Following US President Donald Trump’s airstrikes on Iran’s three major nuclear facilities — Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — on June 22, analysts have been questioning what the decision, seemingly signaling a more active US military role in shaping the Middle East security landscape, means for the global strategy of the US.
The Trump administration had declared that the Indo-Pacific region and Taiwan would be its “priority theater.”
However, the strikes should not be seen in isolation. As Johns Hopkins University Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs Hal Brands wrote for Bloomberg, Israel’s war against Iran was about three overlapping conflicts: a war for the future of the Middle East, a war for nuclear non-proliferation and a war that squeezes the axis of aggressors — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and its proxies — by pressuring its weakest link.
Trump’s bombing of Iran — something Israeli leaders had long requested from former US presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump in his first term and Joe Biden, but were denied — has not only shown that Trump is willing to act decisively in theaters he believes to be of primary interest to his administration, but also demonstrated the centrality of unpredictability to his foreign policy strategy. By giving Iran a two-week deadline to negotiate, only to order strikes just days later, the administration showed that it views ambiguity and unpredictability as a key tool to enhance US leverage over allies and adversaries.
This approach has deeply unnerved China.
Trump’s departure from the predictable patterns of previous US presidents, under whom Beijing believed it could secure incremental gains with minimal consequences, might force Beijing to reassess its assumptions. In the Indo-Pacific region, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) cannot be sure of Trump’s threshold for escalation, or confident in how the US might respond if China raises tensions around Taiwan.
“The Trump administration sees the previous US strategy — which aimed to build and maintain a global order led by the United States — as a misguided effort that has sapped US power,” academics Jennifer Lind and Daryl Press wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine. “Instead of trying to create global order, the Trump administration now appears to be pursuing a more focused strategy: prioritization.”
Trump’s decisiveness in the Middle East, coupled with his willingness to scale back US commitments in regions deemed secondary — such as Europe — while urging allies to take greater responsibility for their own defense in their region, reflects a strategy of prioritization. If implemented with strategic discipline and translated into sustained, tangible policy, this approach would improve global security and bolster the collective defense of democratic nations, benefiting Taiwan and its partners by keeping authoritarian expansionism in check.
However, even with the US’ strategy of prioritization, Taiwan must not rest on its laurels, and should demonstrate that it takes its defense seriously and fully grasps the severity of the threat posed by China.
Taiwan this year plans to raise defense spending to about 3 percent of GDP through a special budget, up from the initially earmarked 2.45 percent. While this would mark the highest defense allocation in Taiwan’s history, with NATO nations such as Poland already spending nearly 5 percent of GDP, it might still fall short of meeting the expectations of the Trump administration’s “peace through strength” doctrine.
The global trend among democracies is shifting toward significantly higher defense spending and it is important for President William Lai’s (賴清德) administration not to appear to be getting left behind.
