Cleo Paskal: Inside CCP Entropic Warfare, From Shipping Fentanyl to Bribing Elites to Fueling Civil Wars
American Thought Leaders
The Epoch Times
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2022
⏱️ 64 minutes
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Summary
“The overt, stated goal of China is to be number one in the world in terms of comprehensive national power … In a relative sense, if you’ve knocked [other countries] down, you’re doing better than they are. So this explains, for example, why from a comprehensive national power perspective, it is beneficial to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to pump fentanyl into middle America,” says Cleo Paskal, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Fentanyl “destroys communities. It destroys families. It’s real entropic warfare, creating this fragmentation, disintegration, [and] chaos within a target country,” says Paskal.
Paskal, a leading expert on China and the Indo-Pacific region, breaks down the CCP’s strategy in the region, from promoting division and civil war to buying off the elite of small island nations.
“They learn from Japanese movements and American counter movements in the Pacific [during World War II]—which islands and locations are strategic, where you have to hold, where the deep water ports are,” Paskal says.
“Xi [Jinping] in particular has staked his reputation on delivering Taiwan. But it doesn’t stop with Taiwan.” The CCP’s goal is to “push the Americans out of the Indo-Pacific … and push American functional operational capabilities back to Hawaii,” she says.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And they use unrestricted warfare to disintegrate and weaken those societies. |
| 0:04.8 | So this explains why it is beneficial to the Chinese Communist Party to pump fentanyl |
| 0:10.4 | into middle America. |
| 0:11.4 | Today, I sit down with Cleopascal, a leading expert on China and the Indo-Pacific, and a |
| 0:16.7 | senior fellow at the Foundation for Defensive Democracies. |
| 0:19.9 | They came very close to creating a country within a country in the middle of one of the |
| 0:25.0 | most strategically important zones that the United States has in its Indo-Pacific defense |
| 0:30.6 | architecture, which shows how active the Chinese political warfare is. |
| 0:35.1 | Inside the Chinese regime's strategy, what we know they want to do is push the Americans |
| 0:41.0 | out of the Indo-Pacific and push American functional operational capabilities back to |
| 0:47.6 | light. |
| 0:59.7 | So Cleo, you wrote this really fascinating article for me, China, winning, and tropic warfare |
| 1:04.8 | in the Pacific Islands. |
| 1:06.3 | And when I was reading this, I was thinking to myself, this is a tropic warfare. |
| 1:10.4 | This just doesn't apply to the Pacific Islands, but let's start there because this is your |
| 1:14.9 | real area of expertise. |
| 1:17.1 | So what is going on over there? |
| 1:18.6 | So first, it's not warfare in the tropics, so we have to sort of define the term in |
| 1:24.0 | tropic, EN, tropic, and tropic. |
| 1:27.4 | So a state of entropy is when things sort of start to fall apart or fragment, become chaotic. |
| 1:35.9 | And I think, personally, if you look at how the Chinese Communist Party conducts its |
| 1:41.7 | political warfare and targets countries, part of it is in tropic warfare. |
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