STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used an overseas trip to warn against China. In his early days in office, the defense secretary mainly made news for his moves against DEI, a Signal chat that included a reporter and the dismissal of aides accused of leaks. Now he moves to a more conventional role for a defense secretary. Over the weekend, he was at a defense forum in Singapore.
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PETE HEGSETH: Beyond our borders and beyond our neighborhood, we are reorienting toward deterring aggression by communist China.
INSKEEP: NPR's Anthony Kuhn attended the forum. Hi, Anthony.
ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Hey, Steve.
INSKEEP: OK, so not surprising that a U.S. official would criticize China. That's a bipartisan stance. But then you listen for exactly how a new administration does this. So what did Hegseth say?
KUHN: He said that China is engaged in a military buildup. It's shown it's willing to use force or the threat of force to change the status quo. And the most concerning scenario for him is a potential attempt by China to use force to reunify with Taiwan. Hegseth asked governments in the region to increase defense spending to 5% of their economies, as NATO nations are doing. That's going to be more than some Asian governments can manage. He also interestingly said that the U.S. is not trying to strangle, encircle or humiliate China. But he did say that the U.S. has positioned anti-ship missiles in the Luzon Strait to the southeast of Taiwan in April to deter any possible attack by China on Taiwan.
INSKEEP: Interesting. Well, what does China say to that?
KUHN: China's foreign ministry criticized Hegseth's speech as divisive, smearing China and rehashing Cold War logic. I spoke to Peking University international relations expert Wang Dong at the forum. And he told me he was not impressed that, as he saw it, Hegseth was playing up China's threat, asking regional governments to spend more on defense while basically making a sales pitch for U.S. weaponry. Here's what he said.
WANG DONG: Raise the military budget and buy more things, expensive missiles, you know, all these kind of equipment from the United States - and do what? - help defend American hegemony.
KUHN: Now, the U.S. is trying to sell arms or coproduce arms with allies and partners in Europe and the Middle East to get them to do more of the work of deterring U.S. rivals. So there's some similarities.
INSKEEP: Well, let's think about who the real audience is for a speech like this. It's not China, of course. It's these other Asian nations that the United States wants on its side and apparently wants to spend more on defense. How did Hegseth make his specific pitch to motivate them?
KUHN: Right, he's talking to China's neighbors. And he said that the U.S. understands that these Asian nations are naturally close to China geographically and economically, but he told them to watch out because too much economic dependence on China can leave them vulnerable to coercion. I spoke to Choi Shing Kwok, who's director of the Yusof Ishak Institute, a government-funded think tank in Singapore. And I asked him, what does he think of Hegseth's warning? Here's what he said.
CHOI SHING KWOK: I think that's fair. And in fact, in the survey that my institute conducts every year, most countries recognize China's dominant economic influence but also views that with some caution and wants to diversify.
KUHN: So China's neighbors have centuries of experience in dealing with a militarily, technologically and economically dominant China. They're well aware of the risks.
INSKEEP: Is it hard for the U.S. to prove that it will always be there for those Asian countries?
KUHN: Well, Hegseth's speech was very much "America First." It seemed to be a policy of arming U.S. allies to deter U.S. adversaries, but there are a lot of caveats there. Not all allies share the same degree of concern about China as a threat, and those allies cannot match or rival China's military on their own without the U.S.
INSKEEP: NPR's Anthony Kuhn in Seoul. Thanks so much.
KUHN: You're welcome.
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