Shangri-la Dialogue with Ankit Panda

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Ankit Panda 0:21

And I'm Ankit Panda, the Stanton Senior Fellow with the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C.

Jeffrey 0:28

Yes, listeners, Ankit and I are doing a special version of the podcast because we are here poolside at the Shangri-La Hotel at the IISS. Shangri-La dialogue. That's right, and it's a beautiful day by the pool. It's really quite lovely, although you may hear some birds chirping, and you can almost certainly hear the lovely waterfall behind me as the water crashes down.

They got coy the size of cats in that thing.

Ankit 0:57

Yes, those are very large, and you can see them from the gym, which I love to do every time I work out here.

Jeffrey 1:01

They're very motivating. It's really quite lovely. So Ankit and I have spent the past two days at the Shangri-La Dialogue, which is IISS's large Asia-Pacific, Indo-Pacific, I guess is the phrase we now use, centered dialogue. It's been kind of an interesting thing. What did you think?

Ankit 1:25

Yeah, so, you know, I've been coming to the Shangri-La dialogue since 2017, Jeffrey, and it's always interesting to kind of look at the themes that rise to the top. You know, this is Arms Control Watch, which is why we talk about nuclear weapons, right? Because traditionally, the only time we heard about nukes at Shangri-La, which obviously takes place in Singapore...

In Southeast Asia, where nukes really aren't part of the conversation. It would really be the Korean or the Japanese defense minister talking about how terrible North Korea is and all the things that they're doing to violate UN Security Council resolutions. But that's changed in recent years, right? And I think this year, we continue to see that. Some concern about US-China arms racing dynamics, a lot of concern about AUKUS.

Certainly, that's something we keep hearing about. But this is your first show, so what was your impression?

Jeffrey 2:08

Yeah, I mean, I really was struck by how little discussion of nuclear weapons there was because I go to like fully nuclear focused meetings. And I don't think that's really a fault of the dialogue here. That's just an expression of my bias. You know, the things I heard about were AUKUS. Just the general decline in U.S.-China relations, which I think interests people in a broad, general way, and that obviously has a pretty big nuclear component to it, and the potential Chinese accession to the protocol to the Southeast Asian nuclear weapons free zone.

Those are the three kind of big areas where I noticed conversations starting to happen.

Ankit 2:58

Yeah, that's right. And of course, we got the obligatory mentions of North Korea, right? South Korean Defense Minister Lee Jong-seop pretty much dedicated his entire speech to convincing Southeast Asia of why they should care about North Korea and implement UN Security Council sanctions resolutions, which has traditionally been a focus. Of the Korean and the Japanese defense ministers when they do come to Shangri-La.

We, of course, I think, noticed a difference, right? A new defense minister for China, the last defense minister, General Wei Fenghe, was the last chief of the Second Artillery Corps before China set up the rocket force. So last year, actually, he did get asked a question about the Chinese nuclear buildup. He didn't deny that a buildup wasn't happening, which I thought was pretty notable given that We were hearing about windmills at the time.

But this year, unfortunately, General Li Shengfu, his first international speech at Shangri-La, he got no questions on the nuclear buildup from the audience. Although Secretary Austin got a question after his speech on China's nuclear buildup. And his answer didn't really give us much to go on, just that China should come to the table and talk to the United States.

Jeffrey 4:05

Yeah, I think if you've never been to this dialogue, one of the really interesting things is how large and diverse this region is. I spend almost all of my time focused on Northeast Asia, and I think I came here thinking primarily about the U.S.-China relationship. I mean, that's the lens through which I saw this dialogue. But I forgot that India and Pakistan come.

And so there's a whole South Asia component to it. And really, because we are in Singapore, this is really an ASEAN-focused conversation. And so the South China Sea... Factors, like, much more in the discussion here than I really was anticipating.

