Forget Biden-era alliances—Trump wants Indo-Pacific partners to pay up or fall in line

By Monish Tourangbam In August 2024, Joe Biden’s top foreign and national security team wrote a joint op-ed for The Washington Post lauding his Indo-Pacific diplomacy, which the authors argued had made America’s future more secure.According to Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Lloyd Austin, one of the core achievements of Biden’s diplomacy in the region was upgrading the “hub and spoke” model to an “integrated, interconnected network of partnerships” through minilaterals and trilaterals, including the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) and the Australia, UK and US (AUKUS) grouping. Seen in this context, what does the US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s recently concluded trip to Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, and Japan in the Indo-Pacific region stand for? Did it succeed in its primary aim of reassuring America’s allies in the face of China’s aggression?Re-establishing deterrence’ in Indo-Pacific Region Hegseth’s Indo-Pacific trip assumed critical importance at a time when trust in America’s foreign policy, trade policy and national security apparatus is weakening, and amid intense questioning of President Donald Trump’s national security team by the US Congress over an inadvertent Signal chat group leak that detailed real-time war plans for missile targets on Houthi rebels. The trip also came close on the heels of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard’s tour of the region, which included visits to Japan, Thailand, and India. Taken together with the foreign ministers’ meeting of the Quad countries shortly after Trump’s inauguration, these developments reflect the Trump administration’s strategic prioritisation of the Indo-Pacific region. In fact, while addressing the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels on 12 February, Hegseth contended, “Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”“We also face a peer competitor in the Communist Chinese with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity, and making the resourcing tradeoffs to ensure deterrence does not fail,” Hegseth said. Therefore, in viewing China as the only country with both the intent and capability to challenge America’s primacy in the international system, there is broad continuity from the Biden administration to the current Trump administration. However, Hegseth’s call for “re-establishing” deterrence to counter Chinese aggression—made while in the Philippines—suggests a degree of disdain for the Biden administration’s approach, which intended to stitch together a network of alliances and partnerships through the operationalisation of “integrated deterrence”. Hegseth emphasised the Trump administration’s intent to “deploy additional advanced military capabilities for joint training, enhance interoperability for ‘high-end operations,’ and prioritize defense industrial cooperation” with the Philippines specifically. Moreover, the US has committed $500 million “in foreign military financing and other security assistance to support the Philippines military modernization.” Hegseth’s visit also coincided with the start of the 2025 iteration of the comprehensive US-Philippines Balikantan military exercise. While in Tokyo, Hegseth said that US-Japan security cooperation in the coming days would include “speeding up a Biden administration-era plan to create a new joint U.S.-Japan military command in Tokyo,” calling it a “war-fighting headquarters”. Hegseth also promised more joint military exercises in the Okinawa islands. An op-ed in China’s Global Times highlighted the absence of South Korea from Hegseth’s Indo-Pacific travel itinerary. While it primarily pointed to the political turmoil and leadership crisis in South Korea as the reason for skipping a key US ally, the article also highlighted the greater geostrategic value of the Philippines compared to South Korea—citing its proximity to Taiwan and the South China Sea.