Since the start of his administration, President Biden has undertaken a strategy to expand American military access to bases in allied nations across the Asia-Pacific region and to deploy a range of new weapons systems there. He has also said the U.S. military would defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion.

On Wednesday, Mr. Biden signed a $95-billion supplemental military aid and spending bill that Congress had just passed and that includes $8.1 billion to counter China in the region. And Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken traveled to Shanghai and Beijing this week for meetings in which he planned to raise China’s aggressive actions around Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Earlier in April, the leaders of the Philippines and Japan met with Mr. Biden at the White House for the first such summit among the three countries. They announced enhanced defense cooperation, including naval training and exercises, planned jointly and with other partners. Last year, the Biden administration forged a new three-way defense pact with Japan and South Korea.

“In 2023, we drove the most transformative year for U.S. force posture in the Indo-Pacific region in a generation,” Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said in a statement following an interview.

The main change, he said, is having American forces distributed in smaller, more mobile units across a wide arc of the region rather than being concentrated at large bases in northeast Asia. That is largely intended to counter China’s efforts to build up forces that can target aircraft carriers or U.S. military outposts on Okinawa or Guam.

These land forces, including a retrained and refitted U.S. Marine littoral regiment in Okinawa, will now have the ability to attack warships at sea.

For the first time, Japan’s military will receive up to 400 of their own Tomahawk missiles — the newest versions of which can attack ships at sea as well as targets on land from over 1,150 miles away.

The Pentagon has also gained access rights for its troops at four additional bases in the Philippines that could eventually host U.S. warplanes and advanced mobile missile launchers, if Washington and Manila agree that offensive weaponry can be placed there.

The United States has bilateral mutual defense agreements with several allied nations in the region so that an attack on the assets of one nation could trigger a response from the other. Bolstering the U.S. troop presence on the soil of allied countries strengthens that notion of mutual defense.

In addition, the United States continues to send weapons and Green Beret trainers to Taiwan, a de facto independent island and the biggest flashpoint between the United States and China. Mr. Xi has said his nation must eventually take control of Taiwan, by force if necessary.

“We’ve deepened our alliances and partnerships abroad in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago,” Kurt Campbell, the new deputy secretary of state, told reporters last year, when he was the top Asia policy official in the White House.

What Deters China?

Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said in an interview in Taipei that the strengthened alliances and evolving military force postures were critical to deterring China.

“We are very happy to see that many countries in this region are coming to the realization that they also have to be prepared for further expansions of the P.R.C.,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

To some Chinese military strategists, the U.S. efforts are aimed at keeping China’s naval forces behind the “first island chain” — islands close to mainland Asia that run from Okinawa in Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines.

U.S. military assets along these islands could prevent Chinese warships from getting into the open Pacific waters farther east if conflict were to break out.

Leaders in China’s People’s Liberation Army also talk of establishing military dominance of the “second island chain” — which is farther out in the Pacific and includes Guam, Palau and West Papua.

But several conservative critics of the administration’s policies argue that the United States should be keeping major arms for its own use and that it is not producing new ships and major weapons systems quickly enough to deter China, which is rapidly growing its military.

Some American commanders acknowledge the United States needs to speed up ship production but say the Pentagon’s warfighting abilities in the region still outmatch China’s — and can improve quickly with the right political and budget commitments in Washington.

“We have actually grown our combat capability here in the Pacific over the last years,” said Adm. Samuel J. Paparo Jr., the incoming commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. “But our trajectory is still not a trajectory that matches our adversary. Our adversaries are building more capability and they’re building more warships — per year — than we are.”

Mr. Paparo said new American warships were still more capable than the ones China is building, and the U.S. military’s “total weight of fires” continued to outmatch that of the People’s Liberation Army, for now.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a Cold War-era arms control agreement between Washington and Moscow, prohibited land-based cruise or ballistic missiles with ranges between 311 miles and 3,420 miles. But after the Trump administration withdrew from the pact, the United States was able to develop and field a large number of small, mobile launchers for previously banned missiles around Asia.