Ankit 4:50

Well, I mean, what I would say is that I think for Americans, what's really important about a place like Shangri-La is sitting in D.C. or even sitting on the West Coast and reading the American press, hearing about great power competition... It really can seem like everything that's happening in Asia is really due to the United States and China pushing their weight around.

But I think when you talk to the Southeast Asians especially, I mean, you really do get a sense for the agency some of the countries in this region have, right? I mean, as Americans, we might not agree with it. Like I think Indonesian Defense Minister Prabowo's speech certainly ruffled many feathers when it came to his assessment of the causes and the solutions for the war in Ukraine.

But it's important for Americans to, I think, realize that the world is seen very differently from this part of Asia.

Jeffrey 5:32

Yeah, I think we should probably walk through some of the big keynotes and maybe at the end, maybe talk about the half-baked Indonesian peace plan for Ukraine, which I don't know. That's a short conversation. It sucked. Yeah, yeah. So the first keynote we had was the prime minister of Australia, which I think naturally leads us into a conversation about AUKUS.

I am surprised at how much... Interest there is in in AUKUS and I I further am surprised at how little people understand what AUKUS is and so it seemed like almost every conversation involves people saying insane things about AUKUS if they're against it and people who are supporting it Largely admitting that AUKUS is whatever you want it to be.

So, like, it's really strange because as a nuclear policy person, I think of AUKUS as being, like, a very specific set of things. But out here, it's, like, all vibes, man.

Ankit 6:39

Absolutely. I think that's totally right. Look, I think on AUKUS, you have competing narratives, right? I think AUKUS is a... Victim of its own transparency in some ways. Right. And I think the extent to which the Australians have been open, right, every Australian official that mentions AUKUS goes to great lengths to clarify that it is a nuclear powered, conventionally armed submarine.

Because, of course, AUKUS is being met with attempts by China, for instance, to really just equate the transfer of naval nuclear propulsion tech with the transfer of nuclear weapons, which was something that the Chinese defense minister, in no uncertain terms, included in his speech. He literally called it a transfer of nuclear weapons technology, which is just not true.

He literally did. And so, you know, AUKUS isn't just a submarine, right? But really, I think that's what it does boil down to. Some of the Southeast Asian states, I think, see AUKUS through the lens of the United States, quote, militarizing this region, which takes me back to the earlier Shangri-Las when I'd come here, and you'd hear about sort of things like FONOPS conducted by the United States, you know, freedom of navigation operations, as an example of the United States doing the same thing.

And now that the United States and its allies are Pooling sovereignty in these new interesting ways. I think it's certainly not necessarily sunk in yet in this region, why that's happening, why Australia has fundamentally gone through this dramatic shift, right? We didn't have the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2020 and 2021 when the Australians did their big defense strategic update.

When they sort of looked back at their defense white paper from 2016 that was fairly rosy, all things considered, and basically said the world is a much more dangerous place and Australia needs to take steps to basically have the capability to defend itself and defend its ally, the United States. And so that message, I think, look, I mean, it wasn't really the focus of what Albanese was trying to, I think, bring to the table during his keynote.

He could have turned it into a defense of AUCA speech, and I think it was actually a smart thing that he didn't do that. Of course, I think it was one of those speeches that sometimes makes your eyes roll in your head about just how important the rules-based order is. I don't know, Jeffrey, I guess as somebody that doesn't go to a lot of these kinds of conferences, how did that speech hit you?

Jeffrey 8:50

I'm glad that I didn't agree to drink every time someone said rules-based order. But, you know, the Albanese speech left me cold. I was fundamentally unimpressed with him as a politician. I just was... I don't know. He struck me as being very Tim Kaine-y. If you know anything about my political feelings, Tim Kaine strikes me as the epitome of everything I find disappointing about the Democratic Party.

Ankit 9:24

I will need more time to think about that, but I think I see where you're coming from. Look, I thought all things considered, it was a fine speech. I think the fact that he chose to focus on the agency of small states and middle powers was a pretty compelling theme to bring to a forum like Shangri-La. Australia is in the business of winning hearts and minds in Southeast Asia, especially given the backdrop of AUKUS and the vibes that you talked about.

