Cleo Paskal: Inside CCP Entropic Warfare, From Shipping Fentanyl to Bribing Elites to Fueling Civil Wars

<p>“The overt, stated goal of China is to be number one in the world in terms of comprehensive national power … In a relative sense, if you’ve knocked [other countries] down, you’re doing better than they are. So this explains, for example, why from a comprehensive national power perspective, it is beneficial to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to pump fentanyl into middle America,” says Cleo Paskal, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.</p><p>Fentanyl “destroys communities. It destroys families. It’s real entropic warfare, creating this fragmentation, disintegration, [and] chaos within a target country,” says Paskal.</p><p>Paskal, a leading expert on China and the Indo-Pacific region, breaks down the CCP’s strategy in the region, from promoting division and civil war to buying off the elite of small island nations.</p><p>“They learn from Japanese movements and American counter movements in the Pacific [during World War II]—which islands and locations are strategic, where you have to hold, where the deep water ports are,” Paskal says.</p><p>“Xi [Jinping] in particular has staked his reputation on delivering Taiwan. But it doesn’t stop with Taiwan.” The CCP’s goal is to “push the Americans out of the Indo-Pacific … and push American functional operational capabilities back to Hawaii,” she says.</p>