January 25, 2021
Some two decades ahead of schedule, on Jan. 12, the Trump administration declassified its Indo-Pacific Strategic Framework, a document outlining its national security strategy regarding Asia. The document is critical, and the timing of its declassification was telling.
As National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien noted in a statement announcing its release, the framework “has provided overarching strategic guidance for implementing the 2017 National Security Strategy within the world’s most populous and economically dynamic region.”
By making the document public just before Inauguration Day — as with itsotherrecentactionsandrevelationsregardingCommunist China — the outgoing Trump administration delivered a message to its would-be soft-on-China successor: Do not deviate from the course we have charted in countering our most formidable adversary. A return to appeasement becomes more difficult when the extent of the Chinese Communist Party’s malignant endeavors are laid bare, and the American people can see that there has been a robust plan for confronting it.