Even with the deployment of new systems, the United States would still rely on its legacy assets in the region in the event of war: its bases in Guam, Japan and South Korea, and the troops and arms there.

All of the senior U.S. officials interviewed for this story say war with China is neither desirable nor inevitable — a view expressed publicly by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III. But they also insist that a military buildup and bolstering alliances, along with diplomatic talks with China, are important elements of deterring potential future aggression by Beijing.

Chen Jining, the Communist Party chief in Shanghai, told Mr. Blinken on Thursday that “whether China and the U.S. choose cooperation or confrontation, it affects the well-being of both peoples, of both nations, and also the future of humanity.”

Japan

The new deterrent effort is twofold for American forces: increasing patrolling activities at sea and the capabilities of its troop levels ashore.

To the former, the Pentagon has announced that U.S. Navy warships will participate in more drills with their Japanese counterparts in the western Ryukyu Islands near Taiwan and with Filipino ships in the South China Sea, where the Chinese coast guard has harassed ships and installations controlled by the Philippines.

To the latter, Marine Corps and Army units already in the Pacific have recently fielded medium- and long-range missiles mated to small, mobile trucks that would have been prohibited under the former treaty.

These trucks can be quickly lifted by Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft or larger cargo planes to new locations, or they can simply drive away to evade a Chinese counterattack. A new flotilla of U.S. Army watercraft being sent to the region could also be used to reposition troops and launchers from island to island.

In an interview last year with The New York Times, Gen. David H. Berger, then the Marine Corps’ top general, said the service had begun analyzing strategic choke points between islands where Chinese forces were likely to transit throughout the Pacific. He said the service had identified sites where Marine assault forces like the new Okinawa-based littoral regiment could launch attacks on Beijing’s warships using these new weapons.

Philippines

The Pentagon announced in February last year a new military base-sharing agreement with Manila, giving U.S. forces access to four sites in the Philippines for use in humanitarian missions, adding to the five sites previously opened to the Pentagon in 2014. Most of them are air bases with runways long enough to host heavy cargo planes.

Plotting their locations on a map shows the sites’ strategic value should the United States be called upon to defend their oldest treaty ally in the region, if the Philippines eventually agrees to allow the U.S. military to put combat troops and mobile missile systems there.

One, on the northern tip of Luzon Island, would give missile-launching trucks the ability to attack Chinese ships across the strait separating Philippines from Taiwan, while another site about 700 miles to the southwest would allow the U.S. to strike bases that China has built in the Spratly Islands nearby.

In 2023, the United States committed $100 million for “infrastructure investments” at the nine bases, with more funds expected this year.

Australia

The Pentagon has forged closer military ties with Australia and Papua New Guinea, extending America’s bulwark against potential attempts by the Chinese military at establishing dominance along the “second island chain.”

The Obama administration moved a number of littoral combat ships to Singapore and deployed a rotating force of Marines to Darwin, on Australia’s north coast, giving the Pentagon more assets that could respond as needed in the region.

Last year, the Biden administration greatly elevated its commitment to Australia, which is one of America’s most important non-NATO allies.

A new multibillion dollar agreement called AUKUS — for Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States — will permanently transfer some of the U.S. Navy’s newest Virginia-class attack subs to Canberra. The location of the new bases for those subs has not been announced, but the first group of Australian sailors who will crew them graduated from nuclear power training in America in January.

These stealthy submarines, which can fire torpedoes and Tomahawk missiles, will potentially add to the number of threats Beijing faces in case of a regional war.

Just north of Australia, an agreement in August gave U.S. forces more access to Papua New Guinea for humanitarian missions and committed American tax dollars to update military facilities there.

To Admiral Paparo, this growing network of partnerships and security agreements across thousands of miles of the Pacific is a direct result of what he calls China’s “revanchist, revisionist and expansionist agenda” in the region that has directly threatened its neighbors.

