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After listening to US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth’s all-out attack on “communist China” at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, some might have wondered what the Chinese people would make of it. But as a Chinese delegate listening to him live, I was wondering what Hegseth’s boss, US President Donald Trump, would think. In February, Trump called US Vice-President J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich bashing European allies “brilliant”. This time, we haven’t had his thoughts.
I wondered, not only because Trump doesn’t have a clear China strategy, but also because his attitude towards US allies in Europe and Asia is like a pendulum. It is well known that Trump wants his European allies to increase defence spending so they can deal with Russia on their own, leaving the US to shift its focus to the Indo-Pacific, and China in particular.
It appears today that America’s Asian allies are more important than its European allies. The problem, though, is that the US has far fewer allies in Asia and none see China, their largest trading partner, as an existential threat in the same way that America’s European allies view Russia.
In Singapore, Hegseth said the China threat is “real” and “could be imminent”, claiming that it is public knowledge that the People’s Liberation Army has been tasked with being capable of attacking Taiwan by 2027. This conclusion is quite different from that of his predecessor Lloyd Austin, who said at the dialogue in 2023 and 2024 that a conflict was neither imminent nor inevitable.
Many in Southeast Asia would question such assessments of security threats from a television anchor-turned-defence secretary. When asked by US Senator Tammy Duckworth to name one member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations during his confirmation hearing, Hegseth couldn’t even do that. In the question and answer session at the Shangri-La Dialogue, his answers were a hodgepodge.
Hegseth seemed to suggest that allies in Asia should increase their defence spending to 5 per cent of gross domestic product because that’s what he says Nato members are pledging. That’s a fool’s errand.
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