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With one action and one statement over the weekend, President Donald Trump has pretty much vaporized the United States’ reputation as a serious power in East Asia—the region that includes China, Japan, and the two Koreas—and with it, possibly, in much of the rest of the world.

The statement, which he filed on social media late Sunday afternoon, ordered the Pentagon “to substantially reduce” joint military exercises with South Korea. He gave three reasons for his order. First, the exercises are “costly.” Second, they send a “signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, who, “as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.” The third reason for the cutback is that South Korea’s president refused “to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

The action that Trump took was to redeploy an aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, from Japan to the Middle East, where it will replace the USS Abraham Lincoln. Many news agencies have reported the hideous condition of the Lincoln—the exhaustion of its crews, the depletion of basic supplies, the breakdown of everyday equipment—as a result of its overextension within firing range of Iran. The ship certainly needs relief. However, a little-covered fact is that ordering the Washington to the Middle East removes the U.S. Navy’s only aircraft carrier in the entire region known as Asia Pacific.

In other words, the Navy now has no significant way to project power in the region—and this is the case for the first time since 1944. As Phillips P. O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews and author of........

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