On Saturday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth marked the 80th anniversary of the battle of Iwo Jima, liberated from Imperial Japan in World War II at a cost of 26,000 killed.

This occasion, like the rest of Pete’s travels across the Western Pacific last week, offered a most-needed reminder of the importance of the vast region’s strategic islands – and the magnitude of the folly of allowing Communist China to dominate any of them.

Simply put: We risk having to pay again in blood and treasure to reverse another totalitarian foe’s imperialism – and the attendant threat to our vital interests in what the great strategist Cleo Paskal described in a recent PresentDangerChina.org webinar as America’s “Pacific heartland.”

We must now actualize Secretary Hegseth’s highly visible, and most welcome, commitments to support our allies there and counter our mutual enemy, the Chinese Communist Party.