John Andrew Byers, a longtime history professor who oversaw the Charles Koch philanthropic network’s grants promoting libertarian foreign policy stances at universities, was sworn in this week as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia — a role that immediately thrusts him to the center of America’s response to China’s ongoing military pressure campaign targeting the Philippines, with which Washington holds a mutual defense treaty.
Byers is a self-described proponent of foreign policy “restraint” — a term popularized by Koch-backed philanthropies that describes a particular variety of foreign policy retrenchment.
Several Trump administration officials have taken robust stances on the need to deter China, including national security adviser Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Byers’s opposition to a trade war also seems to contradict Trump’s campaign trail promises to place tariffs on Chinese goods.
And Pete Hegseth, the president’s defense secretary nominee, has long advocated that the U.S. strongly deter China. During his confirmation hearing, he pledged to “work with our partners and allies to deter aggression in the Indo-Pacific from the communist Chinese” and added that “we can no longer count on ‘reputational deterrence’ — we need real deterrence.”
Byers’s opposition to a deterrence model is not an outright objection to any policy that prepares America and its allies to confront Chinese aggression. He instead favors the development of military capabilities for U.S. allies that keeps Chinese forces away from their shores, and he believes that the U.S. could shift to deterrence in the event of a Chinese act of aggression, by empowering U.S. allies to defend themselves.
But his perspective is notably conciliatory toward Beijing.
Overall, he wrote, the U.S. and China “are more geopolitical rivals than full-fledged adversaries. They both have more to gain by maintaining deep economic ties than by severing them.”
He advised the second Trump administration against waging a “severe trade war.”
“But when conflicts of interest are more imagined than real, as is the case with current U.S.–China relations, the path to peace is not to demonstrate resolve and a willingness to fight but to wind down the escalation of mutual distrust by means of empathy for the other’s need for security and reassurance of one’s own benign intentions,” Byers continued.
“In practice, America should abandon belligerent military initiatives targeted at China and, instead, hedge against the China threat by adopting a ‘readiness’ strategy that emphasizes research and development, professional training, and organizational planning, such that U.S. military capabilities can be quickly expanded later if necessary,” he wrote. Byers did not elaborate on existing defense programs that he considers to be belligerent.