Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reassured allies in the Indo-Pacific on Saturday that they will not be left alone to face increasing military and economic pressures from China.
He said Washington will bolster its defenses overseas to counter what the Pentagon sees as rapidly developing threats by Beijing, particularly in its aggressive stance toward Taiwan. China has conducted numerous exercises to test what a blockade would look like of the self-governing island, which Beijing claims as its own and the U.S. has pledged to defend.
China's army “is rehearsing for the real deal,” Hegseth said in a keynote speech at a security conference in Singapore. “We are not going to sugarcoat it — the threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent.”
China has a stated goal of having its military be able to take Taiwan by force if necessary by 2027, a deadline that is seen by experts as more of an aspirational goal than a hard war deadline.
But China also has developed sophisticated man-made islands in the South China Sea to support new military outposts and built up highly advanced hypersonic and space capabilities, which are driving the U.S. to create its own space-based “Golden Dome” missile defenses.
Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a global security conference hosted by the International Institute for Security Studies, Hegseth said China is no longer just building up its military forces to take Taiwan, it's “actively training for it, every day.”
Hegseth also called out China for its ambitions in Latin America, particularly its efforts to increase its influence over the Panama Canal.
He repeated a pledge made by previous administrations to bolster U.S. military capabilities in the region to provide a more robust deterrent. While both the Obama and Biden administrations had also committed to pivoting to the Pacific — and even established new military agreements throughout the region — a full shift has never been realized.
Instead, U.S. military resources from the Indo-Pacific have been regularly pulled to support military needs in the Middle East and Europe, especially since the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. In the first few months of President Donald Trump’s second term, that’s also been the case.
In the last few months the Trump administration has taken a Patriot missile defense battalion out of the Indo-Pacific in order to send it to the Middle East – a massive logistical operation that required more than 73 military cargo aircraft flights - and removed Coast Guard ships to return them to the U.S. to help defend the U.S.-Mexico border.
Hegseth was asked why the U.S. pulled those resources if the Indo-Pacific is the priority theater for the U.S. He did not directly answer but said the shift of resources was necessary to defend against Houthi missile attacks launched from Yemen, and to bolster protections against illegal immigration into the U.S.
The Indo-Pacific nations caught in between have tried to balance relations with both the U.S. and China over the years. Beijing is the primary trading partner for many, but is also feared as a regional bully, in part due to its increasingly aggressive claims on natural resources such as critical fisheries.
Hegseth cautioned that playing both sides, seeking U.S. military support and Chinese economic support, carries risk.
"Beware the leverage the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) seeks with that entanglement,” Hegseth said.
China usually sends its own defense minister to this conference — but in a snub this year to the U.S. and the erratic tariff war Trump has ignited with Beijing, its minister Dong Jun did not attend, something the U.S. delegation said it intended to capitalize on.
“We are here this morning. And somebody else isn’t,” Hegseth said.
He urged countries in the region to increase defense spending to levels similar to the 5% of their gross domestic product European nations are now pressed to contribute.
“We must all do our part,” Hegseth said.
It's not clear if the U.S. can or wants to supplant China as the region's primary economic driver. But Hegseth's push follows Trump's visit to the Middle East, which resulted in billions of dollars in new defense agreements.
Hegseth said committing U.S. support for Indo-Pacific nations would not be based on any conditions on local governments aligning their cultural or climate issues with the West.
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