US warns Asia of ‘imminent’ China threat; French Prez suggests alliance

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth reassured allies in the Indo-Pacific on Saturday that they will not be left alone to face increasing military and economic pressure from China, while insisting that they also contribute more to their own defence.

He said Washington will bolster its defences overseas to counter what the Pentagon sees as rapidly developing threats by Beijing, particularly in its aggressive stance toward Taiwan.

China has conducted numerous exercises to test what a blockade would look like of the self-governing island, which Beijing claims as its own and the US has pledged to defend.

China’s army “is rehearsing for the real deal”, Hegseth said in a keynote speech at a security conference in Singapore. “We are not going to sugarcoat it — the threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent.” The head of China’s delegation accused Hegseth of making “groundless accusations”.

Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a global security conference hosted by the International Institute for Security Studies, Hegseth said China is no longer just building up its military forces to take Taiwan, it’s “actively training for it, every day”.

He urged Indo-Pacific countries to increase defence spending to levels similar to the 5 per cent of their gross domestic product European nations are now pressed to contribute.

He also repeated a pledge made by previous administrations to bolster the US military in the Indo-Pacific to provide a more robust deterrent.

Instead, US military resources from the Indo-Pacific have been regularly pulled to support military needs in the West Asia and Europe, especially since the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. In the first few months of President Donald Trump’s second term, that’s also been the case.

Hegseth was asked why the US pulled those resources if the Indo-Pacific is the priority theatre. He did not directly answer but said the shift of resources was necessary to defend against Houthi missile attacks launched from Yemen, and to bolster protections against illegal immigration into the US.

French President Emmanuel Macron has called on European and Asian nations to work together to build a “positive new alliance” to avoid being dragged into the growing rivalry between the US and China.

“Let's build a positive new alliance between Europe and Asia, based on our common norms, on our common principles. Our shared responsibility is to ensure with others that our countries are not collateral victims of the imbalances linked to the choices made by the superpowers,” the leader of Europe’s second-largest economy added.

“We have a challenge of revisionist countries that want to impose under the name of spheres of influence — in reality, spheres of coercion; countries that want to control areas from the fringe of Europe to the archipelagos in the South China Sea,” he added.