From cutting USAID programs to putting Voice of America employees on paid administrative leave,

the Trump administration has been aggressively seeking to reduce government spending on international initiatives.

But some such spending may yet have value.

If you're a little newspaper in Solomon Islands and you want to cover what China is doing in your country.

It's nearly impossible. Your advertising can get cut, you're discredited.

So Kerry Lake talked about, for example, setting up a dedicated unit within VOA to investigate

Chinese illegal coercive, aggressive and deceptive activity throughout the region.

And VOA is very well placed to connect those dots.

Cleo Pascal, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, FD,

breaks down how certain U.S. measures in the Pacific are vital to U.S. national security interests

to deterring

increasing Chinese encroachment in the region.

The PLA studied very carefully the Pacific War.

You see it targets the same locations that where there were bases or where there were

runways and the Solomon Islands.

The Chinese are now rebuilding Henderson Airfield, which so many Marines died to protect.

They're putting in ports. They're putting in Huawei towers.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick.

Cleo Pascal, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Always great to be here. Thank you for having me.

So a lot of unusual things have been happening with respect to different tools of U.S. foreign

policy. USAID is being cut down dramatically. Most recently, VOA, Voice of America, and Radio Free Asia, RFA, are being reduced

...