Security in the Indo-Pacific with Assistant Secretary of Defense Ely Ratner

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ryan and Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, chatted about, well, it's in his job title. They discussed North Korean intentions, American military posture, deepening cooperation between South Korea and Japan, Chinese military modernization, corruption in the Chinese military, and deterring an attack on Taiwan.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the War on the Rocks on Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs.
0:14.4	My name is Ryan Evans, I'm the founder of War on the Rocks.
0:17.6	Last Tuesday I sat down with Eli Ratner.
0:20.9	Dr. allotted. We unfortunately didn't get to talk much about Aukis or India, two massive topics.
0:35.0	Hopefully Eli will come back on the show and we'll chat more about those things.
0:39.0	But I do think you're going to enjoy this conversation quite a lot. So how does one become a senior defense official?
0:45.2	You know everyone's got their own path and I get asked all the time from folks who are up and coming in the
0:50.9	fields you know if they aspire to a certain position in government,
0:54.4	how should they go about it? And my answer is, you know, everyone's got their own way.
0:58.8	For me, it was to be trying a variety of things.
1:03.4	As my mom always said, try to have as many arrows in your quiver as you can.
1:07.6	And for me that was doing jobs in Washington, going to grad school out in California, living in China, studying lots of different things.
1:18.0	For other people, it is move to Washington, get an internship, hit yourself to a senior person and climb the ladder straight up.
1:26.0	I think there's a lot of different ways to go.
1:28.6	Where were you doing your graduate work?
1:30.2	So I did my PhD out at UC Berkeley and took some time off while I was at Berkeley back here in Washington
1:37.0	did a stint on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So I was in Washington for about a year and a half while I was doing my PhD program, put that on pause, and then spent a considerable amount of time in the latter part of my PhD out in China in Shanghai and living in Beijing as well.
1:57.0	About what year was that you were in China?
1:59.0	I was there in 2007, 2008, so it was a really interesting time to be there because it was obviously in the lead up to the summer Olympics in Beijing, which the government considered really as their coming out party as a great power, and it was a fast a
2:13.9	absolutely fascinating time to be in Beijing but also to be traveling around the
2:18.5	country and saw some really interesting things while I was there if we have a moment on this I can share a story.
2:24.4	Shaped my view about this. One of the things I decided,
	...

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