China no longer Pentagon’s top security priority

According to the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy, China is no longer the top security priority for the United States.

The document, published every four years, instead states that the security of the US homeland and the Western Hemisphere is the department’s primary concern and says Washington has long neglected the “concrete interests” of Americans.

The Pentagon also announced that the United States would offer “more limited” support to its allies.

This follows the publication last year of the US National Security Strategy, which said Europe was facing “civilisational collapse” and did not portray Russia as a threat to the US. At the time, Moscow said the document was “largely consistent” with its vision.

In contrast, the 2022 National Defense Strategy named the “multi-domain threat” posed by China as defense’s top priority. In 2018, the document identified “revisionist powers” ​​such as China and Russia as the “central challenge” to U.S. security.

The 34-page document, released Friday, greatly strengthens policy positions established by the Trump administration in its first year back in office.

At the time, US President Donald Trump took on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, launched attacks on alleged drug boats in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean, and more recently put pressure on US allies to seize Greenland.

The strategy reiterated that the Pentagon would “guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key regions, particularly the Panama Canal, the American Gulf, and Greenland.”

The document also states that the Trump administration’s approach will be “fundamentally different from the grandiose strategies of past post-Cold War administrations.”

He adds: “Abandon utopian idealism, in favor of stubborn realism.”

Relations with China should be approached through “strength, not conflict.” The aim, the document states, “is not to dominate China or to stifle or humiliate them.”

Unlike previous versions of the strategy, China’s self-governing island of Taiwan is not mentioned. But the document states that the US aims to “prevent anyone, including China, from dominating us or our allies.”

Late last year the US announced a major arms sale to Taiwan worth $11bn (£8.2bn), prompting China to hold military exercises around the island in response.

The strategy also calls for greater “burden sharing” from US allies, saying partners are “happy” to allow Washington to “subsidize their defences”.

But he denies that this indicates a move towards “isolationism”.

“Rather, it means a focused and truly strategic approach to the threats facing our nation,” he says, adding that America does not want to conflate its interests with “the interests of the rest of the world — that the threat to a person on the other side of the world is the same as the threat to an American.”

Instead, he says, allies, especially Europe, “will lead against threats that are less serious to us but more serious to them.”

Russia, which launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago, is described as “a persistent but manageable threat to NATO’s eastern members.”

The strategy also outlines a “more limited” role for U.S. deterrence against North Korea. The report stated that South Korea was “capable of assuming primary responsibility” for this mission.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in his speech at the World Economic Forum earlier this week that the old world order “will not return” and called on mid-sized powers such as South Korea, Canada and Australia to come together.

“The middle powers must act together because if we are not at the table, we are on the menu,” Carney said at the Davos meeting.

This comes after French President Emmanuel Macron also warned of a “transition to a world without rules”.