So I think overall, as far as these keynotes go for opening Shangri-La, it made sense. I thought Kishida last year made a much bigger impression on the conference. A keynote is supposed to sort of set the tone for the entire conference. Two days of deliberations that follow and kishida i remember very you know prominently highlighted nuclear issues highlighted u.s china arms control in a way that i found really surprising at the time right and albanese i think tried to keep things a little bit more i guess you could say milk toast as far as things go that that is the term i use for tim kaine there you go i guess we're on the same page there though yeah i mean you're just nicer than i am

Jeffrey 10:22

Okay, so that's one piece. I think the second piece is how much the declining relationship between the United States and China dominates the conversation, because that is the primary security axis, I suppose, in this region, that everything sort of revolves around. And we had... We had a keynote from Lloyd Austin, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and we had a keynote by Li Shengfu, the Chinese Minister of Defense.

Although I think it is very important to say the Chinese Minister of Defense exists to be a counterpart to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, but is not the counterpart to the U.S. Secretary of Defense in the sense that The way civilian control of the military works in China, party control, it does not run through the Minister of Defense.

He's really China's top military diplomat. That's right.

Ankit 11:26

The first vice premier of the CMC, the Central Military Commission, would be a more accurate counterpart for what Austin really does, but... You know, Li Chengfu is a military diplomat. He's here to engage in military diplomacy to deliver China's vision. And the speech he gave at Shangri-La was his first roadshow. It's his first international address to an audience like this.

It's the first time he took questions from a group. And I think that's actually one of the great strengths of the Shangri-La dialogue is the fact that IISS does actually subject every defense minister to questions from the audience, which usually are, you know, sometimes ignored by the defense ministers, but nevertheless...

Jeffrey 11:59

It's rare for him.

Ankit 12:00

I think Lee was pretty good at it in contrast to Austin, who I think really struggles with Q&A situations. I thought he did a little bit better than last year, but it's certainly not SecDef's strong suit. And I think that was certainly a consensus view as far as I could tell.

Jeffrey 12:15

I mean, I thought it was very notable that Austin really struggled to understand questions. And I think part of that is accents. Part of that is jargon. And part of that is just kind of the rambling way that academics sometimes speak. But you could just see him. Someone would be talking. And just the look on his face is like, I have no idea what this person is saying.

But you saw John Chipman, the outgoing chairman. No, what is his actual position? CEO, the head of IISS. Paramount leader. Paramount leader. He actually started summarizing the questions, and I think Austin did a little bit better. What did you make of these two speeches that existed largely to result in a handshake?

Ankit 13:01

Yeah, look, so – Again, I mean, just to kind of draw on the baseline of the last few years, I think what we saw this year at Shangri-La between the United States and China is unfortunately going to be the new normal going forward. For China, Shangri-La is going to be a forum to present its vision for regional security, right?

Li opened with the Global Security Initiative and talked about how China sees regional order. Austin's speech, like last year, listed every single thing the United States is doing with every ally from the South Pacific to Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia. Talisman Sabre, Bali-Katan, exercises with Japan, regional security. And fundamentally, there was no real overlap. The United States called on China to engage in dialogue.

I think the strong subtext underlying Lee's speech is that the United States fundamentally has no role in Asia. Lee was critical of alliances. You know, I think he said partnerships over alliances. And so, you know, we're going to be coming to this security forum to hear two competing visions that have very little in common and really little interplay and crosstalk between the United States and China.

And it doesn't necessarily used to be that way. I mean, sure, the U.S. and China have never seen eye to eye, but I thought this year Shangri-La was particularly stark in the difference in the two visions. I'd also say, I mean, Austin's speech really included a focus on the United States leaning forward on dialogue, which we've seen through the Biden administration, right?

