Why is China Funding the Pentagon's Budget?
According to the US Treasury, the annual budget deficit of the United States federal government in 2025 was $1.78 trillion . The Pentagon budget for 2025 was $849.8 billion , but now President Donald Trump is proposing to increase that to roughly $1 trillion in fiscal year (FY) 2026. Again, according to the US Treasury , China and the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) owned a combined total of $938.6 billion in US Treasury securities in late 2025. Mainland China held $682.6 billion, and the Hong Kong SAR $256 billion. The amount held in US Government bonds in Russia in 2025, in contrast, amounted in value to a paltry $31 million . This leads us to two observations: the first is, that it is hardly a wise course for the Trump Administration to pursue a foreign policy based on nineteenth-century Palmerstonian ' gunboat diplomacy ', of the kind recently displayed in Venezuela , on the basis of money largely borrowed from one of the USA's principal adversaries, an...