Southeast Asia

In any dictatorship, it’s dangerous to be someone the leader depends on to stay in power – it means that you can easily become a threat, as it appears that Jang [Song-Thaek] and the patronage system that he ran did.

Today, many of the [North Korean] workers who participate [in working overseas] are people who have at least enough money and political connections to offer bribes to get these opportunities.

I was a bit surprised by [the president's decision to leave Asia out of the address at West Point] myself. The main answer, I think, is that this was an army audience and the army, along with the marines, have borne the brunt of ground interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. So it's important for army officers to know, going forward, how the U.S. government is going to use them — and, more importantly, not use them. And that's what he did. If he had done the graduation speech at the Naval Academy, which is on the front lines of rebalancing, it would have been a very different, Asia-focused speech.

It's not the kind of situation where you can draw red lines, because China does lay claim to the territory where it's operating. It's not a situation where anybody is totally in the right and China is totally in the wrong.

The most significant part of the [Obama] administration’s Asia 'rebalance' is a re-involvement in Southeast Asia that had been missing for quite some time.

[The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement] is very much in the spirit of the [Obama] administration’s foreign policy as a whole, signaling commitment without overt intervention. The operative test in Asia is whether (unlike in Syria and in Ukraine) it inhibits rather emboldens others.