VIDEO: Ricketts on Combatting Communist China’s Aggression, Protecting Undersea Cables

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Yesterday, U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts (R-NE) participated in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing where he discussed his work to combat the illegal, coercive, aggressive, and deceptive activities of Communist China in the Indo-Pacific.  Ricketts highlighted how Communist China’s maritime militia threatens undersea, critical infrastructure of regional allies. “Russian research vessels and tankers [are] coincidentally stopping over critical infrastructure right as it fails.  The Indo-Pacific has this problem, only it’s magnified,” said Ricketts. “You’re not just seeing the actions of a few rogue ships, but you’ve got the Chinese maritime militia, which has a fleet of thousands of civilian fishing vessels that are just CCP proxies.” “These dual-use vessels provide Beijing with a perfect screen for their ICAD activities — illegal, coercive, aggressive, and deceptive operations that target subsea cables and threaten the digital lifeblood of regional countries like Taiwan, which we’ve already talked about, but also Vietnam, the Philippines, and Singapore,” said Ricketts. Watch the video here. Ricketts’ comments were made in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing: “Sabotage in the Baltic Sea, Implications for European Security, and Lessons for the Indo-Pacific.” The witnesses were Benjamin Schmitt, Senior Fellow at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Kleinman Center for Energy Policy , and James O’Brien, Distinguished Visiting Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations.