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Ely Ratner is a leading defense intellectual on China issues. During the Biden administration, he was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, and before he was confirmed, he directed the Pentagon’s China Task Force. In those capacities, he helped put together the administration’s strategy of building what it called a “lattice work” of defense relationships across the region to try to counter China’s growing military power. Before joining the administration he was executive vice president of the Center for a New American Security, a leading defense think tank. He joined CNAS after a stint as deputy national security advisor to Joe Biden during his vice presidency. Most recently, Ratner has joined The Marathon Initiative, a national security think tank that focuses on great power competition.

Q: When you look at what Trump has done on defense, how much has he picked up from what Biden was trying to do when it came to China?

A: To the extent that we’ve seen an explanation of the Trump administration’s defense policy or strategy in the Indo-Pacific, it came during Defense Secretary Hegseth’s speech at the recent Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore [on June 3]. It included some ‘America First’ rhetoric about pressing allies to do more on defense spending and on defense in general. 

But the policy part of the speech, where he was articulating the kinds of things that they’re trying to do in the Indo-Pacific, was in near total continuity with the Biden administration, right down to the categorization of areas of emphasis. He talked about force posture, strengthening our partners’ capabilities, working on the defense-industrial base, which are areas where we focused.

If you go back even further to when you came into office, how much were you picking up from the Trump administration? 

The major innovation of the first Trump administration was not on defense policy per se, it was a shift in strategy. The 2018 National Defense Strategy was a really important document. It declared that the United States was going to shift from a policy focused on counterterrorism and nation-building efforts in the Middle East and Afghanistan toward a greater focus on great power competition. That declaratory change in and of itself was profoundly important and much needed. 

The actual implementation of that strategy in the Pentagon was very incomplete. When I came into the Pentagon in 2021, I had the opportunity to run what was called the China Task Force. I spent about three months with a team comprised of members across the Pentagon. We did hundreds of interviews to understand where the building was as it related to the China challenge.

The dominant conclusion was that people had gotten the message that it was time to shift the focus, but the department had not yet turned in a way that was synchronized, coordinated and focused on the China challenge.

When I look at the arc of U.S.-China relations, Trump clearly made a huge difference in the turn from engagement to what is now estrangement. But it seemed to me that the shift started to be pronounced at the very end of the Obama administration with the Rose Garden incident [where Xi Jinping promised to end cyberespionage of U.S. firms], the buildup in the South China Sea, and the administration turning down some Chinese efforts to buy U.S. chip firms.

I might put it a bit earlier. The Hillary Clinton intervention at the ASEAN Regional Forum [in 2010] and some of the heightened competition in the South China Sea was occurring before the end of Obama’s first term But you’re right [about Obama 2.0]. That period is when the contradictions and discontinuities between where many people thought China’s development was going to go and what we were seeing were too much to avoid.

Not enough people are waking up in the morning and saying to themselves, ‘Okay, I’ve got to get to the office because the United States is in intense competition with China, and we need to do what we have to do.’

Of course, some of that tracks with Xi Jinping coming to power and then starting to implement a much more assertive policy. China was abandoning its hide-and-bide strategy, and was more willing to be assertive with the global financial crisis, and the United States tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

They believed that U.S. decline was happening faster than they thought it was going to happen, and they were prepared to rise and take what they view as their deserved place in international politics maybe sooner than they expected. They hit the accelerator through the 2010s and that sent a bit of a shockwave through Washington.

Still, it has taken time. There is a difference between the recognition of the China challenge, the articulation of the challenge by national security leaders, and the degree to which it has gotten embedded in our national security strategies.

There also needs to be urgency and focus, and resources brought to bear in terms of implementation. That’s still very much a work in progress. In Washington, a lot of people understand it in their head, but they don’t feel it in their guts. Not enough people are waking up in the morning and saying to themselves, ‘Okay, I’ve got to get to the office because the United States is in intense competition with China, and we need to do what we have to do.’

When I look at U.S. efforts toward China, actions always seem to get sidelined. China does lots of things that the U.S. finds problematic, such as the buildup in the South China Sea. But then Putin sends 100,000 troops over the border in Ukraine. So where are you going to focus? [The interview took place before the U.S. shifted resources to the Middle East and bombed Iran.]

Strategic distraction has been a real problem. If you look at the amount of attention and resources that the United States places around the world, it has not been balanced. The Indo-Pacific and China have not received the focus that they should, given their importance.

It is the nature of what you described. With China, it’s not a terrorist attack that is big and dramatic. It’s not an invasion — at least not yet. It is hard at times to galvanize [action], because things are happening incrementally. But at some point, it’s going to be too late or we’re going to find ourselves in a really disadvantaged position. 

Beijing has been deliberate in trying to avoid heightened confrontation with the United States. They’re very tactical in the gray zone, whether it’s around Taiwan or the South China Sea or on technology. They try to gain strategic advantage without doing it in a way that incites a crisis. 

We see that very deliberately from a military perspective. With Russia-Ukraine, or with the Houthis, Beijing is either deliberately turning a blind eye or is supporting and sponsoring some of the malign activities that are leading to U.S. distraction. That is certainly intentional.

In your recent Foreign Affairs article, you talk about the need for a Pacific Defense Pact, and you name the U.S., Australia, Japan, and Philippines as the core countries with others to join later. Why do you think that’s necessary?

The dominant question in the region is, how can we maintain peace and stability? We have had a model for that since the end of the Second World War, which has been largely focused on U.S. bilateral alliances, the hub-and-spoke system as it’s called, with the United States at the center. Increasingly it is clear that that model is outdated. It was designed at a time of U.S. military supremacy, when the China military challenge was nowhere on the map, and when our allies and partners had relatively little to offer besides the defense of their own countries. 

All those factors have changed. The United States has a very powerful military, but it doesn’t have primacy like it once did in the western Pacific. We’ve also seen the China challenge growing to be quite intense, and we now have allies and partners [in the region] that are among the most advanced, wealthiest democracies in the world. 

That has led an evolution in regional strategy that is sometimes described as a lattice work. But it is really more of a networked approach of overlapping and complementary institutions, whether it’s AUKUS [a submarine-building and technology effort of the U.S., Australia and the U.K.] or the U.S.-Japan-Korea trilateral arrangement, the Indo-Pacific Quad with India, [Japan, the U.S. and Australia], and all the work we were doing with the Philippines, Japan and Australia to try to make deterrence greater than the sum of the parts.

From a defense and security perspective, it is very incomplete. The kinds of things that you need for true combat-credible deterrence over time require more than informal, ad hoc arrangements. You need to start formalizing these mechanisms so that you can do command-and-control, planning, and exercises so militaries can operate together and, if necessary, fight together.

Based on my experience in the region, Australia, Japan, and the Philippines are the most ready given the very close strategic alignment they have on the China challenge, the degree to which they are cooperating with one another in unprecedented ways, and the degree to which they are stepping up in their own roles in U.S. alliances. We certainly could consider others over time, with South Korea as a likely candidate. But that would require the Koreans to make a pretty significant change in their own defense policy, which heretofore has been almost exclusively focused on the DPRK [the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — or North Korea].

How would it differ from NATO with its requirement that one come to the aid of the others?

The principle of collective defense would be the same. The ultimate goal would be to have the group defend the other individuals in the group.

The differences are that NATO is a pan-regional organization that encompasses almost all of Europe. In the case of the Indo-Pacific, the aspirations to do something like that have always faltered because of the diversity of interests, perspectives and countries in the region. It would be very difficult to think of a collective defense arrangement that would be meaningful and include countries as different as India, countries in Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and others.

