“China is the Department’s sole pacing threat, and denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan — while simultaneously defending the U.S. homeland,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared (using the latest jargon) in a memo setting forth global U.S. strategy, “is the Department’s sole pacing scenario.”
Recently shared with military brass and congressional national security committees, and recently leaked, Hegseth’s Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance is, according to The Washington Post, “extraordinary in its description of the potential invasion of Taiwan as the exclusive animating scenario that must be prioritized over other potential dangers.”
While I can’t find a copy of the leaked document, The Post relates that “given personnel and resource constraints,” the United States will focus on China and “pressure allies in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia to spend more on defense to take on the bulk of the deterrence role against threats from Russia, North Korea and Iran.”
This makes enormous sense. We are already at war in Ukraine and across the Middle East, while China, the most dangerous aggressor, has been ratcheting up its bullying and threats against its neighbors whom we have pledged to defend.
Taiwan is too important — especially strategically, but also economically, and even symbolically, as an incredible democratic success story — to allow it to be gobbled up by the genocidal Chinese Communist Party regime.
Europe can step up to defend itself and is increasingly doing so. Germany has troops and tanks headed to Lithuania, the first such deployment since the Second World War.
These are serious times. Glad to have a more serious plan to address them. And to count other free countries as allies. We will need each other.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
P.S. On four separate occasions, President Biden publicly promised that the United States would come to Taiwan’s assistance militarily should China’s repeated threats to invade come to fruition, but where President Trump would stand in his second term seemed uncertain. Would he make a deal with Xi Jinping that sold out Taiwan, as John Bolton, his former national security advisor, has claimed? Bolton has been wrong before.
Illustration created with Krea and Firefly
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