How Trump’s ‘America First’ national security strategy frames China threat

It claims the president has “single-handedly reversed” three decades of naive engagement, declares the Indo-Pacific the central arena of this century, and promises a “free and open” region built on stronger alliances and cutting-edge military technology.

China has built up its military

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

Back in May, I argued the real China problem was not that Beijing’s ambitions were hidden, but that Washington kept mistaking tough talk for strategy.

On paper, parts of the new strategy sound like an answer. It calls deterring a conflict over Taiwan a “priority,” promises a force “capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain” and warns about the dangers if China dominates key sea lanes.

The trouble is that almost all of this lives at the level of declaration. The question is whether the U.S. defense policy is actually organized around the contest with China that Beijing is preparing for — or whether it is being steered toward a different priority: locking down the Western Hemisphere while managing Asia at the margins.

For more than a quarter century, Beijing has built a military meant to push back the United States and to project power well beyond coastlines. Its navy is now the world’s largest by hull count.

China is fielding long-range missiles designed to hold U.S. carriers at risk; expanding its nuclear and submarine forces; adding bombers and stealth aircraft that can operate far outside the Western Pacific; and securing port access from the Indian Ocean to Africa and the Mediterranean.

$11B arms deal for Taiwan isn’t enough

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

Taiwan is just one chapter in that story. Chinese planners have been building options that do not rely on a Normandy-style landing.

Large exercises, missile deployments and naval patrols suggest a campaign that strangles the island rather than storms it — “quarantine” declarations dressed up as law enforcement.

Coast Guard ships, maritime militias and near-daily combat aircraft operations around Taiwan and near the Philippines reflect a gray-zone strategy to keep pressure below the threshold to justify U.S. intervention.

A quarantine strategy is designed to force choices under ambiguity — how long Taiwan can hold, how fast allies can respond and whether Washington escalates.

That’s why the administration’s new $11 billion Taiwan arms package reads like deterrence expressed in invoices: useful, even necessary, but not a substitute for the unglamorous work the NSS mostly dodges — posture, access, sustainment and an allied concept for breaking a slow chokehold.

China will notice the U.S. change in strategy

China’s new national security white paper, released in May, casts the Asia-Pacific as facing “extraterritorial forces” and elevates “safeguarding national territorial integrity and maritime rights and interests” at the center of China’s modernization project.

The Pentagon’s annual reports assess that Beijing aims to field a “world-class” force by midcentury that can defend the regime, coerce neighbors and, if necessary, fight and defeat the United States.

None of that makes the Chinese military 10 feet tall — purges, corruption and untested logistics are real weaknesses — but those very gaps heighten the risk of miscalculation and make clear, credible deterrence now more important than slogans about strength later.

The NSS sounds as if it grasps at least part of this. It highlights Taiwan’s role in the global semiconductor supply, warns about control of the South China Sea and promises a military “capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain.” It calls for allies such as Japan and South Korea to spend more, grant greater access to U.S. forces and invest in their own deterrent capabilities.

On the surface, it reads like a strategy that understands the stakes in Asia. But that is not the only story the document tells — and one that Beijing will notice.

The same NSS lays out three other broad lines of military effort: defense of the homeland and the Western Hemisphere; increasing burden-sharing with allies and partners; and “supercharging” the U.S. defense industrial base.

Plan ‘gestures at strong measures’

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

At the Reagan National Defense Forum on Dec. 6, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth leaned hard into the first. Quoting the strategy, he invoked a strengthened Monroe Doctrine and described defending “our hemisphere” as the Pentagon’s primary effort. The message is that global posture and resources will be organized around the Americas first.

In that frame, deterring China is still on the list, but it no longer drives the strategy. Hegseth’s rhetoric sounded more like risk management than a plan to blunt an immediate challenge to U.S. power in the Pacific. The implied red lines are familiar — no invasion of Taiwan, no direct attack on U.S. territory or treaty allies — but in the space in between, the strategy retreats to broad terms.

It gestures at “strong measures” to keep sea lanes open and urges allies to do more, but offers little about how Washington will handle China’s slow squeeze: a tightening pressure on Taiwan, deeper leverage over regional shipping and a presence from Africa to the Gulf that can gradually rewrite the rules of global trade.

In May, I wrote that the United States spent years confusing rhetorical consensus about China with an actual plan — lots of hard talk, big procurement headlines, but few of the posture changes and alliance decisions that would really alter Beijing’s calculus. The new strategy appears to have only changed the packaging, not that pattern. It recognizes the threat on paper, but then builds a doctrine whose sharpest, least cautious commitments are a 21st century Monroe Doctrine close to home.

Reagan’s test was simple: Does defense spending make it harder for the adversary to execute its theory of victory? The Trump administration’s strategy borrows his language but leaves one question: Are we still trying to shape the balance of power in the Pacific, or have we settled for a fortress hemisphere and calling it strategy?

Brian O’Neill is a retired CIA executive who has served in such leadership roles as deputy director of analysis at the National Counterterrorism Center and as executive editor of the President’s Daily Brief. He now teaches national security at Georgia Tech and contributes to the journal “Just Security” and other outlets.