So, I have thought much more about a core group that is focused and has the will and capability. Frankly, that core group of Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States encompasses a lot of the deterrent power that you’d want for something like this anyway.

Even with existing bilateral alliances in the Indo-Pacific, treaties often speak of initiating consultation before next steps and shared defense. With a Pacific Defense Pact, you’d be taking the steps necessary to have a foundation of military cooperation and interoperability, such that in the event of a crisis, leaders could decide how they wanted to respond together or not. 

People worry, ‘Well, if I’m signing up for this, does it mean that I’m automatically going to be pulled into a conflict I don’t want to be part of?’ The answer to that is, ‘No, there would still be decision space for your leaders, but your leaders would have options and choices because of all the foundations that have been built for military cooperation.’

Are you concerned about a reaction from China where maybe they’d move up the date by which they try to merge or take over Taiwan?

It should be expected that China would react very badly to something like this. They would certainly try to coerce members not to take these kinds of steps. We would have to prepare to deal with the coercive potential of the PRC.

The key question for critics who might raise the concern you’re raising is, what would be the trajectory in the absence of taking a step like this? The trajectory that Beijing has been on, and which we should all expect to continue, is one of rapid military modernization and unabated ambition in terms of achieving their regional ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.

It’s not as if we took our foot off the gas pedal, then everything would be fine. Everything is not fine, and we are now on a path toward instability, crisis and potential conflict unless we take more proactive steps to strengthen deterrence. I get the point that this would make Beijing unhappy, and they would respond. But the counterargument is that not taking this step is an invitation for conflict and instability. On balance, moving forward with something like this is both necessary and is the better of the options.

As you say, one way China might try to counter this idea would be through economic coercion. Do you see this grouping as having a role when it comes to economic coercion or is it strictly military?

There are broader opportunities for U.S. allies and partners to work together on PRC economic coercion. That’s something that we worked on quite a bit during the Biden administration. We looked at the tools that the U.S. government has and worked with partners to build their own resilience. Given the ways in which Beijing uses its markets, the United States helping countries be insulated from that pressure is really important. In some ways, the question about how the United States thinks about secure supply chains and critical minerals is in response to PRC economic coercion.

On this topic, an America First economic policy that’s primarily focused on onshoring into the United States and tariffing our partners — even close economic partners like Japan and others, Australia, South Korea — is clearly in tension with efforts to try to develop a more collective, resilient supply chain. That is one of the contradictions that are going to have to be worked out. 

When you say contradiction, I assume you mean Trump is talking about bringing everything back to the U.S.. But that’s unrealistic, and you have to trust an alliance system to deal with problems like critical minerals and technology.

Yeah, exactly. If you look at critical minerals, those must be mined somewhere and processed somewhere. We can work toward developing some of those capabilities in the long term in the United States, but we are going to be relying on Australia and Japan and South Korea and others for some of these critical capabilities over the next few years. We have to find a way to not shoot ourselves in the foot with tariffs.

What is India’s role in all this? They work together with the U.S. in the Quad, but they buy a lot of oil from Russia and have a history of trying not to be too aligned with one side or the other.

India’s role writ large in U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific is enormous. In the context of a collective defense pact, India has a multilateral, multipolar approach to foreign policy. Part of their orientation is toward Western democracies. They want to work with the Quad, and they have very close relationships with Japan and others. On the other hand, they very much have a developing country, global-South orientation that they express in their diplomacy and in their relationships around the world, including with Russia. 

As we close our own borders, not only are we losing influence with some of our regional partners, but China is earning market share around the world, whether it’s in electric vehicles or batteries or other high tech domains.

Expecting them to break out of a policy of non-alignment has never been the goal for those of us who work on India policy. The goal has been to integrate them into our efforts and ensure that as they develop and try to achieve their own aspirations for great power status that they do it in a way that aligns with what the U.S. is trying to do.

India is fundamentally important, but I don’t think about them as serving an initial member in an arrangement like this.