“I do believe that the U.S. and our allies and partners are playing a stronger hand and that we would prevail in any fight that arose in the Western Pacific,” the admiral said in an interview.

“It’s a hand that I would not trade with our would-be adversaries, and yet we’re also never satisfied with the strength of that hand and always looking to improve it.”

FIRST ON FOX: House Republican lawmakers are urging major Columbia University donors who are outraged at the anti-Israel protests on campus to speak out with their wallets. 

“As Members of Congress, we urge donors and individuals affiliated with Columbia University to condemn the antisemitic incidents occurring on the university’s campus by pulling donations and support for the university until there are demonstrable changes in leadership, including the resignation of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik,” House Republicans, led by Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., wrote in an open letter to the Ivy League’s vast and influential alumni and donor network.

For days, students at Columbia and its sister school, Barnard College, have camped out on the Upper Manhattan campus while holding demonstrations in protest of Columbia’s investments in companies with ties to Israel. It’s part of a wider progressive backlash against Israel’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attacks against the Jewish state.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MOVES TO HYBRID LEARNING ON MAIN CAMPUS AMID ANTISEMITIC PROTESTS

But that protest and similar ones cropping up at colleges around the country are now facing bipartisan backlash and accusations of having waded into antisemitic territory. 

Social media videos from the anti-Israel tent encampment on Columbia’s campus show activists cheering on the deaths of Israeli soldiers and showing support for Hamas. Jewish students have reported feeling unsafe on campus and shared stories of being verbally and physically assaulted.

“They were pushing and shoving me… They threw rocks at my face. At that moment, my life was totally threatened. And there was no safety authority on campus,” one student told NY1 over the weekend.

COLUMBIA SETS DEADLINE FOR AGREEMENT WITH PROTESTERS, THREATENS ‘ALTERNATIVE OPTIONS’ FOR CLEARING PROTESTERS

Columbia University, where students have set up what is being referred to as a Gaza Solidarity Encampment, is seen in New York on Wednesday. (Getty Images)

In their open letter, the House GOP lawmakers urged donors to follow the example of Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, who pulled his support earlier this week in response to the protests.

“We encourage all supporters of the university to do the same and call for the resignation of President [Minouche] Shafik,” they wrote.

“The university should also provide a thorough review of all school funding and investigate the outside forces influencing students and agitators to participate in these disruptive and violent incidents that target and intimidate Jewish students on campus,” they continued.

“Additionally, we urge all individuals affiliated with the university to call for a transparent and thorough audit of all university funding concerning the anti-Israel movement on campus, and what outside groups are contributing and influencing students and agitators to participate. ”

OMAR’S DAUGHTER DECRIES ‘HYPOCRISY,’ SAYS ANTI-ISRAEL STUDENTS ARE ‘100% TARGETED’ AFTER SUSPENSION AND ARREST

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft recently announced he would stop his donations over the protests. (Michael Reaves/Getty Images)

It comes a day after Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., traveled to Columbia with House Education and Workforce Committee Chair Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., and three New York Republicans, where he denounced the protests and reiterated his earlier call for Shafik to resign.

“I’m here today joining my colleagues in calling on President Shafik to resign if she can not immediately bring order to this chaos,” Johnson said as students heckled. “As Speaker of the House, I have committed today that the Congress will not be silent as Jewish students are expected to run for their lives and stay home from their classes hiding in fear.”

Fox News Digital reached out to Columbia University for comment.

For those rightly concerned about the timing of Donald Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial, Thursday’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court gave plenty of reasons for worry. Moreover, the court’s conservative majority seemed inclined to define presidential immunity from prosecution in a way that could undermine some of the charges in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment.

