The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question.
In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and the Western Hemisphere. This is natural and appropriate: the United States must secure its own backyard before tackling challenges further afield. But reading the NSS and NDS, one gets differing assessments of those more distant challenges, especially as they relate to China.
The NSS paints China as posing acute threats in both the economic and military domains and calls for “winning the economic and technological competition over the long term.” But even though it was the first Trump administration that officially reconceptualized America’s relationship with China as competitive, the NDS describes China as neither a threat nor a competitor. Indeed, the latter strategy document emphasizes seeking a “decent peace, on terms favorable to Americans but that China can also accept and live under.” Given that US and Chinese fundamental interests are in direct tension, this is an unrealistic goal. An unhappy modus vivendi might be possible; a happy one is not.
Still, the NDS does note the NSS’ direction to “build, posture, and sustain a strong denial defense along the” first island chain. In many ways, this is consistent with longstanding US defense strategy. The first island chain stretches from Japan in the north, through Taiwan, down to the Philippines in the south, and westward across the South China Sea’s southern littoral waters. Along with the Korean Peninsula, it has effectively served as the United States’ forward defense perimeter in the Indo-Pacific since the close of World War II. From the first island chain, home to several American allies and security partners, the United States can deny a hostile Asian hegemon easy access to the Pacific Ocean (and thus prevent hostile forces from approaching the homeland), secure Indo-Pacific sea lines of communication, and project power onto the Asian mainland if necessary.
Leaders in Taipei can rightly find reassurance in the NSS and NDS’ commitments to “denial defense along the first island chain.” Taiwan occupies key geography, as the NSS explains: “Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain [which includes US territory] and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters.” Since Douglas MacArthur identified Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” US leaders have recognized the island’s strategic importance. That apparently has not changed.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration is abandoning other proven strategic conceptions. In his first public remarks after the NDS’ release, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby announced that the Trump administration seeks “a favorable balance of power in which no state can impose its hegemony.” This would be a radical shift. In Colby’s telling, no longer is the United States opposed only to the emergence of a hostile hegemon in Asia, but also to its own hegemony as well. But it is precisely America’s distant, benign hegemony — a hegemony welcomed by most Asian states — that created the conditions for the region’s decades of sustained peace and growing prosperity. A balance of power in which no state can impose its hegemony is a recipe for instability: supposedly equitable balances tempt revisionists to try to overturn them.
Colby’s remarks and the NDS, for which he was responsible, echo his earlier scholarship. “The strategy of denial does not require a domineering America,” he wrote in 2022. “It is not an argument for American hegemony,” but instead “it respects the due claims of other states.” China insists those due claims include ownership of Taiwan. If a decent peace is truly on offer, Taiwan will have to be on offer, too.
Michael Mazza is senior director for research at the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security (formerly the Project 2049 Institute) and a senior non-resident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.
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