This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 2nd, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How the US handles various potential military engagements in Asia is of critical importance, but it's not clear what defense posture the U.S. will take as, for example, China exerts more pressure on Taiwan.

Eric Gomez, Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, discusses how restraint gets applied to military strategy in Asia.

The US has a military presence around the world.

We have security guarantees that we've extended to countries around the world. We have security guarantees that we've extended to countries around the world.

And we have specific strategies with respect to countries around the world that we deem to be

either threats or less than friendly. So what has been the

US defense posture with respect to Asia, you know, since World War II.

Yeah, so against China specifically,

the, well, the operational plans are all classified, so I don't know what those say.

But in general, the overarching parts of US Defense Strategy in Asia have emphasized

the ability to operate without much interference or as

relatively free and as flexibly as possible, pretty much as close to China's coast as possible.

This often entails having the ability to do what's called command of the comments, right?

Air and Sea, especially the ability to seize command of them, prevent others from

achieving dominance of it, namely China, and that being the thing

that enables all their rest.

So that's the foundational block upon which a lot of US posture and strategy is built around and

this has been reiterated by the Trump administration and the Biden administration

when they come to their documents about the national

defense and national security strategy.

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