The focus on guardrails, the need to have crisis communications, the need to avoid misunderstanding. And with a tiny exception at the end of Lee's speech, when he talked about the 2022 Bali meeting between Presidents Biden and Xi, we really got very little of that. But I'm wondering, how did you interpret the crosstalk?

Jeffrey 14:44

Yeah, I, you know, I think the way that I look at those two speeches is that they're not really aimed at one another. They are aimed at the region as a whole. And so these are almost two competing visions for security, the security architecture of the region. You know, I thought Austin's speech was good, but maybe a little bit of a missed opportunity in in the sense that unlike and you'll chuckle at this, unlike the Ben Wallace speech, which which I really enjoyed.

This was a real opportunity, I think, to make the argument that if you are a country in the Indo-Pacific, chances are you are not a big power. You are a small power, and you are a country that wants rules. You want some predictability, and you want countries to interact with each other on the basis of equality. And what we're seeing in Ukraine is what happens when you start to – Start to defer to the prerogatives of the big powers.

Right. That's where you get coercion and predation. And I felt Wallace did a better job of bringing that out than than Austin did, although that was there in Austin's speech. I thought the Chinese speech was less. Hostile than other people did, in part because I have this fundamental sense that the reason that we're seeing this dramatic decline in U.S.-China relations is because China's democratic transition failed.

And one of the reasons it failed is that the Chinese Communist Party is deeply afraid of factionalism. And so when Lee was talking about how U.S.-China relations had to proceed on the basis of mutual respect, what he was really talking about are, I think, somewhat paranoid Chinese fantasies that the U.S. is trying to overthrow the party. And the best part of the speech for me is where he talked about how the Biden-Xi meeting was successful, was immediately followed by him saying, you know, but you have to match actions with words.

And what I mean is mutual respect. Let's let the loud thing go by. I took Li's speech to be a fairly accurate representation of how deeply committed the Chinese leadership is to this argument that they should run the country because they are under assault by the United States. And so by that very low bar, I thought this was, like, not as bad as I was expecting.

Ankit 17:19

Yeah, fair enough. I mean, I think content-wise, I certainly didn't detect anything wrong. Materially new. I think some people were surprised by the Taiwan component of the speech. I think everything there was really boilerplate at this point for, for a Chinese speech at an overseas, in an overseas context on Taiwan issues, and especially for Lee on his first trip overseas. I think he has to put a little bit of extra effort in for his audience of one back home. In a way, gotta put a little mustard on that hot dog.

No, but as you were talking about the democratic transition, I was actually thinking, IISS got Lee to give his speech on June 4th. And, you know, that's – actually, that's something that's happened in the past, I think, given the time when Shangri-La takes place. But no, I think you're right, and it didn't help the fact that the Trump administration would repeatedly – Distinguish between the Chinese people, the People's Republic of China, and the Communist Party of China, largely focusing on the latter entity when they would criticize China, which I think contributed to that sense of the United States fundamentally not accepting the legitimacy of the Communist Party's leadership in China.

Austin didn't get anywhere close to talking about those fundamental issues at the core of U.S.-China relations, but certainly I think that subtext was there in Li's address. I think the pitch, though, that China brings to Shangri-La, and I think, you know, you saw a couple commentators say that, oh, China has this very successful time at Shangri-La because it emphasizes international law.

I really don't think, you know, if you talk to Southeast Asian delegates, and I think you saw this with every single question a Southeast Asian delegate asked General Lee, the Southeast Asians are not convinced by what China is trying to sell at Shangri-La, right? We heard a great question from... From a Philippines Coast Guard member about why China's deeds don't match its words in the region.

And that's something that China never really directly explains. And of course, we had that near-collision incident in the Taiwan Strait, right, the night before General Lee spoke. And he got asked about that, and he really had no good answer, right? He, I think, used the phrase hegemony of navigation and talked about China's sovereign waters, which I guess now is how China talks about the Taiwan Strait.

