The Pentagon Is Too Fixated on China
Good strategy involves handling multiple problems at once.
WATCHING SECRETARY OF DEFENSE PETE HEGSETH address the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore this weekend, I was reminded of a street performer I once watched in Europe. As the juggler managed six balls in the air, someone in the crowd asked him which ball was most important. Without missing a beat, he looked toward the one that happened to be highest at that moment. The audience laughed.
The unspoken answer, of course, was that they were all important. The highest ball needs immediate attention, but there are still five others.
That image came to mind as I read reports from Singapore, where Secretary of Defense Hegseth laid out the latest articulation of the Trump administration’s national security priorities. The message was unmistakable: China is the highest priority. The Indo-Pacific is the primary theater. America’s military, diplomatic, and economic resources are increasingly focused on preventing Beijing from dominating Asia.
There is logic behind that assessment. China’s military modernization has been extraordinary, not only because of its scale but because of its consistency. Nearly three decades ago, while attending the National War College, I was the Army representative on a six-person military-to-military delegation that visited the People’s Liberation Army’s war college in Nanjing. Chinese officers briefed our team—a group that included representatives from the Navy, Air Force, and Marines—on a twenty-year military modernization plan. The presentation was comprehensive, ambitious, and frankly difficult to believe. The Chinese described future capabilities that appeared well beyond their reach at the time. They discussed advanced naval forces, long-range precision weapons, modernization of doctrine, expanded training programs, improvements in command structures, and military projects that would allow them to project power far beyond China’s borders.
Frankly, the American officers on the trip thought the Chinese were fooling themselves. They were over-ambitious, or maybe they were just trying to show off to us. We were wrong.
Over the next decades, Beijing transformed reefs and shoals into fortified islands throughout the South China Sea. China built expansive testing and training facilities while modernizing its naval and air forces, investing heavily in missile technology, restructuring its command architecture, rewriting doctrine, expanding cyber and space capabilities, and aggressively acquiring foreign technologies through both legal and illicit means. Just as importantly, the People’s Liberation Army moved away from many of the rigid, scripted training methods that characterized its earlier years and began developing a more realistic and modern approach to readiness.
Looking back at that trip, I realize that one of our mistakes was underestimating China’s capacity for strategic patience. Chinese leaders established long-term objectives and pursued them relentlessly through multiple leadership transitions, economic fluctuations, and geopolitical setbacks. Whether one agrees with their goals or not, it is difficult to deny their effectiveness in translating strategy into capability.
Strategic patience is not always an American strength. Our political cycles often reward short-term gains, immediate results, and headline-driven policymaking. In good times and bad, China demonstrated a willingness to think in decades while we frequently think in election cycles.
That history helps explain why so many defense officials today view China as the pacing challenge. The under secretary of defense, Elbridge Colby, has spent years arguing that American strategy became distracted by secondary conflicts in the Middle East and Europe while neglecting the most consequential challenge to the global balance of power. The administration’s National Defense Strategy, published earlier this year, reflects much of that thinking, emphasizing deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, strengthening a denial defense along the First Island Chain, and ensuring that China cannot achieve regional hegemony in Asia.
Hegseth’s speech reinforced those priorities. He highlighted America’s growing relationships with Japan, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. He spoke repeatedly of deterrence, burden-sharing, military modernization, and the importance of regional partnerships. Somehow he did this without ever mentioning Taiwan, the geographic and strategic fulcrum of the entire concept of defense along the First Island Chain, the place where success or failure could determine the outcome of a much larger campaign in the region. It seems intentional—mention of Taiwan was also conspicuously absent from the National Defense Strategy.
But what struck me was the implicit assumption that the United States can prioritize one challenge without the others demanding equal attention.
Strategy requires prioritization. Every strategic leader, civilian and military, understands that threats are theoretically infinite but resources are finite. Every planner must determine where to place the main effort. But prioritization is not the same thing as exclusivity.
While Hegseth was speaking in Singapore about China’s rise, Iranian military officials were increasingly claiming authority over maritime traffic through one of the world’s most important waterways, while negotiations with the United States remain stalled over sanctions relief and access to frozen assets. Tehran appears determined to leverage any economic gains toward rebuilding military capabilities damaged during recent conflicts, including missile and drone programs. And the future of its nuclear program remains unresolved.
At the same time, Vladimir Putin was executing another major missile and drone strike against Ukraine. Ukrainian intelligence warned of a new wave of attacks, likely once every week. Ukrainian forces continued striking deep into Russian territory, reportedly destroying military infrastructure, damaging fuel facilities, and hitting an Iskander missile system while expanding efforts to disrupt Russian logistics networks. The war in Ukraine remains one of adaptation, escalation, and attrition, and there is little evidence that Moscow has abandoned its maximalist objectives.
These challenges are not isolated. Reports continue to emerge about growing military cooperation between China and Iran. Reports that Iranian forces may have used Chinese-manufactured air defense systems during recent hostilities are a reminder that the world’s major security challenges increasingly overlap. Russia relies on Iranian drone technology. Iran benefits from Chinese economic and technological support. Beijing studies Western responses to conflicts in both Europe and the Middle East while evaluating its own options in the Pacific. What happens in one theater no longer stays in one theater.
Then there are the other balls in the air. The administration is all but committed to regime change in Cuba. There is continued instability in Venezuela. Migration pressures throughout the Western Hemisphere have not abated. There is competition in the Arctic, and there are emerging security challenges across Africa. So many other balls that they’re sometimes hard to name. None of these may be the key pacing challenge, but all of them remain challenges nonetheless.
This equates to the juggler’s dilemma.
The administration appears increasingly convinced that America can afford to focus on one ball at a time. The reality of global affairs suggests otherwise. Iran may be the highest ball in the air today, but that does not mean China stops acting or that Russia stops attacking. It does not mean regional crises politely wait their turn until Washington is ready to address them.
The challenge for great powers has never been identifying the most important threat, but managing multiple threats simultaneously without dropping one while reaching for another.
That is why Hegseth’s speech felt incomplete. Not because he was wrong, as China deserves the attention it received. Nor because the administration is wrong to prioritize the Indo-Pacific. Any serious national security strategy must account for China’s growing military and economic power.
The speech felt incomplete because it reflected a tendency that is becoming increasingly visible in American national security policy: the belief that a singular strategic focus can substitute for global strategic integration.
It’s unclear where the instinct to focus on China at the expense of the rest of the world comes from. Perhaps it’s a nostalgia for the Cold War, when every global conflict, crisis, and hot spot could be understood through the prism of the Soviet–American competition (even though that interpretation was often misleading and led to catastrophic misunderstandings and policy mistakes). Perhaps it’s a reaction to a sense of American power weakening—in which case it’s a prescription that will only accelerate the disease. Or perhaps it’s just a misunderstanding of the world, a belief that the world is flat instead of round, and that every part isn’t connected to every other part.
Effective strategy requires more than deciding which challenge matters most. It requires understanding how they interact and ensuring that while our eyes are fixed on one threat, the others do not slip from view.
That is the real challenge facing American policymakers today. Like the juggler standing before the crowd, they may know the highest ball is most important. But the harder task is keeping all of them in the air.