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Opinion
Why US defence chief’s attack on China won’t find favour in Southeast Asia
The US is playing up the ‘China threat’ and wants allies in Asia to increase defence spending, but it may find this to be a hard sell
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Senior Colonel Zhou Bo (ret) is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University and a China Forum expert.
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.
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