July 2025
Issue brief A pivot to China—not Asia Clementine Starling-Daniels, E. Aaron Brady, and Theresa Luetkefend The next National Defense Strategy must prioritize competition with China beyond the Indo-Pacific— and clearly define how to recalibrate the size, structure, and posture of US forces.
Bottom lines up front •
To deter China in the Indo-Pacific, the US military should focus on long-range fires, the ability to move forces, and infrastructure protection. It should strengthen its posture through additional basing options and capacity building.
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The Department of Defense (DoD) should recognize the global implications of competition and conflict with China—and should adapt US force structure and posture accordingly.
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The United States should deprioritize secondary regions but not divest from them entirely, articulating which resources and capabilities it will provide, and where allies and partners should take the lead.
How to counter China in the Indo-Pacific and beyond The National Defense Strategy (NDS) of the second Donald Trump administration is likely to prioritize China as the primary competitor of the United States. This is a marked change from the NDS of the first Trump administration and that of the Joe Biden administration. Both administrations centered great-power competition in Department of Defense (DoD) strategy, weighing China and Russia—and therefore the Indo-Pacific and Europe—as twin focal points of risk and strategic interest. The current Trump administration is shifting gears. Rather than balancing China and Russia, the DoD will now organize around China as the principal threat and competitor (prioritizing it alongside homeland defense). Until and unless these two top priorities are met, everything else must be deprioritized.
ATLANTIC COUNCIL
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Prioritization is welcome. To the ire of defense planners, the United States has long attempted to prioritize too much in its NDS. In their view, the strategy attempts to balance too many regions and too many threats to the United States without a corresponding increase in defense budget, making it difficult to address any of them effectively. The problem is not whether the United States should engage globally—it must—but whether considering too many issues means that none of them is truly prioritized. A case in point: The Barack Obama administration’s promised pivot to Asia never fully materialized. There also exists a belief that China has been able to outpace the United States in many key areas. While China has focused on increasing its national power to compete with the United States, US administrations have balanced many other threats—including Russia in Europe, Iran and terrorist or-