While much of the world's attention is currently focused on the economic fallout of the tariffs imposed by the United States on allies and designated adversaries alike, they are only one part of a much wider strategy aimed at what U.S. policymakers themselves claim is a bid to maintain the U.S. as "the world's dominant superpower."

These were the words used by now White House advisor Peter Navarro, who, in 2023, wrote the "Chapter 26: Trade" for the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 policy paper now being put into policy under the Donald Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based conservative American think tank that anticipated Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election, released the plan aimed at restructuring the U.S. federal government and centralizing executive power in April 2023.

As was laid out in Project 2025, the Western media now admits these tariffs are less about "reindustrializing" the U.S. and instead seek to "isolate" China as a means of reasserting American dominance worldwide.

In many ways, recent U.S. policy aims to isolate China through tariffs in the same way the previous Joe Biden administration sought to isolate and undermine Russia economically through sanctions.

Just as with Russia, the U.S. is also positioning its own and its allies' military forces—including the Philippines—to encircle and contain China, and even precipitate a conflict with China as a means of justifying further means of isolation.

Another key component of this strategy is China's own island province of Taiwan.

A systematic violation

Despite decades of insisting it upholds the one-China policy, the U.S. has not only violated this policy, but has done so with increasing frequency and severity in recent years, all as a means of using the island to go against the rest of China.

The U.S. Government's agreement with Beijing, documented in the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, states, "The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Straits maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves."

In the communiqué, the U.S. also affirmed that its ultimate objective was the "withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan."

Initially, the U.S. did indeed withdraw its forces from the island province, but subsequent enactment of laws such as the so-called "Taiwan Relations Act" and the "Six Assurances" negated U.S. commitments to Beijing and its obligations under international law. It maintained ties to the administration in Taipei, continued military support through arms sales and, in recent years, redeployed U.S. troops to Taiwan itself, both under the first Trump administration and the subsequent Joe Biden administration.

The U.S. has also continued to expand arms shipments to the island province, including a $2-billion arms deal reported on by CNN in late 2024.

Within the first few weeks in office, the Trump administration sailed U.S. warships through the Taiwan Straits as another means of provoking Beijing.

The U.S. has also ramped up unauthorized visits to Taipei by serving U.S. politicians including then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in 2022 and more recent visits by senators including Pete Ricketts this year.

At the crux of growing U.S.-China tensions is ultimately America's refusal to accept China's rise and its own decline as "the world's dominant superpower." In a bid to sabotage China's rise and reassert its own dominance, the U.S. seeks to encircle and contain China using its own island province of Taiwan and neighboring nations in the same way it is attempting to encircle and contain Russia in Europe.

A familiar and dangerous pattern

This process reflects similar agreements made with Russia following the fall of the Soviet Union regarding the expansion of NATO into former Soviet territories, development and deployment of specific types of weapons, and the growing encroachment and containment of Russia in subsequent decades as these agreements were systematically violated.

Today, tens of thousands of U.S. troops are stationed both across Eastern Europe and the Asia-Pacific region to contain both Russia and China.

If Ukraine served as a catalyst to escalate significantly against Russia, including through coercing nations around the globe to cut diplomatic and economic ties with Russia in a bid to isolate Moscow, the recent tariffs and a possible conflict over Taiwan threaten to do likewise to China.

The U.S. has also attempted to politically subvert and capture nations all along China's periphery including across Central, Southeast and East Asia. Ongoing political turmoil and even conflict has resulted from these policies, including an ongoing war in Myanmar, right on China's border. Most concerning of all is the use of the Philippines, Japan and the Republic of Korea to station growing numbers of U.S. troops and weapons specifically aimed at threatening China. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's first trip to Asia was to the Philippines, one of the countries located closest to Taiwan of China, to "counter China's aggression in the Indo-Pacific region," CNN reported.

The "aggression" the U.S. refers to are minor maritime disputes in the South China Sea, previously managed bilaterally. The U.S. has since injected itself in a bid to escalate the disputes into a regional or even global crisis.

U.S.-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)recognizes the vast majority of trade moving through the South China Sea is either originating in China or on its way to China. Since 2023, the Philippines itself has counted China as its largest export and import partner.

Thus, the U.S. is not building a military partnership with the Philippines to protect it from its largest and most important trading partner, but instead to transform it into a Ukraine-style proxy to use against China—and just as is the case with Ukraine—entirely at the Philippines' own cost.

This cost is already rising. Infrastructure projects already underway between China and the Philippines aimed at improving the economy and quality of life for Filipinos were canceled with public funds diverted to military projects aimed at China.

Despite the U.S. claims that it seeks to uphold freedom of navigation and defend peace and stability across the "Indo-Pacific," Washington serves as the greatest threat to the region—and all in a bid to maintain unwarranted dominance—a region the U.S. is not even geographically located within.

Considering the decades of uninterrupted bipartisan policy that has led it to this juncture, it is unlikely Washington will change its course. For this reason, it is up to China and its partners to insist on regional and cross-Taiwan Straits peace and cooperation, while creating defenses against not only U.S. military force and that of its proxies, but also against the more indirect political and economic interference and coercion (soft power) that has played such a central role in facilitating Washington's policies across Asia and around the world for decades. 

The author is a Bangkok-based independent geopolitical analyst and former U.S. Marine

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson

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