Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

4. Department of Defense · Minor

Support greater Taiwan/allied defense spending to create a collective Asia-Pacific defense model

Partially done

94 4. Department of Defense

“Support greater spending and collaboration by Taiwan and allies in the Asia–Pacific like Japan and Australia to create a collective defense model.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The FY2026 NDAA modifies the Taiwan Security Cooperation Initiative (sec. 1265), extends the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (sec. 1251) and the Indo-Pacific extended deterrence education initiative (sec. 1252), and creates a Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience (sec. 1253) — allied spending and collaboration supported, no collective defense model created. Congress separately enacted the Taiwan Assurance Implementation Act (P.L. 119-45, 2025-12-02).

  2. Partially done

    The National Security Strategy commits to pressing First Island Chain allies "to spend more on their own defense," says the United States must "urge" Japan and South Korea to increase defense spending, and says that "in our dealings with Taiwan and Australia we maintain our determined rhetoric on increased defense spending." It calls for allies to "step up and spend—and more importantly do—much more for collective defense" but establishes no collective defense model or structure.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Two objects: supporting greater allied spending and collaboration (delivered) and creating a collective defense model in the Asia-Pacific (not created). A two-object ask with one object delivered is partial.

Checked against the 2026 National Defense Strategy, 2026-09-03, and it carries nothing for this ask. The strategy was fetched from media.defense.gov and read in full. It commits to “work closely with our allies and partners in the region to incentivize and enable them to do more for our collective defense”, but the Indo-Pacific ally text is generic, and the asymmetry is the finding: Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Korean Peninsula each get a named burden-sharing paragraph under Line of Effort 3 and the Indo-Pacific allies get none. Over the complete 34-page text, “Taiwan” and “Australia” appear zero times and “Japan” appears twice, both in the threat chapter’s description of what North Korea can reach, not in any collective-defense or burden-sharing passage. No collective defense model is named or created. The rung is unchanged; the record is a negative about the document. (The earlier note that prompted this check said Japan appeared zero times; it appears twice, and neither occurrence bears on this ask.)

This item was also covered by one negative search run across its whole cluster of related asks in this Chapter.

Action
create
Object
collective defense model with Taiwan, Japan, and Australia
ID
139