President-elect Donald Trump is moving at record speed to nominate Cabinet officials and select White House staffers, especially in the area of national security policy. The world is watching and waiting, especially our allies and adversaries in the Indo-Pacific. The China hawks are back, and that most likely means that the United States will actually (instead of rhetorically) “pivot” to the Indo-Pacific. The Cold War with China is about to intensify. Let’s begin with Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth, currently a Fox News analyst and a decorated combat veteran of the Afghan and Iraq wars. Hegseth has stated that China is building an army that is specifically dedicated to defeating the U.S. Hegseth believes that America’s armed forces need to be more lethal, less concerned with “diversity, equity and inclusion,” and focused on winning wars. China, he believes, wants to take over Taiwan and gain control over its semiconductor industry. China’s leaders, he recently remarked, “have a full-spectrum long-term view of not just regional but global domination.” Hegseth will likely advocate for shifting resources from the Ukraine war to bolstering our ability to deter and if necessary defeat China in the western Pacific.  Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, also a retired army combat veteran, says that China is an “existential threat,” and has called for the U.S. to arm Taiwan “now before its too late.” Like Trump, Waltz has also urged Taiwan’s leaders to provide more for their own defense. Waltz values America’s alliances with Japan and South Korea, and sees India as a potential valuable ally against China. Waltz compares our current struggle with China to the 20th-century Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union. He is more supportive of Ukraine than Hegseth, but has also urged our European allies to provide more help in a war that affects them more than it does the United States. Perhaps the biggest China hawk on Trump’s new team is Secretary of State nominee Sen. Marco Rubio. Rubio has warned that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan may happen in the next few years. “We must do all we can to deter an attack on Taiwan,” Rubio said in 2022, “or we risk losing the Indo-Pacific region to the Chinese Communist Party.” Rubio is probably more interventionist than Trump or some of his other advisers, but on China he is in lockstep with other Trump national security picks.  Meanwhile, Trump has nominated New York Rep. Elise Stefanik to be America’s UN ambassador. Stefanik has been an outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its influence operations within the United States. Last year, Stefanik traveled to the Indo-Pacific region to meet with allied leaders in Japan, Singapore, and Thailand, where she pledged to “continue to strengthen key alliances and partnerships in the region” in the face of what she called China’s encroachment in the Indo-Pacific. Trump’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard, another army veteran, for director of national intelligence (DNI), is not so much a China hawk as a Ukraine war skeptic, who like Trump was highly critical of the interventionist policies of Bush 43, Obama, and Biden. She previously opposed Trump’s trade war with China, but also warned that Biden’s policies were pushing China and Russia closer together. For CIA director, Trump has selected former DNI Director John Ratcliffe, described as a “hardliner against China.” Ratcliffe was quoted as saying that “Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily, and technologically.”  Trump’s picks should come as no surprise, and it is likely that sub-cabinet positions and other national security and military positions will complement those at the top. Toward the end of Trump’s first term as president, the China “superhawks” (to borrow Josh Rogin’s term in Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century) were ascendant. Rogin noted that after two years of infighting, the “hardliners in the Trump administration ultimately succeeded in moving the government closer to a competitive stance vis-à-vis China than any administration that had come before.” This was no small feat given the consensus behind engagement with China that dominated post-Cold War thinking since the early 1990s. Trump started to reverse that in his first term, but the Biden administration shifted back to “competitive engagement,” a policy that emboldened the CCP to place even more pressure on Taiwan. Moreover, Biden’s support for a Ukrainian victory in its war with Russia moved Russia closer to China.  Trump’s picks thus far demonstrate a consensus on a much firmer China policy — a recognition that post-Cold War engagement was a strategic failure that facilitated the rise of a new peer competitor to the United States. Trump and these advisers surely don’t want war with China, but they understand that the best way to avoid war is to prepare for it in such a way that the adversary is deterred. That will be the most important mission of Trump’s new China hawks. READ MORE: The Growing Irrelevance of the Mainstream Media Trump’s Well-Chosen Promises Would Bush’s Endorsement Help Harris? The post With Trump’s Presidency, the China Hawks Are Back appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.