Lawfare Archive: Hunter Marston on the South China Sea
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 19 April 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From October 25, 2024: Hunter Marston, PhD candidate at the Australian National University and Southeast Asia Associate at 9DashLine, joins Kevin Frazier, Assistant Professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and a Tarbell Fellow at Lawfare, to explore the economic and geopolitical significance of the South China Sea. Hunter leans on his extensive knowledge of Southeast Asian politics and history to paint a comprehensive picture of why the next Administration should pay close attention to this geographical hotbed of political tension.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Marissa Wong, Internet Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare for April 19, 2006. |
| 0:18.3 | The ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran and the United States has sparked concerns that China may use the United States actions in the Gulf to justify similar tactics in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. |
| 0:29.9 | For today's archive, I chose an episode from October 25, 2004, in which Kevin Frazier and Hunter Marston discuss the economic and geopolitical |
| 0:40.2 | significance of the South China Sea and what it means for the future of U.S.-China relations. |
| 0:53.1 | It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Kevin Frazier, senior research fellow in the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin and a Tarbell fellow at Lawfare. |
| 1:03.2 | Joined by Hunter Marston, Ph.D. candidate at the Australian National University and Southeast Asia Associate at 9-dash line. |
| 1:11.7 | If China were to invade Taiwan tomorrow, most Southeast Asian states and most of the South |
| 1:17.5 | China Sea littoral states would try to stay out of such a conflict. The Philippines, because |
| 1:21.5 | it's a U.S. ally, would actually be directly implicated in such a conflict. |
| 1:25.5 | Today we're discussing the economic and geopolitical significance of the South China Sea |
| 1:30.1 | and why the next administration should pay close attention to this geographical hotbed of |
| 1:35.6 | political tension. |
| 1:37.6 | All right, Hunter, can you help situate our audience by just giving us a sort of atlas of the South China Sea. |
| 1:46.8 | Who are the bordering states, or to use the proper term, who are the littoral states around |
| 1:53.2 | the South China Sea? And where exactly are we when we're thinking about geography? |
| 1:59.6 | Yeah, the South China Sea is a major causeway for international trade, commerce, |
| 2:06.6 | and also contains a number of islands and different states. |
| 2:13.6 | You mentioned littoral states, so there are a number of countries that have competing maritime claims in the South China Sea, including Malaysia, Brunei, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and even Taiwan, which has a stake in these South China Sea claims dating back to the 1940s. |
| 2:36.9 | Roughly a third of international trade transits through the region and there is something like three trillion or more than three trillion in |
| 2:42.3 | trade passing through the region annually. Okay. So hotly contested area if we're talking about |
| 2:48.2 | trillions of dollars of trade and competing claims to this |
| 2:52.6 | area, for those folks who haven't dove into maritime law or extensively studied maritime policy, |
... |
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