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In 2011, the Obama administration boldly announced a pivot to Asia, declaring a new U.S. focus on the Asia-Pacific in order to cope with a rising China. Subsequent administrations have paid at least lip service to the idea that the Asia-Pacific is the most important strategic domain for the United States—until the second Trump team came along, pivoting to the Western Hemisphere.

Is there any life left in the idea? Zack Cooper, an experienced Asia hand at the American Enterprise Institute, has pronounced it dead, arguing persuasively in Foreign Affairs that the pivot failed. The United States moving Asia-Pacific military assets—most dramatically, moving THAAD and Patriot missile defense systems from South Korea, and ships 5000 Marines from Japan to the Persian Gulf as the Iran war deepens—speaks for itself.

In 2011, the Obama administration boldly announced a pivot to Asia, declaring a new U.S. focus on the Asia-Pacific in order to cope with a rising China. Subsequent administrations have paid at least lip service to the idea that the Asia-Pacific is the most important strategic domain for the United States—until the second Trump team came along, pivoting to the Western Hemisphere.

Is there any life left in the idea? Zack Cooper, an experienced Asia hand at the American Enterprise Institute, has pronounced it dead, arguing persuasively in Foreign Affairs that the pivot failed. The United States moving Asia-Pacific military assets—most dramatically, moving THAAD and Patriot missile defense systems from South Korea, and ships 5000 Marines from Japan to the Persian Gulf as the Iran war deepens—speaks for itself.

Since the U.S. became a predominant global power after World War II, there has been a perennial tension between the push of declared priorities and reacting to the pull of events as Washington sought to pursue global primacy imperatives.

The reality of actual post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy from administration to administration has often seemed reactive, more like an endless game of whack-a-mole than a strategy. Witness President Donald Trump getting sucked deeper into the Middle East, even as his National Security Strategy proclaims, “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”

Yet on the surface, the U.S. security presence and policy in the Asia-Pacific appears to have a substantial degree of continuity. Both former President Joe Biden and Trump beefed up key U.S.-Japan, U.S.-South Korea, and other alliances (though they face new uncertainties under the second Trump administration), as well as expanded and redistributed its military presence across the Pacific to counterbalance China. Trump continued the AUKUS defense industrial cooperation initiative.

The hopes of “peace through strength” and “deterrence by denial along the first island........

© Foreign Policy