Pete Hegseth used the most prominent stage in Asian security to deliver a blunt message to American allies on Saturday: spend more, and spend it soon. Addressing the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, the US defence secretary called on governments across the Indo-Pacific to ramp up military budgets to match what he described as China's "historic military buildup", casting the next few years as a narrow window in which the region's balance of power will be set for a generation.
The keynote, delivered on the second morning of the three-day forum convened by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, was the first detailed statement of Washington's regional posture since President Donald Trump met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing earlier this month. That summit produced an agreement to reset relations and manage disputes, and Hegseth leaned into the thaw, telling delegates that US-China relations were "better than they've been in many years" even as he warned of "rightful alarm" at the pace and reach of Chinese military activity.
The balancing act — reassurance toward Beijing paired with pressure on allies — ran through the speech. Hegseth pointed to Chinese operations around contested reefs in the South China Sea, expanded patrols near Japan and a steadily growing nuclear and naval inventory as evidence that the buildup was not rhetorical. Yet he framed the American answer not as a unilateral surge but as a demand that partners shoulder more of the load, echoing the burden-sharing argument the administration has pressed on European capitals over Ukraine.
One word was conspicuously absent. Hegseth did not mention Taiwan by name, an omission that drew immediate attention in a hall accustomed to parsing American statements for signals on the island. Previous US defence chiefs have used the Singapore podium to restate Washington's commitment to Taiwan's security, and the silence was read by some delegates as deliberate — a gesture calibrated to avoid puncturing the fragile understanding reached in Beijing, by others as a worrying softening of resolve.
China's absence shaped the event as much as anything said on stage. Defence Minister Dong Jun stayed away for a second consecutive year, and Beijing sent in his place a delegation of experts and scholars from its military academies, led by Major General Meng Xiangqing of the National Defence University. The decision to cede the ministerial platform left the United States to dominate the agenda and denied the forum the set-piece rebuttal that Chinese ministers have delivered in years past.
For the assembled defence ministers, military chiefs and diplomats, the speech sharpened a dilemma that has grown more acute as the war in the Middle East and Russia's grinding campaign in Ukraine have stretched American attention across three theatres at once. Several delegations have privately questioned how much bandwidth Washington can devote to the Pacific while it brokers a ceasefire between the United States and Iran, and Hegseth's emphasis on allied spending was, in part, an answer: the region's security would depend on what its own governments were prepared to fund.
Hegseth singled out the strength of the American alliance network as the decisive advantage China cannot match, citing treaty commitments to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia and the deepening web of bilateral and trilateral arrangements that has grown up alongside them. The message to those capitals was that the architecture would hold only if they invested in it — a theme that landed differently across a room containing both treaty allies and states that have worked hard to avoid choosing sides.
The forum continues through the weekend with a schedule thick with bilateral meetings, where the real diplomacy of the dialogue tends to happen away from the plenary hall. Hegseth was expected to hold a series of one-on-one sessions with regional counterparts, and the test of his keynote will be less in the applause it drew than in whether the governments he addressed translate the call into the budgets and basing decisions that Washington is counting on.