“‘I think what Beijing is pursuing — and it’s a rational interest — is hegemonic authority over Asia,’ said Elbridge Colby, the former Pentagon official who was the main writer of the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy, which focuses on how the American military should reshape itself for great-power competition with Russia and particularly China…
“‘We need to change things on Taiwan to improve the deterrent and make clearer where we stand,’ said Mr. Colby, who added that the United States had to ‘end any remaining ambiguity about how we’d react to the use of force.’ Without that, China may well doubt that Mr. Trump sees Taiwan’s de facto independence as a vital American interest…”