SINGAPORE: US 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.
\nHe 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 US has pledged to defend.
\nChina\u2019s army \u201cis rehearsing for the real deal,\u201d Hegseth said in a keynote speech at a security conference in Singapore. \u201cWe are not going to sugarcoat it \u2014 the threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent.\u201d
\nChina 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.
\nBut 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 US to create its own space-based \u201cGolden Dome\u201d missile defenses.
\nSpeaking 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\u2019s \u201cactively training for it, every day.\u201d
\nHegseth also called out China for its ambitions in Latin America, particularly its efforts to increase its influence over the Panama Canal.
\nHe repeated a pledge made by previous administrations to bolster US 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 \u2014 and even established new military agreements throughout the region \u2014 a full shift has never been realized.
\nInstead, US 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\u2019s second term, that\u2019s also been the case.
\nThe Indo-Pacific nations caught in between have tried to balance relations with both the US 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.
\nHegseth cautioned that playing both sides, seeking US military support and Chinese economic support, carries risk.
\n\u201cBeware the leverage the CCP seeks with that entanglement,\u201d Hegseth said.
\nChina usually sends its own defense minister to this conference \u2014 but in a snub this year to the US and the erratic tariff war Trump has ignited with Beijing, its minister Dong Jun did not attend, something the US delegation said it intended to capitalize on.
\n\u201cWe are here this morning. And somebody else isn\u2019t,\u201d Hegseth said.
\nHe urged countries in the region to increase defense spending to levels similar to the 5 percent of their gross domestic product European nations are now pressed to contribute.
\n\u201cWe must all do our part,\u201d Hegseth said.
\nIt\u2019s not clear if the US can or wants to supplant China as the region\u2019s primary economic driver. But Hegseth\u2019s push follows Trump\u2019s visit to the Middle East, which resulted in billions of dollars in new defense agreements.
\nHegseth said committing US support for Indo-Pacific nations would not be based on any conditions on local governments aligning their cultural or climate issues with the West.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SINGAPORE: US 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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":81853,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81856,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81840\/revisions\/81856"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}