While the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy will reportedly highlight home front defense —securing America’s borders and justifying U.S. military efforts to counter cartels and drug trafficking —behind the scenes, Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby’s Pentagon is all China, all the time.
Identifying China as the main U.S. adversary is not a problem; China is the main U.S. adversary. The problem is that myopia is undermining most White House and Pentagon strategy, which treats China as a regional rather than a global competitor.
While Massad Boulos, President Donald Trump’s envoy for Africa, crisscrosses the continent to mediate ceasefires and commercial agreements, his piecemeal approach lacks any coherent effort to counter China. The State Department continues to slow-roll its Horn of Africa review, while Somali lobbyists seemingly have convinced senior White House officials that recognizing Somaliland will somehow bolster al Shabaab by allowing it to play the nationalist card. Frankly, National Security Council officials like Seb Gorka should understand that the current Somali government is both pro-Beijing and historically permissive toward al Shabaab. It is not a coincidence that the group has grown in proportion to U.S. deference to Mogadishu while Somaliland has denied its territory completely to the al Qaeda-affiliate.
Somaliland also allies with Taiwan, one of only two African countries that now does so. To throw either of these countries under the bus sends the wrong message and allows China to deliver a coup de grâce to American interests on the continent. Most recently, the Taiwanese coast guard started patrolling the Gulf of Aden using Somaliland as its logistical hub. Trump and Colby’s cancellation of coast guard support in countries such as Nigeria and the Ivory Coast also allows Chinese ships to overfish, undermining local economies and making Chinese loans more attractive.
In Iraq, too, U.S. pressure has paid dividends. The Iraqi government, for example, awarded Ankido a contract to build two data centers over a competing Huawei bid. Ankido is the only company in Iraq fighting against the introduction and proliferation of Chinese technologies in the national infrastructure. Yet, with the White House, State Department, and Pentagon largely ignoring Iraq or viewing it through the lens only of Iran, they risk such advances being undone. Businessmen and consultants close to a former prime minister have started a whispering campaign falsely tying Ankido to pro-Iranian militias. Accepting such a calumny would be the national security equivalent of an own-goal.
Trump’s team also fumbles efforts to counter China in South Asia. Pakistani leaders have transformed their country into a satrapy of China. Pakistan now owes China almost $30 billion due to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and other corrupt projects. That Trump tilts U.S. policy toward Islamabad and away from New Delhi encourages China to go on the offensive. Already, China occupies a Maryland-size chunk of Indian Kashmir, and it increasingly encroaches on Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state China now claims as its own that is more than twice the size of Taiwan. To throw India under the bus is not different than betraying Taiwan itself.
Part of Trump’s first-term legacy was resolving the debate about whether the United States should see China as a partner rather than an adversary; now, there is a broad consensus absent under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, whose administrations naively saw Beijing in a positive light.
Ironically, though, the Trump administration’s blindness to the need to counter China everywhere in the world could condemn Trump’s second-term legacy to allowing a competitive, if not strategic, defeat to Beijing. Surely, the National Security Council and Pentagon should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
