Casting aside the long-standing policy called strategic ambiguity, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth says America would go to war to stop China invading Taiwan.

Hegseth says the Trump administration’s military policy is to pivot from Europe to Asia, to deter China’s threat and thwart Beijing’s quest for regional supremacy.

Hegseth told Singapore’s annual Shangri-La dialogue on Saturday: ‘President Trump has said that Communist China will not invade Taiwan on his watch. Our goal is to prevent war. And we will do this with a strong shield of deterrence …. But if deterrence fails, we will be prepared to do what the Department of Defence does best—fight and win—decisively.’

The China section in the Hegseth’s speech was headlined ‘The Threat’, arguing Beijing seeks to ‘dominate and control’ Asia:

It should be clear to all that Beijing is concretely and credibly preparing to use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. We know that Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. The PLA [People’s Liberation Army] is building the capabilities needed to do it—at breakneck speed. The PLA is training for it, every day. The PLA is rehearsing for the real deal. Let me be clear: any attempt by Communist China to conquer Taiwan would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world. We are not going to sugarcoat it. The threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent.

Hegseth’s speech had three references to the Indo-Pacific as America’s ‘priority theatre’.

Turning to the Indo-Pacific meant Europe would have to do more for itself, he said: ‘We’re pushing our allies in Europe to own more of their security—to invest in their own defence. Thanks to President Trump, they are stepping up. As our allies put their shoulders to the plow and carry more of their own burden, we will continue increasing our focus on the Indo-Pacific, our priority theatre.’

In Hegseth’s version of history, the Indo-Pacific priority will repair years of neglect: ‘For a generation, the United States ignored this region. We became distracted by open-ended wars, regime change, and nation building. These costly diversions lacked clearly defined goals and were not tied to vital American interests.’

Hegseth said ‘America First does not mean America alone’ as he promised ‘uncomfortable and tough conversations’ so allies shared the security burden. The US’s three overriding defence objectives, he said, were to ‘restore the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and re-establish deterrence’. The US defence budget next year would for the first time be more than $1 trillion, to get the ‘best military equipment in the world’.

Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles told the dialogue Hegseth’s commitment that ‘the Indo-Pacific is the US strategic priority is deeply welcome. The reality is that there is no effective balance of power in this region absent the United States.’

Marles later told reporters that China’s ‘extraordinary military build-up’ was the ‘fundamental issue shaping the strategic landscape’. In his speech, Marles said a durable Indo-Pacific order needed a balance of power to manage strategic competition:

In geopolitics, imbalance is provocative. It alters the calculus around the risks of military force and invites the kind of deterrence failure we saw in Europe three years ago. China is embarked on the largest conventional military build-up since World War II.  It is doing so without providing any strategic transparency or reassurance. And this remains a defining feature of the strategic complexity that the Indo-Pacific and the world faces today.

China had little ability to answer back at Shangri-La because, for the first time since 2019, its defence minister did not attend. The response to Hegseth came from China’s foreign ministry, which said the description of China as a ‘threat’ was defamatory, false, provocative and intended to sow division:

No country in the world deserves to be called a hegemonic power other than the US itself, who is also the primary factor undermining the peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific. To perpetuate its hegemony and advance the so-called ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’, the US has deployed offensive weaponry in the South China Sea and kept stoking flames and creating tensions in the Asia-Pacific, which are turning the region into a powder keg and making countries in the region deeply concerned.

Pete Hegseth poked hard. He is the most tattooed and least qualified US defence secretary of the modern era. But the Fox TV pundit has a core Trumpian skill–to shoot a message that’s sharp and stark. His words were a world away from the Pentagon’s usual bland bureaucratise.

Hegseth’s speech offers a Trump strategy for the Indo-Pacific beyond trade and tariffs.