As I have watched U.S. policy in Asia, I wondered about the role of Rahm Emanuel. He was an effective ambassador to Japan [under Biden]. But he was also trolling Xi Jinping constantly. How much of that was part of a plan or how much of it was just Rahm being Rahm?

Well, Rahm is always being Rahm. From my perspective, his communications were quite effective, and his willingness to shed light on malign behavior of the CCP or pure propaganda was effective. 

I was talking earlier about how we’re still, as a government, only starting to put together something that may look like a focused, coordinated, synchronized, competitive strategy with China. One of the areas where we are far behind is in the information and narrative space. 

The PRC has been incredibly effective in their propaganda and the way they exploit, coerce and shape media around the world. PRC narratives around China’s role and Taiwan and the Chinese economy, even when completely fabricated, are quite dominant in parts of the global South in particular, and globally in general. We have not gotten our act together institutionally or strategically to think about how we compete in the information space.

For a long time, there was a perspective that information is free, and we should take a laissez-faire approach, support journalists, and let the public square adjudicate what’s real and what’s not, and what’s good for America. In the 21st century information environment, that’s not going to work.

The question becomes, how do we do a better job of telling our story, of highlighting things that we think the PRC is doing that is contrary to the interests of countries around the world. Rahm was doing that effectively, but it was not part of what should have been a whole-of-government or synchronized approach.

Now we’re seeing the closing of the Global Engagement Center at the State Department and the Voice of America. Even the minimal efforts that were underway to try to compete in this space have now been shuttered. It’s all well and good to have the right policy, but how are we communicating it? 

Often, we would spend an enormous time in the interagency process, as we should, hashing through what is the right policy, what is the right strategy, but the communications wrapper around that — describing what we’re doing, helping people understand what our intentions are — was often sprinkled on as a last-minute thought. It should be a central piece of strategy and policy in the first place.

When we were talking about AUKUS and the various initiatives in Asia, how involved was President Biden? Obviously, there’s a lot of controversy at the moment about how much people knew about his physical and cognitive decline, and you go back with him a long way.

I was over at the Pentagon, so I was not in the White House meetings with the president on these issues. What I did see is that he was certainly supportive of and participating in some of the key leader-level meetings that got these things over the finish line. That includes the Camp David leader-level trilateral that he held with the Japanese and the Koreans which was fundamentally transformative for that relationship. It became the reference point for everything that happened afterward. And he participated in the leader-level engagements in the AUKUS framework, and the Quad.

In your Foreign Affairs piece, you were talking about the military. But as you know, Asian countries want market access to the U.S.. I thought the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework was pretty tea. Is there a need for stronger trade relationships, and what used to be called free trade deals? 

My article was primarily focused on a collective defense pact. This was not a proposal for a new 360-degree diplomatic and economic alliance. But for the United States to continue to lead and be effective in the Indo-Pacific, we need to be leading not just on military, but also on economics and technology. I was in meetings during the Biden administration, where even defense ministers would say, ‘This defense cooperation is great and let’s continue it, but where is the United States on trade and economics because that’s the lifeblood of the Indo-Pacific.’

With secure supply chains, we were talking about the contradiction between onshoring and the need to work with allies and partners. In some ways, that’s a microcosm of the bigger question you’re asking, which is how do we have fair, politically sustainable economic policies that are advancing the interests of the American people and that the American people support and yet do it in a way that maximizes our interests globally? 

The United States is a big market, but it’s only 350 million people out of several billion. When we make cars, and when in the future we make advanced semiconductors, we’re going to want to sell those things outside of the United States. We benefit from not only countries being able to access the U.S. market but by being engaged in global commerce. 

The way the Trump administration has gone about it has been quite blunt. We’re going to need a more nuanced approach. Let’s make sure that we have fair and equitable trade relationships, but I don’t think driving toward autarky in the United States is the answer.

