The administration’s fiscal year 2027 $1.45 trillion defense spending request represents the largest single-year defense topline since World War II, with significant resources aimed at the Indo-Pacific — a development that has drawn close attention from defense hawks, Asia watchers, and allies in the region alike.
But simply spending more is not, by itself, sufficient. The deeper question is whether this proposed budget is structured to sustain American strategy in the Pacific for the long term.
The budget comes on the heels of President Donald Trump’s Beijing summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping – the first visit of a U.S. president to the Middle Kingdom since Trump’s last trip there nearly a decade ago. Unlike last time, this visit yielded only modest commercial outcomes that included a Chinese order of 200 Boeing airplanes and a commitment to purchase at least $17 billion of U.S. agricultural products annually (compared with a $250 billion commitment in 2017).
And the trip only further muddied the waters on critical areas of disagreement. For instance, the Chinese bluntly warned the U.S. about “clashes and even conflicts” over Taiwan, while President Trump declared that U.S. arm sales to Taiwan, which are mandated by U.S. law, are “a very good negotiating chip” with Beijing, and added that he “wasn’t looking [for Taiwan] to go independent.” This lack of resolve likely left Taipei, as well as many U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, alarmed.
The Beijing visit — combined with the April Capitol Hill testimony of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, which also produced little in the way of policy substance — leaves more questions than answers about the U.S. strategy that this massive budget request is meant to underwrite.
So Much Overdue for U.S. Security in the Indo-Pacific
After more than a decade of underinvestment relative to the shifting balance of power away from the United States and Europe and toward the Indo-Pacific, U.S. defense resources for the theater are finally beginning to catch up to the rhetoric. The ramp-up in munitions production is overdue. The shipbuilding increase is overdue. The push to build out U.S. defense logistics west of the international date line is overdue. Under the request, the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI) will grow 16 percent to a total of $11.7 billion, for the first time satisfying all the requirements of the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command.
The hearings of the House and Senate Armed Services committees with Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Air Force General Dan Caine, and in the Senate, with Acting DoD Comptroller/Chief Financial Officer Jules W. Hurst III were a missed opportunity to examine the substance of the budget and the serious questions it raises about U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy. What should have been a rigorous examination of the administration’s historic $1.45 trillion defense request — an increase of $440.9 billion or 44 percent in defense spending from the current year — became a predictable round of political theater.
The new budget request comes up short on three counts when it comes to the Indo-Pacific.
The first problem is durability. Funds envisioned for key items relevant to the Indo-Pacific, such as the purchase of additional munitions and the planned purchase of F-35 jets, hinge on a separate budget “reconciliation” process that may not succeed. That’s not the mark of sound, multi-year planning. The Pentagon and the defense industrial base cannot plan multiyear production lines, shipyard expansions, or theater logistics based on funding that may not appear again. Shipyards, production lines, and logistics hubs take years to build, and they can’t be financed against money that may vanish after a single budget cycle. Building these investments into the Pentagon’s regular annual budget — even at a smaller headline number for each year — allows planners to actually plan, and would buy more lasting deterrence than a one-time approach that might evaporate on the whim of a single vote in the House or Senate.
The second problem in the budget request is the lack of prioritization, exemplified by the lack of connection between the sequencing and the strategy. The unclassified summary of the 2026 National Defense Strategy makes no mention of the massive new budget request, suggesting a lack of strategic coherence. The result is a budget in which the sixth generation F-47 and the F/A-XX jet programs, expanded shipbuilding, the drone enterprise, the munitions ramp-up, and a pay raise for the troops are all designated equal priorities, rather than being ordered in relation to the others.
When everything is a priority, nothing is. The munitions burn rate from recent operations in the Middle East is case in point: capabilities needed for Indo-Pacific contingencies have already been expended elsewhere, and the budget does not honestly reckon with that tradeoff.
The Imperative of Relationships for U.S. Military Access
The third problem is cooperative U.S. military access to the territory of allies. The Pacific Ocean is vast and unlike its potential adversaries, the U.S. homeland is thousands of miles away from a potential fight in the Indo-Pacific — what the Pentagon likes to call “the tyranny of distance.” Access, basing and overflight are as critical to military success in the region as any weapons platform, and U.S. military posture and U.S. and allied investments in military bases and facilities in Japan, Australia, Palau, the Northern Marianas, and the Philippines all depend on favorable diplomatic relationships with Tokyo, Manila, Canberra, and the Freely Associated States.
These relationships are all currently complicated by public pressure from top U.S. officials on Japan and South Korea over burden-sharing, the recently-completed review of the Australia-U.K.-U.S. (AUKUS) trilateral partnership, perceptions of inconsistent U.S. performance in meeting its obligations to the three Pacific Island nations under “Compacts of Free Association,” and uncertainty over the U.S. posture toward Taiwan. The Beijing summit did nothing to dispel that uncertainty, including the administration’s subsequent decision to pause the $14 billion arms package to Taipei. These developments are eroding the political foundation of the U.S. posture in the region.
A budget can purchase capabilities, but it cannot replace the relationships which underpin those basing rights and overflight permissions, and which give those capabilities deterrent value in the first place. Strengthening alliance relationships is the cheapest force-multiplier available, and it does not require new appropriations.
The second Trump administration can look to its first iteration for inspiration. The 2017 National Security Strategy stated: “We will strengthen our long-standing military relationships and encourage the development of a strong defense network with our allies and partners… We will maintain our strong ties with Taiwan in accordance with our “One China” policy, including our commitments under the Taiwan Relations Act to provide for Taiwan’s legitimate defense needs and deter coercion… We will re-energize our alliances with the Philippines and Thailand and strengthen our partnerships with Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and others to help them become cooperative maritime partners.” This is what strengthened relationships across the Indo-Pacific should look like – and what should be the basis of a bipartisan policy today.
The instinct behind the budget’s Indo-Pacific investments is right. But connecting the proposed spending to a more coherent strategy — and strengthening the alliance relationships that make a more robust forward presence possible — would produce an approach the region can take more seriously.
Settling for a topline number without those fixes would leave the United States with a massive budget ship without a policy rudder. It’s a problem the Beijing summit threw into sharper relief, as allies were left to parse competing U.S. and Chinese readouts about Taiwan and to wonder about other aspects of the administration’s China policy.
The Indo-Pacific aside, this budget request should also serve as an impetus for Congress to grapple with the alarming state of the nation’s fiscal health, including the national debt that now exceeds 100 percent of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The committee hearings over the last month regrettably failed to press these questions, but Congress should continue to demand answers from the administration for the American people.
