Australia & Japan Are Seemingly Having Second Thoughts About The De Facto Asian NATO
Playing any role in a Sino-US war over Taiwan, even a logistical one, could provoke Chinese retaliation.
The Financial Times reported that US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby recently asked Australian and Japanese defense officials how their countries would respond to a war over Taiwan. He also asked them to boost defense spending after NATO just agreed to do so during its latest summit. Colby lent credence to this report by tweeting that he’s “focused on implementing the President’s America First, common sense agenda of restoring deterrence and achieving peace through strength.”
This sequence shows that Trump 2.0 is serious about “Pivoting (back) to (East) Asia” in order to more robustly contain China. This requires freezing the Ukrainian Conflict and assembling a de facto Asian NATO, however, both of which are uncertain. As regards the first, Trump is being drawn into “mission creep”, while the latter is challenged by Australia’s and Japan’s reluctance to step up. To elaborate, they seemingly expected the US to do all the “heavy lifting”, just like NATO expected till recently as well.
That would explain why they didn’t have a clear answer to Colby’s inquiry about how their count
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