But none of that is convincing to arguably the audience that China most cares about at a forum like this. And so I just think that that's, you know, a pretty big missed opportunity, because I think you could imagine a different approach that might actually make the United States not look so great. And I think China just doesn't take that.

And so usually, you know, you get like, I agree with you that Austin did not do a great job at the Q&A, and his speech was perhaps a little bit too long. But overall, I think, you know, Shangri-La tends to be a net positive for the United States.

Jeffrey 19:52

Oh, I certainly thought that the U.S. got the better of the two arguments. I mean, I think you saw that almost immediately in both the reactions of the two questions that Li got from Southeast Asian nations about how much China bullies them when it comes to territorial, but also you saw with the questions about Chinese maritime activities, one from the U.S. and one from a IISS colleague, there wasn't really any pushback in the room against those questions.

Those questions, I think, barely represented the sense of the room, which is that it was all great for the Chinese to complain about the United States, but that their behavior was alarming their neighbors. The last thing I want to say about that Is this, for me, the conversation we just had about China and the conversation we had about AUKUS underline the value of coming to a conference like this for me because I spend so much time at nuclear-focused specialist meetings.

I do sometimes lose a little track of the vibes. And, you know, ultimately, I think at the end of the day, Lee doesn't get any questions about nuclear weapons. And that is similar to the AUKUS discussion, which is in neither case are the nuclear pieces what people are fundamentally concerned about. What in both AUKUS and in the U.S.-China relations conversation people are concerned about is what does it mean for the world's two giant intertwined economies with huge militaries to be having a falling out in this region?

And how does that everything else up? And That's what people are interested in.

Ankit 21:43

Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point. And it's a really good reality check for those of us that do live in those worlds where we talk about the non-proliferation aspects of AUKUS and long-range precision strike proliferation and potentially US-China arms race. I mean, the thing you, you know, you come to a place like Singapore, right, a company, a country that has a larger trade to GDP ratio than I think any other country has.

And the thing they really care about is de-globalization. What does it mean when you have the U.S. and China both sitting out of the major free trade agreement that this part of the world cares about, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, RCEP, which the U.S. isn't involved in. And so the U.S. is fundamentally absent economically in a way that the U.S. is no longer in the business of doing because neither party in the U.S. supports free trade and globalization.

And so we end up in these discussions about Regional security that fundamentally start from a different frame here than they do back in Washington, where we are talking about things like guardrails and crises in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. And so that I thought was pretty interesting. You know, Jeffrey, something else that really struck me is the Korean Peninsula.

Right. It's always an interesting focus. I was here in 2017 and the Korean Peninsula was a huge focus that year for understandable reasons. Right. That was a pretty remarkable year for North Korea. This year we had a North Korean satellite launch just days before Shangri-La. But everybody's sort of just completely inured to the fact that, you know, North Korea has nuclear weapons and they test missiles.

If this was any other year, Shangri-La, I mean, particularly before the pandemic, I think the North Korea issue would have been a lot more prominent. Lee Jong-seop tried to make the case for why the region should care, but I think the ship's kind of sailed, and there is a tremendous amount of instability between the two Koreas. We're in the spiral now going on more than a year since the Yoon administration was inaugurated in particular, but none of that really seemed to make a splash this year, which I thought was pretty interesting.

Jeffrey 23:31

Yeah, what I try to wrap my head around is how much of that is the fact that we have just gotten inert to the idea of North Korean missile tests and nuclear capabilities, and how much of that is the fact that Southeast Asia just feels very far away from this. And so it's really hard for me to tell.

Like, if we had... A conference in Tokyo or Seoul, right? With, with less Southeast Asian participation and, and no South Asian participation, would that conversation have been different? Oh, absolutely. But it just – it was pretty interesting to me too. Like it's just – it's a big freaking continent. That's a pretty good observation about Asia in general.

Yeah, I agree. You know, but I think we sometimes forget. It's a little bit like when people come to California and they're like, oh, I'm going to be in LA. How about I drive up to see you in Monterey? And I'm like, you know, it's five hours, right? Yeah. You know, like it's like a six-hour flight from Tokyo to Singapore.

