OPINION — Out with a “rules-based international order” and in with “U.S. core national interests”, according to the U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2025. The NSS was not well-received by many of the 32 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Indeed, saying good-bye to the U.S. as the guarantor of global order will be difficult for many of our allies and partners, who will be expected to contribute more to their own defense and security.

Europe and the Middle East received lower priority in the NSS, with minimal criticism of Russia. The Western Hemisphere, however, is the primary security region for the U.S., under a modern “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”, with a focus on border control, mass migration, narco-trafficking and international crime and terrorism as principal threats to our nation’s security.

The NSS correctly in my view focused on the importance of the Indo-Pacific region. It called for expanding commercial and other relations with India to contribute to Indo-Pacific security. The NSS called on the Quad – Australia, Japan, India and the U.S., — to align its actions with allies and partners to prevent the domination by any single competitor nation. The NSS cited the need for the U.S. to invest in research to preserve and advance our advantage in cutting-edge military and dual-use technology, to include undersea, space, nuclear, AI, quantum computing and autonomous systems and the energy to fuel these domains.

The NSS correctly focused on Taiwan and its dominance of semiconductor production and, also, Taiwan’s direct access to the Second Island Chain, splitting Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters, and the one-third of global shipping that passes annually through the South China Sea and its implications for the U.S. economy. The NSS is clear in stating that deterring a conflict over Taiwan is a priority, making it clear that the U.S. does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.

The NSS calls on our allies and partners to allow the U.S. military greater access to their ports and other facilities, to spend more on their own defense, and most importantly to invest in capabilities aimed at deterring aggression.

Japan and South Korea are encouraged to increase defense spending, with new capabilities to deter adversaries and protect the First Island Chain. The NSS says the U.S. will harden and strengthen our military presence in the Western Pacific. Indeed, preventing conflict requires a vigilant posture in the Indo-Pacific, a renewed defense industrial base, greater military investment from us and from allies and partners, and winning the economic and technological competition over the long run.

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The Indo-Pacific is the source of almost half the world’s GDP and will grow over the century. It will be “among the next century’s key economic and geopolitical battlegrounds.”

The conventional wisdom, as cited in the NSS, is that China duped us into believing that by opening our markets to China and encouraging American business to invest in China, starting in 1979 when China was a poor and backward nation, we would facilitate China’s entry into the so-called “rules-based international order.” And as the NSS mentions: “This did not happen. China got rich and powerful and used its wealth and power to its considerable advantage.”

But there were leaders in China in the 1980s and 1990s who believed in democratization and the rule of law and open elections. Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang was removed from his leadership position because he, like his predecessor, Hu Yaobang, believed in democracy and the rule of law. Mr. Zhao was removed in June 1989 because he supported the student demonstrators at Tiananmen, and Mr. Hu was removed, also by Deng Xiaoping, for indulging in bourgeois liberalization and advocating democracy. A few years later, Premiers Wen Jiabao and Zhu Rongji, like Messrs. Hu and Zhao before them, were advocates for democratization and free and fair elections. Currently, there may be other senior officials in China who advocate for democratization and the rule of law.

The NSS is a powerful document, focusing on the Western Hemisphere and the security threat to the U.S. emanating from that region. And the U.S. focus on the Indo-Pacific region and deterring aggression in the First Island Chain while ensuring no unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait are clear and unambiguous goals of the Trump Administration. Getting the support of regional allies and partners will be an important part of this national security strategy.

This column by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joseph DeTrani was first published in The Washington Times

OPINION — China uses a layered approach in the South China Sea that blends military power, paramilitary forces, legal instruments, and political signaling. Beijing has asserted “historic rights” over most of the waterway in the past two decades or so, via the nine-dash line strategy. This strategy overlaps the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of several Southeast Asian states. A 2016 international law tribunal convened under UNCLOS ruled overwhelmingly against these claims. However, China rejected the ruling and continues to behave as before, trying to assert de facto control in the area. This strategy is reinforced by the use of 'official maps', textbooks, and diplomatic statements aiming to slowly set down the notion that the territorial waters there are under a Chinese sphere.

