Mike O'Hanlon on 'The Senkaku Paradox'
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2019
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
Benjamin Wittes sat down with Mike O'Hanlon who writes on military affairs and foreign policy, and has been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution for a long time. His latest book is "The Senkaku Paradox: Risking Great Power War Over Small Stakes." The title says it all. It's about the places in the world that are the potentially most explosive flashpoints over the least important U.S. interests. It's about the places in the world where we are treaty-bound to go to war to protect trivia. And, it's about thinking creatively about how to handle low-stakes questions in a high-stakes world.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:33.9 | There could be multiple interpretations of what's going on. |
| 0:36.8 | One could be that China is sort of beleaguered and challenged on multiple fronts because of |
| 0:43.1 | these border disputes. |
| 0:45.0 | Another interpretation is that China just as soon have some kind of a real staff that |
| 0:49.6 | it can dial up and down vis-a-vis China, Russia, Vietnam, because it actually doesn't want |
| 0:54.6 | completely happy relationships with any of these countries and it feels like it's in |
| 0:58.2 | the driver's seat as the more powerful nation. |
| 1:01.4 | The degree of the border dispute is usually 10 kilometers here or 5 kilometers there. |
| 1:06.4 | Again, not trivial if you happen to be one of the people who lives in that zone, but |
| 1:10.6 | in the global scheme of things, not a big deal. |
| 1:13.2 | No one's denying the basic right of the other country to exist or to exist more or less |
| 1:18.2 | in its current shape and configuration. |
| 1:21.4 | You could call these major border disputes in the sense that there are a lot of them and |
| 1:24.6 | that they involve powerful countries. |
| 1:26.4 | You could also call them minor border disputes in that they don't involve a lot of territory. |
| 1:31.5 | I'm Benjamin Wittes and this is the LawFair podcast June 25th, 2019. |
| 1:38.4 | Mike O'Hanlon is one of my most prolific and thoughtful Brookings colleagues. |
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