Much of the court’s questioning went well beyond the immediate issue of Trump’s immunity for the criminal acts alleged. The court’s conservatives focused almost exclusively on abstract questions of immunity for future presidents rather than the charges against the former president. Even the more moderate members of the conservative majority seemed preoccupied with the difficulty of drawing the line between official and unofficial acts, assuming that the former deserve extensive protection from prosecution.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett read a litany of acts from the indictment and asked Trump’s lawyer whether they were official or not. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. indicated that the line between public and private presidential conduct is hard to draw, saying he was concerned that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals “did not get into a focused consideration of what acts we’re talking about or what documents we’re talking about.”

At best, the court’s questioning augurs an opinion setting out general principles of immunity and necessitating a remand to the lower courts to apply the justices’ guidance. As Justice Neil M. Gorsuch put it, “We’re writing a rule for the ages.” That would add further delay to a schedule that already seems to be putting a trial shortly before or beyond the November election.

And that wasn’t even the most serious implication for Smith’s case.

The conservative justices’ questioning of Michael Dreeben, the special counsel’s well-regarded Supreme Court specialist, was sharp and fast. And their questions to both sides suggested they might conclude that inquiring into a president’s motives for certain acts would violate the constitutional separation of powers. That would point to a decision requiring the courts to set aside all evidence of a president’s malign intent.

If motive has to be disregarded in determining whether the president’s actions are official or not, it could undermine much of the case against Trump — including, for example, his brazen attempt to strong-arm the Department of Justice into falsely informing Georgia officials that the state’s election results were flawed.

Such a limitation might even provide immunity in the hypothetical extreme proposed during arguments before the D.C. Circuit: a president ordering Navy Seals to assassinate a political opponent. The force of that example is that it shows how an official act could have a patently malign motive.

As Justice Elena Kagan interjected in reference to the implications of her colleagues’ questions and Trump lawyer John Sauer’s response: “You’re asking us to say that a president is entitled … for total personal gain, to use the trappings of his office.” Exactly right.

Gorsuch threw another lifeline to Trump’s lawyer, asking whether he would accept a definition of official acts like the one in the D.C. Circuit’s opinion in Blassingame vs. Trump, which concerned presidential immunity from civil suits. That case drew a distinction between Trump’s acts as an officeholder and as an office-seeker. Applying it to the criminal case would likely immunize Trump for some of the conduct in the indictment, in particular his allegedly corrupt use of the Justice Department, though he would presumably remain on the hook for political conduct such as organizing false electors.

It got worse for the prosecution. More or less out of nowhere, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh suggested that one of the charges against Trump, conspiracy to defraud the United States, relies on a statute that is so broad and vague that it could be misused by future prosecutors against future presidents. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. jumped in to second the suggestion, taking up a criticism of the prosecution that Trump’s lawyers hadn’t even raised.

Since the court just heard arguments in a separate case that could invalidate two of the four charges against Trump — those under a federal obstruction statute — an opinion invalidating another charge could force Smith to soldier on with only one remaining charge against Trump, conspiracy against rights. That charge relies on the electorate’s right to have votes counted, which is a somewhat indirect approach to accountability for Trump’s pernicious post-election conduct.

That’s not all. Kavanaugh also raised the Trump team’s suggestion that perhaps Congress should have to make a “clear statement” of intent to apply any criminal law to the president, a stratagem the court previously conjured to deal with separation-of-powers concerns. Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that it would in effect excuse a president for violations of most of the federal code.

Dreeben hardly had time to make his points until the end of the nearly three-hour argument, when Kagan gave him some room to do so. Kagan also asked the special counsel’s representative a friendly question getting at the possibility that the court could limit its decision to the charges against Trump to permit the trial to go forward expeditiously. But the odds that the court will take that guidance now look extremely slim.

Going into Thursday’s showdown, the critical question was whether the court’s opinion would permit the trial to go forward without further proceedings. In the wake of the arguments, that seems more unlikely than ever. Indeed, the court’s questions raised the additional alarming prospect that it could confer the kind of expansive presidential immunity that would further weaken the constitutional principle that a president is not a king.

Harry Litman is the host of the “Talking Feds” podcast and the Talking San Diego speaker series. @harrylitman