As we close our own borders, not only are we losing influence with some of our regional partners, but China is earning market share around the world, whether it’s in electric vehicles or batteries or other high tech domains. Of course, strategists in the Biden administration understood that challenge. But trying to square domestic policy and domestic politics with a regional strategy — we have not yet found an elegant solution there.

Your article came out a month after one by your fellow Biden alumni Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi, which also called essentially for strengthening alliances in the Pacific. But now you have an administration that is fighting with everyone. Do you think Trump’s erratic policymaking and pronouncements alienate other countries, or do his actions actually encourage them to try to get closer to the U.S. to try to insulate themselves?

Trump’s style, and the administration’s approach, are having multiple effects, some of which are beneficial to the United States, and some of which are going to make it harder for them to achieve what they want to achieve.

On the glass-half-full side, pushing countries, as Secretary Hegseth did in Singapore, to increase their own defense spending, not just be reliant on the United States for security is a good message. We had started that under the Biden administration. Despite the Trump administration’s or the president’s skepticism toward alliances, in the Indo-Pacific we have seen defense and security relationships continue to deepen, even as the political and economic environments have become relatively tense. For now, Asian partners still want the United States to be present; they still want alliances to be strong. They are continuing to work together. And they’re hoping that the economic and diplomatic issues don’t become so severe that they start undermining defense and security efforts.

On the glass half-empty side, a lot of what we’re asking allies and partners to do, whether it’s increasing defense spending or playing a more significant role in regional security issues, takes political capital for leaders to accomplish. These things are hard politically. They’re willing to do that in an environment where they believe the U.S. commitment is firm.

But if you turn that on its head so that cooperating with the United States becomes more challenging politically, that will hamstring defense efforts. If the economics become quite severe and there are real trade standoffs, not just with China but, say, with Japan or South Korea or Australia or others, eventually that will start weighing down the defense relationships.

Switching gears, what do you make of the ongoing shakeup in China of its defense establishment?

What we know is that the PLA is suffering from severe corruption issues. This was an important theme of Xi Jinping early in his terms and it has emerged again and resulted in a series of very senior-level dismissals and arrests. That’s an indication of how severe the problem is.

Corruption investigations are some of the most tightly held, secretive efforts within the Chinese Communist Party, so when we see them that means we’re seeing something that’s probably very late in the process, and we’re probably seeing just the tip of the iceberg.

The fact that defense ministers, and senior officials on the CMC [Central Military Commission] have been rolled up is quite notable, and it has to be creating doubts in Xi Jinping’s mind about the competency of his PLA bureaucracy. That should be helpful for deterrence from a U.S. perspective. When you start losing senior officials, it slows down efforts within those institutions and creates a chilling effect where officials are more cautious because they’re worried about getting ensnared.

I doubt they’re done yet. The PLA is a really corrupt organization that has thrived on corrupt practices. If Xi Jinping has determined that that’s not good enough for him, then there will be more rooting out to come.

Do you think that makes it less likely that China would try to act militarily to take over Taiwan, either through a blockade or invasion?

On balance, yes. An institution under siege in a corruption scandal is going to have a harder time getting ready. That doesn’t mean we should be complacent about Xi Jinping’s ambitions toward Taiwan, but versus a world where none of this is happening, yes, it should build time and caution into the PRC system.

In your recent article you cite former CIA director William Burns talking about Xi Jinping wanting the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, although Xi hadn’t decided to do that. When you testified before Senate Foreign Relations in 2023, you said, ‘We can get to the end of the decade without them committing major aggression against Taiwan.’ In other words, 2030 seemed to be your drop dead date.

