Toshi Yoshihara

“And so I decided really at the very last minute to not take the LSATs and instead take the GREs to go into grad school for IR, to study on international relations. And so in many ways, learning what I hated helped to reinforce and to understand what I truly loved. And so from that, I continued to do strategic studies, went to a PhD program at the Fletcher School, again, just maintaining my focus on China's military.”

“This whole idea of the First Island Chain in part started with an important post-war lesson after the Pacific War, which was a lesson of never again. Never let a local power achieve dominance over a key region or a key piece of terrain where that hegemon would be able to acquire the resources and the capabilities to project power to threaten the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Of course, we were thinking at the time, at the end of the Pacific War, about how an isolationist United States essentially allowed the danger to gather in Europe and Asia, that eventually led to a global war.”

“The way I think about the First Island Chain is what my former collaborator and longtime friend Jim Holmes and I have described as a great wall in reverse, which is that it's not China's great wall, it's our great wall where we have these sentinels lined up from a north to south axis. I think it's this foundation that we're able to thus far maintain a favorable balance of power.”

“And the threat that we face, if we were to try to intervene on behalf of Taiwan, is this idea of a reconnaissance strike complex, which is basically a marriage of modern, sophisticated sensors with long-range precision strike systems. And that's, of course, the large family of ballistic and cruise missiles that China could launch from land, from the sea, from the undersea, and from the air. And this complex is designed to sort of go after our way of warfare that we've developed over the past few decades, and that that way of warfare has specific vulnerabilities.”

“And we are going through what's been called the terrible 20s, where our military forces through the 2020s and into the early 2030s, will be their oldest and their smallest in recent decades. So we're dipping into this, what's been called a capability or capacity trough, or a bathtub, whatever metaphor we choose to use. And the question for us is sort of how deep and how long that trough is going to be.”

“And the problem with the First Island Chain, and perhaps it's something I should have mentioned earlier, is that what makes the First Island Chain so important is that there really isn't anything left east of the First Island Chain, right? So like, if you compare the strategic geography of Maritime Asia to Europe, Continental Europe has a lot of strategic depth, right? So it runs from Poland, arguably, all the way out to the UK. With the First Island Chain, you fall back east of Japan, and that's it. It's thousands of kilometers of ocean.”

“China is in many ways a cooperative adversary to the extent that the actions that it's taking, particularly its peacetime coercive actions, have really raised awareness of the China challenge down the First Island Chain, whether it's their probing against South Korea in the Yellow Sea or whether it's the coercive actions against the Japanese around the Senkakus or the increasingly regular maritime and aerial exercises in the Sea of Japan and now in the Northwest Pacific on Japan's Eastern facing part of the First Island Chain.”

“So when my son asked, I don't remember how old he was, eight or whatever, he said for Christmas he wanted a toy aircraft carrier. So my wife went on Amazon, just ordered the first aircraft carrier she saw, toy aircraft carrier. And he got it for Christmas. He opened it up and it was a Lao Ning. And it was made in China. Inside the box was a map of the Nine Dash Line in English, declaring that this was Chinese, the Nansha Military District, and the Lao Ning will defend it.”

“I should have clarified that I do think that we ought to include South Korea as an element of the First Island Chain. It's clearly a peninsula. It's surrounded by sea on three sides. I think it ought to be considered to be very much integral to that architecture. But I think you do raise an important point. I think this is an issue that the National Defense Strategy also identifies, which is this problem of simultaneity, which is that, would it be possible that the United States focusing on a Taiwan scenario might create an opportunity for opportunistic aggression by North Korea against South Korea?”