In the Spratly and Paracel Islands, China has transformed reefs since the early to mid 2010s into large artificial islands, where it constructs airfields, ports, radars, and missile sites, dramatically expanding China’s ability to monitor and, if necessary, contest and harass surface and air traffic across much of the South China Sea. They also serve as logistics hubs that support the constant presence of Coast Guard, navy, and militia vessels.

China is testing just how much military risk the United States is willing to face in order to protect its regional allies. Their primary target? The Philippines, an avid American ally in the region.

Chinese coercion directed at Manila is carried out daily not just by destroyers but by white-hulled Coast Guard ships and ostensibly civilian vessels organized as a maritime militia. These platforms ram, water-cannon, block, or sideswipe Philippine vessels and increasingly use tools like signal jamming and close-in maneuvers against Philippine resupply missions to Second Thomas Shoal and patrols near Scarborough Shoal. Actions are calibrated to be intimidating, sometimes injurious, but still below the threshold of what most governments would label “armed attack.”

These efforts go beyond short-term tactics. They are strategic in nature. China appears less focused on legal recognition than on practical control. If foreign militaries and commercial operators must factor in Chinese reactions for transiting, fishing, or exploration, Beijing achieves much of what formal sovereignty would deliver.

For Beijing, the South China Sea is part of the “near seas” in Chinese maritime doctrine, making it a defensive bastion that must be secured. But by employing artificial island bases and sending out to sea a number of maritime patrols, China seeks to disrupt American and allied activities in the South China Sea while advancing its own power projection further east and south, into the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

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Control over “blue national territory” is tightly linked to Chinese Communist Party narratives of national rejuvenation. By standing firm in the South China Sea, it bolsters PRC leadership legitimacy and makes compromise politically costly internally. Essentially, Xi Jinping appears to be aiming for a Sino-centric maritime order in which neighboring states de facto - if not de jure at some point - accept Chinese rule as a fact of life and where outside powers operate only on terms that Beijing deems acceptable.

Washington’s declared aims in the South China Sea are the preservation of the freedom of navigation and overflight according to international law.

To achieve these goals the United States uses a combination of naval power, alliance creation and military capability development. The United States Navy ships often come close to Chinese-held land and other maritime areas that China or others claim illegally. It does the latter to demonstrate that America will not tolerate any of these claims. These are high-profile but relatively short-lived operations. The above policy is enforced by the U.S. 7th Fleet (based in Japan). There are also more bases throughout the region in partnership with the Philippines.

Big, complicated exercises and joint patrols with the Philippines, Japan, Australia and others build interoperability as well as signal that any serious conflict would not take place strictly on a bilateral basis.

American officials who point out to the 2016 decision, stress that disagreements must be settled in compliance with international law and publicly reiterate that the United States - Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty pertains to American armed forces, public ships or aircraft coming under attack in the South China Sea. This has been a more frequent trend in recent years.

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What the U.S. Should Do

The United States should embed U.S. presence in sensitive missions, when Manila consents. Instead of sending out stand-alone destroyer transits, the U.S. ought to incorporate freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) as part of logistics missions or surveillance patrols and multilateral exercises. Publicly, Washington should continue to declare that significant attacks on Philippine government ships and aircraft comes under the Mutual Defense Treaty. The U.S. should reiterate privately to Chinese officials what responses it may evoke from the United States - economic sanctions, change in military posture, joint deployments - so that Chinese leaders know where they are headed if they keep these tactics up.

In addition to donating patrol boats, the United States and allies should also assist the Philippines and potentially other claimant states in fielding new coastal defense missiles, unmanned systems and integrated maritime domain awareness networks. Such instruments make it easier for frontline states to detect and respond to incursions with both greater speed and credibility.

China likes to negotiate one on one — and that’s when it has its own leverage. The United States needs to cultivate overlapping coalitions rather than a simple hub-and-spoke model. Institutionalize 'mini-lateral' groupings; U.S. - Japan - Philippines and U.S. - Australia - Philippines patrols, exercises, and intelligence-sharing agreements would make it more difficult for China to pressure any one state without having to face several others.

