpart asked why she kept bringing up "this individual."Also in this episode: the Chinese diplomats who blocked her from the cameras during Premier Li Qiang's 2024 visit to Canberra and declared the city's Hyatt hotel "our territory"; the pressure on Melbourne's mayor not to attend her play "1154 Days"; why her oldest Chinese friends are now afraid to be seen with her; and her warning that Beijing's new "wolf in sheep's clothing" diplomacy is "a friendship that bites."Her book, A Memoir of Freedom, is now out in Chinese as If the Walls Could Talk, published in Taiwan: "a story that happens in China but cannot be read in China."Follow Cheng Lei on X, @ChengLeiFreedom, or on LinkedInFollow us on X, @IndoPacPodcast, LinkedIn or FacebookFollow Ray Powell on X, @GordianKnotRay, or LinkedInFollow Jim Carouso on LinkedInSponsored by BowerGroupAsia

An AI agent was told to find Australian government health statistics. When it couldn't, it went through a Medicare portal it had no authorization to use. Our guest says that wasn't a cyberattack, and explains why that should worry us even more than if it had been.Heidi Mah, Director of Technology at BowerGroupAsia and co-author of the new report Agentic AI in Asia: The New Cybersecurity Frontier, joins Ray Powell and Jim Carouso to explain what "agentic" artificial intelligence means and why it matters. Unlike the chatbots most of us use, an agent is given a goal and takes "several steps to achieve that goal," improvising when blocked and acting "with very little human intervention."Heidi describes how this lowers the time, cost and skill needed to mount a serious attack, pointing to Anthropic's discovery last November that a hacking group was using a Claude Code tool to run near-autonomous operations against at least 30 targets. The same technology can defend networks, but she warns that even a defensive agent could "go rogue" or leak the vulnerabilities it finds.Jim presses on the supply chain: how does one small vendor's weakness become everyone's problem, and Heidi recalls the 2022 attack on a single plastic-parts supplier that halted Toyota production of more than 13,000 vehicles. India now expects large firms to make sure their suppliers can defend themselves, and a senior minister in Singapore has asked AI companies to notify the government when something goes wrong.The conversation turns to China's new export controls on advanced AI tools and Washington's own temporary restrictions on frontier models. Heidi's test for government is not whether they have the best technology today, but "whether you are able to still access that technology tomorrow." Heidi also discusses whether there is a right way to organize a government for cyber defense and what a "guardrail" looks like.Her bottom line: the risk isn't that AI turns evil. It's that it does exactly what it was asked by whatever means it can find.Be sure to subscribe for your weekly Indo-Pacific briefing.Follow Heidi Mah on LinkedInFollow us on X, @IndoPacPodcast, LinkedIn or FacebookFollow Ray Powell on X, @GordianKnotRay, or LinkedIn, or check out his maritime transparency work at SeaLightFollow Jim Carouso on LinkedInSponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific

The “Quad” – Australia, India, Japan and the United States – insists it isn’t here to make anyone choose sides, while Southeast Asia keeps saying “Please don’t make us choose sides.” So if everyone agrees, why is cooperation still so hard?Arzan Tarapore, Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, returns to preview a white paper built by experts he convened from Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore, asking how those countries would react if the Quad stepped up maritime security cooperation. He explains why the controversial grouping cut its agenda to just four lines of effort at its July 2025 foreign ministers’ meeting, and why a more modest Quad may be a more credible one.The headline findings: the Quad’s capacity-building activities are far more acceptable than the reflexive “Southeast Asia won’t like it” suggests. The partner with the most capacity, the United States, is also the most provocative, while India is the reverse. Experts disagreed on whether bringing Southeast Asian countries into Quad activities is more or less provocative than the Quad acting alone. On geography, meanwhile, there was no disagreement at all: the Indian Ocean is far less provocative than the South China Sea, which is why the Quad’s new Indo-Pacific Maritime Security Collaboration Initiative was placed in the IO.Jim and Ray press: How does ASEAN centrality square with ASEAN having no security mandate? Were early critics right that the Quad was too broad to deliver anything? (“I fear that it was.”) Does “modest” just mean less consequential? Arzan says the bluntest challenge is that four countries are walking a tightrope defined by twelve others to avoid upsetting one. His answer: China’s behavior is a variable, not just a brake, and security itself is a public good worth a little provocation.Ray adds a memory from his years in Hanoi: Vietnamese officials praising a U.S. operation that “poked China in the eye”, then in the same breath asking Washington to please be careful.The conversation also covers why undersea domain awareness shared among Quad members would improve the whole region’s picture of the PLA Navy, how the Middle East’s Combined Air Operations Center can be a model for tiered data sharing among partners with different clearances, and Arzan’s lightning-round verdict on the Modi-Trump quarrel: the strategic rationale is intact, but the damage to trust on the Indian side should not be underestimated.Follow Arzan Tarapore on X, @arzandc, or on LinkedInFollow us on X, @IndoPacPodcast, LinkedIn or FacebookFollow Ray Powell on X, @GordianKnotRay, or LinkedIn, or check out his maritime transparency work at SeaLightFollow Jim Carouso on LinkedInSponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific

China may not need to invade Taiwan to isolate it. Chinese coast guard and maritime militia ships now patrol east of the island, and have begun challenging commercial vessels by radio as though Beijing has authority there. Could these patrols be the opening steps of an incremental, gray-zone quarantine that takes shape before anyone recognizes a crisis?Kwangyin Liu, deputy managing editor of CommonWealth Magazine in Taipei and host of Taiwanology, joins Ray Powell and Jim Carouso to discuss “Broken Chain,” her newsroom’s investigation drawing on 1.8 billion vessel-tracking records.Kwangyin points to maritime boundary talks between Japan and the Philippines as the trigger for the June operation, and considers whether those talks simply gave Beijing a pretext for a move it already intended to make. They discuss how tactics tested around Taiwan’s outlying Kinmen Island are spreading to Taiwan’s Pacific waters, and why non-naval government vessels let Beijing press its claims with less risk of escalation than warships.The investigation drew attention from security specialists but got little public response. Kwangyin describes a public focused on a robust economy and stock market, and resistant to warnings that Taiwan is the world’s most dangerous place. Fishermen near the Diaoyutai (Senkaku) Islands tell her that Chinese patrols they once watched closely have become unremarkable. She recalls National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu’s warning that the worst outcome is a public grown numb to pressure.Kwangyin also explains differences between the governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and opposition Kuomintang (KMT), including unease among younger KMT supporters over their party chair’s closeness to Beijing. What does “hedging” between China and America mean in practice, and how do Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole America’s chip business erode confidence that Washington would help in a crisis?The conversation also covers the growth of AI-enabled influence campaigns and her thoughts on the Trump–Xi summit. Kwangyin closes with why she started Taiwanology: to bring a Taiwanese perspective to international conversations about the island.Be sure to subscribe for your weekly Indo-Pacific briefing.Follow Kwangyin on X @kwangliu, LinkedIn, and listen to Taiwanology here.Follow us on X, @IndoPacPodcast, LinkedIn or FacebookFollow Ray Powell on X, @GordianKnotRay, or LinkedIn, or check out his maritime transparency work at SeaLightFollow Jim Carouso on LinkedInSponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific