The U.S. national security community is publicizing its anxieties about China’s military build-up and Beijing’s security partnership with Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
Chinese Major General Hu Gangfeng at the 22nd Shangri-La Dialogue summit in Singapore on May 31, 2025. He fires back at U.S. defence chief Hegseth over his remarks at the event which involved ‘groundless accusations against China.’ (Photo: AFP)
The issue of Sino-American relations assumed center stage at the recent IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. The U.S. Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, used the occasion to issue his most public warning yet about a Chinese military threat to Taiwan. Other speakers at the Dialogue expressed concerns about strained Sino-American relations and the China-Russia defense alignment.
In his May 31 speech, Hegseth highlighted China’s military augmentation while clarifying the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific vision. “Through its massive military build-up and growing willingness to use military force to achieve its goals, including grey-zone tactics and hybrid warfare,” the Secretary observed, “China has demonstrated that it wants to fundamentally alter the region’s status quo.” Describing the situation as “a wake-up call, and an urgent one,” Hegseth’s remarks that “we are prepared to do what the Department of Defense does best: to fight and win decisively,” suggests a clearer U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan militarily.
Another of Hegseth’s objectives was to reassure U.S. allies and partners in Asia about U.S. security guarantees. Though calling on their governments to match Europeans’ commitments to boost defense spending, he insisted that the Pentagon supported “America First, not America alone” and would “be open and transparent with our allies and partners” about changes in U.S. force posture. Alluding to the absence of a senior PRC defense official at the meeting, Hegseth added that, “We are here to stay. As a matter of fact, we are here this morning, and somebody else is not.”
The PRC Foreign Ministry denounced the speech, accusing Hegseth of “provocations … intended to sow division,” having a “cold war mentality for bloc confrontation,” and defaming China by terming it a “threat.” Yet, a few days later, the Chinese media atypically leaked, in an implied warning, that its DF-5B intercontinental ballistic missile could carry a 3-4 megaton warhead some 12,000 km, manifestly sufficient to destroy any U.S. target. And Xi Jinping urged Donald Trump in their June 5 presidential phone conversation to handle the Taiwan question "with caution.”
On May 30, French President Emmanuel Macron became the first European leader to deliver the Dialogue’s inaugural address. In his speech, Macron foresaw “a risk of division of the world and a division between the two superpowers” that could “kill the global order.” He called attention to the “challenge of revisionist countries that want to impose spheres of coercion” over parts of Europe and “the archipelagos in the South China Sea … oblivious to international law.”
Underscoring the connections between European and Asian security, Macron warned that a failure to defeat Russian aggression against Ukraine could encourage Chinese aggression against Taiwan or the Philippines. He also castigated Beijing for failing to reign in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) at a time when North Korea’s munitions are killing Europeans and Pyongyang “is developing a massive nuclear arsenal unconstrained by China” in “alliance with Russia, a nuclear-weapons state.”
Challenging a core PRC security concern to minimize the European military presence in Asia, Macron suggested that, if current trends continue, France might relax its previous objections to NATO’s assuming a larger role in the Indo-Pacific region: “if China does not want NATO being involved in … in Asia, they should prevent, clearly, the DPRK to be engaged on the European soil.”
The U.S. government shares Macron’s concerns. One of the main themes of the 2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment, released in May by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), is the increasing military collaboration between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. According to the DIA, the collaboration will likely manifest itself in circumventing sanctions, pursuing regional conflicts, and influencing global institutions. Conversely, the four governments will strive to “compartmentalize” the frictions that arise between them.
Interestingly, the assessment finds that most cooperation involving the group occurs through “bilateral channels” rather than multilaterally because “these governments give priority to the transactional nature, discretion, and speed of bilateral partnerships.” For example, DIA expects that China will continue to partner with Russia’s armed forces on exercises and with Russian diplomacy in international institutions like the UN, while eschewing overt “lethal military assistance” that could “elicit reputational or economic costs” such as alienating European elites or incurring Western sanctions.
In exchange, Russia will increase the transfer of its missile, nuclear, and space expertise, materials, and technology to China, Iran, and the DPRK, advancing all three countries’ weapons of mass destruction capabilities. The Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in March 2025, likewise noted how this growing “adversarial cooperation” has “strengthened their individual and collective capabilities to threaten and harm the United States.”
According to the DIA, whereas Russian-DPRK defense cooperation has expanded substantially during the past two years, China and North Korea have “virtually no military cooperation.” Signs of Beijing’s unease over the Russia-DPRK defense partnership have been evident mostly in PRC officials’ aversion to discussing the alignment in public and the limited number of trilateral military activities. Chinese anxieties would be understandable. China would suffer if Russian policies catalyzed more DPRK provocations.
Despite Beijing’s anxieties regarding the Russia-North Korea military partnership, the DIA assesses that the PRC will shield the North from new international sanctions and exonerate DPRK provocations by holding the United States responsible “for failing to alleviate North Korea’s security concerns.” According to the ODNI, though Moscow “has been a catalyst for the evolving ties” among these U.S. adversaries, and Beijing has repeatedly denounced the concept of an axis binding these four countries, “China is critical to this alignment and its global significance, given the PRC’s particularly ambitious goals, and powerful capabilities and influence in the world.” U.S. policies regarding Russia, Iran, and North Korea remain under review, but Beijing’s ties with these countries could further intensify the Pentagon’s concerns about China.
