In late March, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued the Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance to the Pentagon. According to the guidance, as quoted by The Washington Post, “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 is the Department’s sole pacing scenario.” The Pentagon is instructed, per the report, to plan only for contingencies with China.
Given the trends in the new administration, none of this is surprising, but it is shocking.
The document is a blueprint for geopolitical malpractice. The guidance’s identification of China as a major security threat, and thus a priority, is appropriate. But the prescribed downgrading of American commitments in Europe and the Middle East is a recipe for global instability, including in Asia. Violent conflagrations will follow.
The document evinces little understanding of the world’s interconnectedness. From Alexander’s invasion of India to the emergence of the Silk Road to Genghis Khan’s transcontinental imperium, history teaches us that the Eurasian continent is a unified political space. Localized political, economic and societal events can and do have far-reaching effects that span the landmass — and eventually hit here in the U.S. That nature is immutable, and evolutions in transportation technologies and global commerce continue to magnify it.
Even the creation of the U.S. was an extension of Eurasian politics. The British raised taxes on the colonials to recover from the Seven Years’ War, fought in North America as the French and Indian War. It also affected Asian commerce, as the tea tossed into Boston Harbor had been imported from China.
The guidance document directs the Pentagon to “assume risk in other theaters,” namely Europe and the Middle East. This is an assumption that, even if American partners fail to invest in their defenses, such risk is tolerable and containable. Neither is the case.
Europe is America’s largest export destination. The U.S. cannot turn a blind eye to war in Free Europe. It cannot ignore conflict in the Middle East either, especially as long as fossil fuels remain an important component of the energy mix of America, its allies and its adversaries. America’s Asian allies and partners — all key to containing and deterring China — are deeply reliant on oil and natural gas imports from the Middle East. China’s dependence on such imports is a major vulnerability.
There can be no doubt that tumult in the western stretches of Eurasia will ripple across the continent. The typically isolated North Korea is now sitting pretty, bolstered by Russian diplomatic, economic, and technical support thanks to the war in Ukraine. China has provided military, diplomatic and economic support to Russia against Ukraine. It also implicitly sided with Hamas in the Gaza war in an effort to gain sway with global Muslim populations. And Beijing’s 25-year strategic partnership agreement with Tehran is proof positive of China’s willingness to sow discord in the Middle East.
Turbulence in Eurasia and the Middle East, meanwhile, threatens freedom of navigation, which Hegseth has called “a core national interest.” The two disruptions to sea trade in recent years — one in the Black Sea and the other in the Red Sea — are the results of land wars in Europe and the Middle East. Both of these wars are themselves the results of diminishing U.S. involvement in those regions since the early 2010s in pursuit of a “pivot to Asia.”
Another attempt to pivot to Asia, as the interim guidance envisions, will create the conditions for crisis elsewhere — if unmitigated, it will mean crisis everywhere. Moreover, there are three problems with adopting China as the “pacing threat” and a Taiwan Strait scenario as the “pacing scenario.”
First, by eschewing forces needed to fight in Europe and the Middle East, the administration makes its policy irreversible for successor administrations without first forming national and congressional consensuses for its policy. While there is substantial overlap in the types of capabilities that conflicts in Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific require, those notional conflicts will look quite different given significant differences in geography and combatants. A laser-beam focus on preventing a fait accompli in the Taiwan Strait will leave the U.S. underinvested in the types of units and weapons systems that will be needed elsewhere.
Second, once American political leaders do awaken to the depth of their mistake, that underinvestment will take time to correct. The U.S. will have foregone years of potential weapons development, military training and regional studies education. Perhaps the Pentagon will have kept pace with the People’s Liberation Army, but it will have fallen behind other adversaries with no way of rapidly catching up.
Even the Trump administration’s focus on China will be ineffective. According to the report, an important element of the strategy against China is “pressuring” Taiwan to boost its own defense, while the secretary has ordered 8 percent cuts across all services. This will leave the force inadequate for a Chinese contingency even if all of the remaining resources are spent on stability in the Americas and Asia.
The administration claims that it is sacrificing Europe and the Middle East on the altar of deterring China, but it appears that it is taking the opposite measure of what is necessary to prepare itself for the Asian theater. China’s armed forces are rapidly modernizing and may soon be capable of invading Taiwan while preventing American intervention. Even if everything goes according to the administration’s wishes, Hegseth’s defense cuts will counteract Taiwan’s boost in spending, and a gap between China’s ability to invade and the collective ability to defend Taiwan will emerge.
Finally, the guidance insists the nuclear umbrella will remain, but allies and partners in Europe, the Middle East and even Asia will have little choice but to consider their own nuclear arsenals. No European nor Middle Eastern state has a defense production base. Acquiring scientific knowledge and creating the production base will take, at best, more than a decade.
Meanwhile, consecutive administrations have sparked among allies a wariness toward buying American weapons and parts — former President Biden by restricting the supply to Ukraine of European-made weapons with American components, and President Trump by threatening to forcefully annex allied territory. As they slowly invest in defense production capacity, Europeans will have no choice but to resort to nukes. Polish President Andrzej Duda has already raised the question publicly. And Asians will know that the U.S. is only ever one election away from turning on them as well.
This will no longer be an academic exercise. The U.S. may soon live in a world teeming with nuclear weapons. Hegseth’s strategy reflects an administration policy ungrounded in history and current trends. Its best-case scenario still requires a lot of luck for existing conflicts to be contained. The worst-case scenario is another global war.
Michael Mazza is a senior director at the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security (formerly the Project 2049 Institute). Shay Khatiri is vice president of development and senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute.