I’ve never had a drop dead date. The mantra that we used during the Biden administration was that deterrence is real, and deterrence is strong, and we need to do everything to keep it that way, and a PLA invasion of Taiwan was neither imminent nor inevitable. We took a number of steps during the Biden administration, including updating our force posture, making major investments in relevant capabilities, developing new operational concepts, and working in unprecedented ways with our allies and partners to create a condition where China’s goal of a short, sharp, low-cost invasion of Taiwan at acceptable cost was not possible. You often heard defense leaders say, ‘We want Xi Jinping to look out the window each morning, consider the costs of conflicts and say to himself, ‘Today’s not the day.’’

Taiwan policy becomes one of going as fast as you can in terms of strengthening Taiwan’s defense and resilience but doing it in a way that’s not so fast that you trip wires [and Beijing believes] its window of opportunity is closing.

That was the condition when we handed off the baton to the Trump administration. What we need now is heightened attention, heightened resources, heightened focus to maintain that deterrence into the future. Can we do that through 2027? Yes, if we have the right policies, not only military, but economic, diplomatic and with foreign assistance. And yes, beyond 2027 if we continue forward. It’s going to be difficult, but it’s possible. The collective defense pact I described in the Foreign Affairs piece would be an essential feature going forward if we can patch it together.

You have mentioned Hegseth was pretty tough on the Taiwan question recently, but it’s fair to say that Trump seems less concerned about Taiwan than the Biden administration was. He looks at Taiwan, with its large trade surplus with the U.S., as just another Asian country that’s ripping off the U.S.. How concerned are you that whatever the Pentagon says, the Commander-in-Chief doesn’t seem to put a lot of focus on Taiwan and may even see Taiwan as a chip to get a deal with China.

When the head of TSMC, Taiwan’s major semiconductor company, came to Washington in part to talk about the major investment that they’re making in the United States, it was encouraging that President Trump talked about the centrality of Taiwan from an economic perspective. He did not dismiss the strategic significance of the island. He also has not — and the administration has not — talked about Taiwan or other allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific with quite the same language he has used with European partners, saying we’re not going to defend them if X, Y, or Z happens.

The policy of strategic ambiguity to date remains intact, but it needs to be carefully managed. There are two challenges that make maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait so difficult. One is if the United States, whether it’s the Pentagon or the President, signals that the United States is unlikely to come to the defense of Taiwan. Then Xi Jinping’s calculation may change, and he may believe that he can execute a short, sharp, low-cost invasion to force Taiwan to capitulate. Potential U.S. intervention is a major part of what deters him.

The other challenge is on the flip side, if the Trump administration or a future administration mismanages the politics of trying to maintain the political status quo across the Taiwan Strait. If the Trump administration, for instance, started talking about ‘strategic clarity’ [meaning the U.S. would clearly defend Taiwan in case of invasion] or introduced certain types of U.S. weapons into Taiwan, or created military arrangements with Taiwan that signal to Beijing that the United States was overtly supporting Taiwan independence, then it is possible that Beijing would believe that they had a closing window of opportunity. In that case, they could be willing to take aggressive action, even if they believed that they weren’t as ready as they would like to be from a military perspective.

Taiwan policy becomes one of going as fast as you can in terms of strengthening Taiwan’s defense and resilience but doing it in a way that’s not so fast that you trip wires [and Beijing believes] its window of opportunity is closing.

One last question. In 2020, you co-wrote an article saying that the U.S.-China relationship isn’t, ‘a new Cold War.’ Isn’t it though? It’s not the same as with the Soviet Union, obviously, but isn’t ‘Cold War’ now a reasonable way to describe the relationship between the U.S. and China?

To a lot of people, saying we’re in a new Cold War means that the U.S.-China competition is exactly like the U.S. competition with the USSR. Yes, there are some similarities, but there are also a lot of differences, including the integration of the global economy. Is the United States in a sustained competition with the PRC? Sure. But China is a much more formidable competitor, and the global landscape is quite different economically and technologically.

Are there lessons to be learned from the Cold War with the Soviet Union? Yes. I just think that labeling this a Cold War does as much harm as it does good in focusing the mind and helping us be clear what our priorities are.

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