That's right. It's a big continent. That's why everybody wants missiles. Because they're pretty good at covering large ranges. All right. I want to draw a line under the first two topics because that's really, I think, what Shangri-La was about this year. I want to talk about the possibility that... China will accede to the protocols as a nuclear weapons state of the Southeast Asian nuclear weapons free zone a little bit.

But like it would be a mistake to imply that that was anything other than a side conversation that occurred among a few specialists.

Ankit 25:10

Yeah, no, I mean, that was the so I, you know, background, I guess, inside baseball here. But that was the question I wanted to ask the Chinese Defense Minister, I didn't get called on, because there were 50 other people that had questions that also didn't get called on. But I think it would have been a really interesting issue to float in the room.

Because fundamentally, I think Southeast Asia's reaction to China becoming the first of the P5 willing to sign the protocol has generally been positive. But I don't think the implications of China joining the protocol are fully understood, right? I think I think For instance, the fact that China bastions its ballistic missile submarines at Hainan in the South China Sea is not well understood.

And then, of course, you have the sovereignty implications, right, where you have disputed maritime territory. The Bangkok Treaty, the Southeast Asian Nuclear Weapon Free Zones, covers the maritime territories of its participating member states. And so for a P5 member to ratify the protocol would mean that they would abstain. From, let's say, sailing vessels with nuclear warheads on them within those waters.

And the fundamental, I think, lack of a nuanced conversation about this in Southeast Asia, I really think is a missed opportunity. And so I think the Indonesians have been really positive about this. I think a few of the other states, I don't think the Philippines has necessarily come out in a forward-leaning way, but ASEAN generally is supportive of this.

And then part of this might also come down to who in the Foreign ministries in various Southeast Asian states is working on these issues, because I don't think the people who work on the nonproliferation portfolio and the shanfiz, as we call the nuclear weapons free zone, are necessarily the same people who think quite closely about maritime disputes and artificial islands and so on and so forth.

So I think that was a pretty interesting sidebar conversation. I just wish we could have gotten a little bit more airtime with the ministers. And maybe, you know, next year, if I'm invited back, I'll try to make a big stink about it.

Jeffrey 27:03

Yeah, I mean, just to summarize for listeners, I mean, the issue has always been about that treaty is the degree to which it inhibits the transit of nuclear-armed vessels. And, you know, there are – I recall there's sort of a debate about just exactly how restrictive it would be. I mean, there's some degree of interpretation there. But, you know, if you're the Chinese, it's fine because you claim the whole damn South China Sea anyway.

Right. So I think if you're the Chinese, it's almost a way of asserting your ownership of those islands.

Ankit 27:44

Yeah. What worries me about the Chinese position... Okay, so first of all, AUKUS is announced in September 2021, and I believe November 2021 is when China announces that it's willing to ratify the protocol. And so it pretty clearly seems like a direct response to AUKUS. And we have this conversation, including at Shangri-La, about how much do the Chinese actually believe what they say about AUKUS, right?

I would like to believe that they understand the difference between naval nuclear propulsion technology and nuclear weapons, but... The reaction to AUKUS, in terms of their willingness to ratify the protocol, suggests that they believe that nuclear propulsion, you know, naval nuclear propulsion, nuclear submarines, in other words, including SSNs, would potentially be prohibited from entering the Bangkok Treaty area.

And that is a bit concerning, right? I don't think that's necessarily what's happening, but there is a bit of, I think, cynicism there about what's happening that I don't fully understand. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Jeffrey 28:44

I guess the last thing is I kind of got in trouble. Oh, let's talk about this. Why'd you get in trouble, Jeffrey? I made a joke. And no one in China thought it was funny. Did you hurt the feelings of 1.4 billion people? I may have hurt the feelings of 1.4 billion people, yeah. So listeners who follow me on Twitter may have noticed that the People's Liberation Army was holding seats by putting stickers on them.

And these were white covered seats and the stickers had these bright red Chinese flags and they said China. And so I couldn't resist taking a picture of the person holding the, The, the sheets of stickers, and there were a lot of them, and then a picture of the stickers on these, you know, chairs, which are otherwise basically, you know, just completely white. They're these, all these chairs, these red stickers. I said that, that the Chinese were putting these red stickers on chairs like they were rocks in the South China Sea.

And that may have started some shit.

Ankit 29:52

I'm pretty sure that was the most viral tweet to come out of this year's Shangri-La.

Jeffrey 29:57

And yeah. I mean, so upsides are the next day the Chinese didn't do it. And I had a lot of angry Chinese people who apparently discovered the Indonesians had put down two stickers. OK. And so I had people tweeting at me that the Indonesian stickers and I like all I could say is like it was a joke.

It was just funny because they were holding an absurd number of seats, which, by the way, it's not like there was a shortage of seating. I think they were just doing it to just have the Chinese group sit together.

Ankit 30:29

Yeah, and to clarify, I have never seen this in a previous Shangri-La, at least not the stickers. And so part of me wants to think that somebody on the PLA delegation was charged with going in early before Austin's speech and making sure they had good seats. And that person might have decided on their own initiative to be very diligent and print out these nice looking stickers to make sure that China had a proper way to reserve its seats.

And unfortunately, it completely backfired in a way that, frankly, is quite hilarious.

Jeffrey 30:57

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it was silly. And I made fun of it, and I'm glad I made fun of it because it was dumb. Some of the worst people in the world liked my tweet. But I think one of the reasons is, and it goes back to this fundamental reaction to Lee's speech... Is people have really hard feelings about China's behavior in the South China Sea, about the tendency to seize islands, reefs, islets, rocks, whatever you want to call them.

And so I think they interpreted the joke in that light. People took it as they're also stealing seats. It's a little bit like we look at Russians stealing toilets.

Ankit 31:51

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. No, but I mean, this is, you know, this is the kind of color you get by actually coming to these conferences and, you know, having those exchanges. I think I think we saw a bunch of reaction from other delegates who certainly found that tweet to be, I think, a pretty good reflection of how the maritime disputes are genuinely seen in this part of the world.

Jeffrey 32:10

Yeah, and I did a deeper cut, which was a little bit more for the cognoscente, but I got the layout of the ballroom, and I put a nine-dash line in it, and that seemed amusing.

Ankit 32:24

And listeners, I was sitting next to Jeffrey, and he did this all on his phone, which I find very impressive.

Jeffrey 32:29

Well, you helped me workshop the joke.

Ankit 32:30

I did, but I want no credit for it, because I would like to still be able to engage our Chinese colleagues on some of these issues.

Jeffrey 32:36

Yeah. Well, anyway, it's been fantastic hanging out with you this weekend at the Shangri-La. We had a lot of quality meetings. We had a lot of quality pool time. And boy, that all-you-could-eat sashimi buffet was a thing of beauty.

Ankit 32:52

Yep, it's a real hardship to be at the Shangri-La Dialogue, but we'll do it hopefully again.

Jeffrey 32:59

Great. Well, I appreciate everybody listening. It maybe doesn't seem like we need your support since I'm sitting here in paradise, but I do. So if you want to support the continued creation of the Arms Control Wong podcast, you can be a supporting member for five dollars a month or just three dollars if you're a student. That gets you the emotional satisfaction of knowing that you're helping support my pleasant weekend here in Singapore.

But it also, more importantly, gets you access to our Slack channel, which is, I really think, one of the most vibrant virtual communities. It's a virtual Shangri-La for the nuclear world. And so with that, thank you for listening. And Ankit, thank you for joining me.

Ankit 33:47

Yeah, this was a lot of fun, Jeffrey. We'll do it again. All right, everybody. Bye.