An exclusive report by the Washington Post on Saturday last week about a secret internal guidance memo signed by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth revealed that US defense strategy has officially been reoriented to focus exclusively on deterring the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) potential military invasion of Taiwan, saying it must be prioritized over other potential dangers.
The nine-page document, known as the Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance, states that all Pentagon branches and departments must adjust deployments and reallocate resources with the central focus of “deterring China’s actions to seize Taiwan,” while simultaneously strengthening US homeland defense.
“China is the Department’s sole pacing threat, and denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan — while simultaneously defending the US homeland is the Department’s sole pacing scenario,” Hegseth wrote in the memo.
This is more than some theoretical document — it is an actual combat blueprint. The memo clearly outlines that the US military would increase its presence, and utilize deterrence capabilities, such as submarines, bombers, uncrewed vessels and specialty units from the US Army and Marine Corps to fully intervene throughout the Indo-Pacific region.
The plan also includes improving the defense of US troop locations, generating pre-positioned weapons stockpiles, improving logistics, and focusing on bombs that can destroy reinforced and subterranean targets.
All of these preparations have only one purpose — to prevent the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from invading Taiwan at the earliest opportunity, and use strength to nullify Beijing’s strategic fantasies of a “quick victory.”
Compared with former US president Joe Biden’s emphasis on multilateral deterrence, this document is much less vague and does not beat around the bush. It is a clear, unequivocal announcement to the world that the Taiwan Strait is a top priority for US national defense.
Even more shocking is that this document closely mirrors a longer report published last year by the Heritage Foundation, titled Project 2025. Several sections of the document have been copied verbatim, indicating that the Heritage Foundation is no longer just an opinion shaper, but a policymaker.
A coauthor of the report, Alexander Velez-Green, now works in an interim role as a top policy official at the Pentagon. This indicates that the strategic layout had already been completed prior to US President Donald Trump’s return to office, and the deep structure of the Pentagon already views countering China as an institutional mission. This is not the personal stance of an individual president, but rather the collective confrontational posture and long-term combat preparation of the entire US military and political system towards the CCP regime.
Washington’s official military documents explicitly designate “deterring China’s actions to seize Taiwan” as an exclusive strategic guiding principle, and the US military’s focus has shifted entirely from Europe and the Middle East to the Taiwan Strait. Despite this, some forces within Taiwan remain skeptical of the US. Some even believe that, at the critical moment, the US would simply sit by and twiddle its thumbs — an assumption that is not only ignorant, but a betrayal of Taiwan’s destiny.
The US has already placed Taiwan’s defense at the core of its national policy — what else is left to question? The only question worth asking is — is Taiwan itself prepared?
Elliot Yao is a reviewer.
Translated by Kyra Gustavsen
China badly misread Japan. It sought to intimidate Tokyo into silence on Taiwan. Instead, it has achieved the opposite by hardening Japanese resolve. By trying to bludgeon a major power like Japan into accepting its “red lines” — above all on Taiwan — China laid bare the raw coercive logic of compellence now driving its foreign policy toward Asian states. From the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China Seas to the Himalayan frontier, Beijing has increasingly relied on economic warfare, diplomatic intimidation and military pressure to bend neighbors to its will. Confident in its growing power, China appeared to believe
After more than three weeks since the Honduran elections took place, its National Electoral Council finally certified the new president of Honduras. During the campaign, the two leading contenders, Nasry Asfura and Salvador Nasralla, who according to the council were separated by 27,026 votes in the final tally, promised to restore diplomatic ties with Taiwan if elected. Nasralla refused to accept the result and said that he would challenge all the irregularities in court. However, with formal recognition from the US and rapid acknowledgment from key regional governments, including Argentina and Panama, a reversal of the results appears institutionally and politically
Legislators of the opposition parties, consisting of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), on Friday moved to initiate impeachment proceedings against President William Lai (賴清德). They accused Lai of undermining the nation’s constitutional order and democracy. For anyone who has been paying attention to the actions of the KMT and the TPP in the legislature since they gained a combined majority in February last year, pushing through constitutionally dubious legislation, defunding the Control Yuan and ensuring that the Constitutional Court is unable to operate properly, such an accusation borders the absurd. That they are basing this
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) was on Monday last week invited to give a talk to students of Soochow University, but her responses to questions raised by students and lecturers became a controversial incident and sparked public discussion over the following days. The student association of the university’s Department of Political Science, which hosted the event, on Saturday issued a statement urging people to stop “doxxing,” harassing and attacking the students who raised questions at the event, and called for rational discussion of the talk. Criticism should be directed at viewpoints, opinions or policies, not students, they said, adding
RSS