Communication links with Beijing such as political and operational hotlines should be tested to ensure they will work under stress. The aim is to be predictable and resolute, to minimize the chances that miscalculation leads to uncontrolled escalation.

The South China Sea has turned into a laboratory for the interaction among power, law and norms in an age of strategic contention. China’s use of maritime power looks to transform disputed waters into a zone over which China can make effective, if not legally exclusive, rules and enforce them through militarized outposts, continuous presence, and the narrative fiction of historical rights.

U.S. policy has preserved core principles - freedom of navigation and treaty commitments - but has not prevented Beijing from strengthening its position or normalizing gray-zone coercion. Washington’s task is not to contain China in absolutist terms, but to ensure that coercive changes to the status quo do not become the region’s operating default. That requires more concrete deterrence at key flashpoints, deeper empowerment of frontline states, and a denser web of regional cooperation - combined with realistic crisis planning to manage the risks that come with sustained great-power competition at sea.

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The wars in Ukraine and Gaza must stop. Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign nation with 1994 security assurances from Russia, has killed or maimed tens of thousands of combatants and civilians. Efforts by President Donald Trump to end this war have failed, with an emboldened Vladimir Putin escalating hostilities in Ukraine, while probing the credibility of NATO, flying drones into Poland and Romania and recently violating Estonia’s airspace. This is the Putin who lamented the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and vowed to recreate the Russian Empire. And that’s what he’s doing. Georgia and Crimea in 2008 and 2014 was a prelude to his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – are next, on Putin’s quest to recreate the Russian Empire.

It's obvious what Putin is doing. He got away with Georgia and Crimea and Putin is confident he’ll prevail in Ukraine with minimal consequences. So, what could the UN do to sanction Russia for its violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty? Indeed, there should be an outcry from the UN demanding that Mr. Putin halt his invasion of Ukraine and enter negotiations with Kyiv.

Iran’s continued refusal to permit UN nuclear inspections and refusal to resume nuclear talks with the U.S. resulted in the reimposition — on September 28 — of sanctions lifted in 2015. So, given that Iran has not changed its attitude and in fact has become more defiant, “snap back” sanctions ban nuclear enrichment, establish an arms embargo and ban tests and transfers of ballistic missiles. It’s clear that Iran wants the option to acquire nuclear weapons capability. A nuclear-armed Iran will be an existential threat to Israel -- an adversary Iran wants to annihilate – and the region.

But for Iran it’s more than acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism, working with its proxies – Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis -- to destabilize and terrorize the region. On September 17, the Department of State also designated three Iraqi militia groups aligned with Iran as terrorist organizations. These terrorist groups have attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and bases hosting U.S. and Canadian forces.

Indeed, the human rights situation in Iran is equally dismal. The 2009 presidential election protests and the 2022 killing of Mahsa Amini by the so-called morality police for incorrectly wearing her head scarf sparked national protests that were brutally suppressed by the ruling theocracy. Nationwide arrests and executions were conducted by a weak and corrupt theocracy that was threatened by the public and its outcry for justice and liberty.

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Ensuring that food and water are available to the people of Gaza is a priority objective, as is ending this bloody war. The onslaught in Gaza was caused by Hamas’s October 7 attacks that killed approximately 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and the abduction of 251 hostages. This was the bloodiest day for Israel since its independence on May 14, 1948. Indeed, Hamas is a terrorist organization closely affiliated with Iran, which provides Hamas with the weaponry and support needed for its acts of terrorism.

The situation in the South China Sea could escalate quickly between China and the Philippines. The irony is that a 2016 ruling by a UN-backed arbitration tribunal invalidated China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea, ruling overwhelmingly with the Philippines. The ruling was deemed final and binding, although China has rejected the ruling and continues to defy it.

These are just some of the national security issues the UN should openly discuss and attempt to resolve. The wars and turmoil in Myanmar, Sudan, Yemen, Haiti and Libya also require immediate UN attention. This is the mission of the UN.

This column by Cipher Brief Expert Joseph Detrani was first published in The Washington Times.

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