To Take On China, Trump Should Pivot to Asia - For Real: When he returns to the Oval Office come January, Donald Trump will inherit a very different Pacific strategic seascape than he knew during his first presidency. U.S.-China relations swerved toward competition during his first term, in part because a domineering China had started asserting itself, in part because of Trump policies aimed at decoupling the U.S. from the Chinese economy while curbing Beijing’s warlike excesses. The swerve is complete. Full-blown peer-on-peer strategic competition is upon America, its allies, and its partners at the inception of Trump’s second term. Three pointers for how the administration should approach the competition, with emphasis on its naval and military dimensions:

Strangely, it falls to a U.S. president diametrically opposed to Barack Obama by most measures to finally execute Obama’s signature—and best-conceived—initiative in foreign policy and strategy. In late 2011, secretary of state and eventual Trump bȇte noire Hillary Clinton proposed that the U.S. armed forces “pivot to Asia,” unbalancing U.S. military deployments to favor the region over theaters commanding lesser importance. Soon after the Obama Pentagon codified Clinton’s pivot as a “rebalance” intended to reallocate military resources in sufficient measure to manage the increasingly unruly, increasingly forbidding strategic environment in the Pacific Ocean. Two succeeding administrations, including Trump’s and Joe Biden’s, likewise vowed to redirect U.S. policy attention and diplomatic, economic, and military resources to the Indo-Pacific to balk Chinese ambitions.

Yet progress has been fitful. Seems pivoting is easier said than done—bipartisan consensus notwithstanding.

But it needs to happen. Setting and enforcing priorities is what strategy is all about. No competitor, not even a global superpower, sports unbounded resources for enterprises domestic or foreign. Promoting one priority connotes demoting another. Zero-sum strategic discipline comes hard for global powers, though. They tend to take on commitments all over the map or nautical chart, sometimes by design, sometimes by default, sometimes in a fit of absentmindedness.

Bowing to a multitude of voices within the Beltway, each clamoring that its pet commitment is the most important, marks the easiest way to keep the peace. Strategic indiscipline constitutes the path of least resistance. And thus the one often taken.

But it’s a path to peril. A competitor that tries........

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