Ely Ratner - Does Asia Need a Collective Defense Pact?

**Mike Green** (0:00)
Welcome to The Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Mike Green of the United States Studies Centre in Sydney and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Welcome back to The Asia Chessboard. I'm Mike Green. I'm joined by Dr. Ely Ratner, a policy scholar practitioner who's had some of the most important jobs on Indo-Pacific security you can get in Washington. He's now a principal at The Marathon Initiative, which we'll ask him about, and a senior advisor to Clarion Strategies. And before serving as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific in the Pentagon during the Biden administration, he was at Center for a New American Security. And Ely, a lot of questions for you. Really appreciate you coming on.

**Ely Ratner** (0:51)
Yeah, great to be here, Mike.

**Mike Green** (0:52)
So why don't we start with, I think a lot of listeners who follow security in the region will know The Marathon Initiative, but tell us a bit about it for those who might not.

**Ely Ratner** (1:00)
Sure. The Marathon Initiative is a 501c3 nonprofit think tank. Some folks sometimes ask me if we're a consulting firm or not. We're a think tank that was founded by Wes Mitchell and Bridge Colby, who were two alumni from the first Trump administration, who saw the turn toward great power competition in US foreign policy and wanted to establish a new think tank to really focus on strategy and thinking about the future of US foreign policy in an environment of great power competition and the need to be really thinking through seriously strategy and trade-offs. And so that's who we are, but it is at its heart a small startup think tank.

**Mike Green** (1:43)
Well, for listeners who don't know the Marathon Initiative, it's generating some of the more important transformational thinking about strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific. So let's get at it. I want to ask you in a little bit about your foreign affairs piece, the case for an Indo-Pacific pact. But first, you're out of government now a year, and it sometimes, I found when I was in government, it's a little bit harder to understand the state of play when you're in the middle of it. You almost have too much information, too much intelligence, too focused on tactical negotiations about where bases go. Sometimes when you've been out for six months a year, you get a much clearer picture. Let's start with that. Marathon focuses on strategic competition, you focused on it in the Pentagon. What's your 30,000 foot assessment of where we are with strategic competition with China? Where are we doing maybe better than people think? Where should we be really alarmed?

**Ely Ratner** (2:34)
Well, from a US foreign policy perspective, I do think we are well behind the curve still, and that there remains a massive say-do gap between what our strategy documents say about this being the challenge of our time, what is often heard of as the one or the most significant bipartisan consensus on China, in Washington being a willingness or a desire to compete with China, and then what the actual policy looks like. I think if you looked hard across the spectrum at what one would call our China policy from defense to trade to technology to everything we are doing here at home, you would not find a strategy optimized for long-term great power competition that reflected the real urgency of the challenge. So I think we made a lot of progress over the last few years. I think Congress has done a few things that have been important, but by and large, I would describe where we are today.
I think there has been maybe an intellectual acceptance of the nature of the China challenge, but I don't think Washington really feels it in its gut in the way that's going to be required to do what we need to do to transform this. In the meantime, it certainly appears that Beijing is charging forward in terms of trying to build its own position in the Indo-Pacific in globally, militarily, technologically, politically, diplomatically, economically, and I feel that we're not yet where we need to be to compete effectively.

**Mike Green** (4:05)
Tell the truth. Did you say things like say do gap before you worked in the Pentagon? I love that phrase.

**Ely Ratner** (4:11)
Well, that was one of the phrases that came out. The first thing that I did in the Pentagon before I got confirmed, I went in on Inauguration Day literally, and ran a China task force for the secretary that was really not a big picture assessment of US strategy, but a down and in assessment in the Pentagon of where was the Pentagon really on the China question. We had the 2018 National Defense Strategy that had declared the shift from counter-terrorism to great power competition. But the task of the task force was to understand, well, really how far had that gone? And I think it was this notion of a say do gap that there had been declaratory change, but on the ground, there had been shifts and pockets of excellence, but we were nowhere near the kind of comprehensive, synchronized, coordinated strategy that we needed in the Pentagon. And I think that's true, again, across the government. If you look at some of the very initial documents out of the Biden administration, the Interim National Security Strategy document that came out very, very early on, and then repeatedly in the National Defense Strategy and the National Security Strategy, there was a line that appeared and reappeared again and again and again, which was that China is the only country in the world with both the will and increasingly the capability to overturn the international order in a way that would be deeply inimical to US interest. And yet, I don't think the urgency, the attention and the resources always reflected that.