I'm John Bachelor, Cleo Pascal, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy is in Palau, which, if you know where it is, good for you.

It's at the end of a chain that is the responsibility of the U.S. to defend, leading from Honolulu, Hawaii, where Cleo attended the Honolulu Defense Forum, to allies in the East Asia, that would be the

Philippines and Japan and Taiwan and other enterprises.

What's important here is that the Chinese see the same thing we see.

Central Pacific is the chain that you must protect in the event of conflict.

And that right now is the question.

Cleo's on Palau, which is the one abutting Japanese defense zones and the Philippines

defense zones, if I remember my map correctly.

These are vast bases.

Cleo's flown them, so she has the sense of how

far apart everything is. What does Palau need now? The leadership of Palau attended the

Honolulu Defense Forum. Did they ask for anything specific, Cleo? Yes, they did. They desperately want help. And there were some agreements that were signed between the U.S. and Palau on December 23rd that will give some of this. But what they need are people on the ground that can help them investigate and prosecute Chinese transnational crime and

corruption. It's just, there is a full scale political warfare attack on Palau to try to get it

to de-recognize Taiwan and to break its relationship with the U.S. So what's needed is essentially a political warfare rapid response unit that can come in

and help take a look at Chinese operations.

I mean, I'll give you an example.

You know, there's a Chinese guy here who is running charters from Macau into

Palau, and now he wants to expand those into Yap, that this is not kind of a natural

tourism runway for Chinese. There's clearly something something else going on here and they need

to know uh i don't know about the specific case but in general they need to know what's going on

the woman that um is the national security coordinator for palau uh palau and woman um her office has

done incredible work over the last year.

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