Asia After America

The pivot to Asia has failed. A decade and a half ago, in 2011, President Barack Obama committed to rebalancing U.S. strategy and resources to focus on the Asia-Pacific. “Let there be no doubt,” he pledged on a visit to Australia, “The United States of America is all in.” Although the phrasing changed and policymakers and politicians argued about the tactical details, Obama’s successors affirmed the logic behind the pivot, which soon became the core bipartisan assumption of American strategy. In speech after speech, U.S. officials emphasized that the only way to prevent China from dominating Asia was for the United States and its allies and partners to make a major investment in the region’s political, economic, and military stability.

Yet nearly 15 years later, U.S. leaders have still not matched their words with action. American promises to foster greater prosperity and better governance now elicit eye rolls throughout Asia. A perpetually distracted United States neglects much of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Few today are asking when the pivot will come. Instead, the question in regional capitals is how far the United States will pull back.

With the United States facing divisions at home and distractions abroad, it has become clear that deep engagement across all of Asia is no longer realistic. Yet the assumptions behind the pivot have persisted, as have the calls to finally give the effort priority. The problem is that having a strategy that cannot be executed in the foreseeable future creates dangers of its own. During World War II, the political commentator Walter Lippmann wrote that “foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power” and warned that not doing so “leads to disaster.” Today, Washington has a “Lippmann gap” in Asia: means have failed to match ends for so long that U.S. commitments have lost credibility. The longer the gap between pledges and action is allowed to remain, the greater the risk of a disastrous failure of deterrence.

The pivot to Asia was based on the assumption that U.S. power was capable of fostering strong regional economies, governments, and militaries that could prevent China from overturning the regional order. Today, however, Washington is not seriously contesting Beijing’s economic and political influence across much of the region, particularly on the Asian mainland. The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly narrows U.S. regional security objectives to protecting the first island chain—a string of archipelagoes that runs through Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines—but this retrenchment has been proceeding quietly for years.

Parts of this thin defensive line rest on shaky ground: countries that are economically dependent on China and thus vulnerable to its political pressure and influence campaigns. China will naturally seek to displace the United States if Washington scales back its commitments. The pivot aimed to make that difficult, if not impossible, by locking in U.S. engagement and ensuring that countries in the region were strong and confident enough to uphold their interests. By serving as a counterweight to China’s massive economy and substantial political influence, the thinking went, the United States gave these countries options. But as the United States curtails its economic and political engagement, it faces the prospect that China could pick off U.S. allies and partners one by one. Many of these countries are already rethinking their alignment decisions and concluding that Beijing may be a more appealing partner—or an inevitable regional hegemon.

As a result, any U.S. strategy that focuses primarily on the military defense of a handful of countries on the first island chain may not be sustainable. But the better option—a comprehensive pivot—is now a practical impossibility. What is left is a strategy based on shoring up a defensive line that might not hold forever but could contain Chinese expansion for now. If executed well, such a strategy could buy enough time for missteps by China to create new openings for the United States and its allies and partners in Asia. Chinese regional dominance is by no means assured. Beijing is increasingly overconfident and is likely to overplay its hand. Still, Chinese leaders are now the ones with the cards to play. The pivot was meant to anchor U.S. leadership in Asia; its unraveling could leave China to set the rules.

THREE-POINT TURN

When it introduced the pivot, the Obama administration outlined three pillars on which the rebalance depended: security, prosperity, and good governance. The central logic was that promoting all three would make the United States’ Asian partners stronger and better able to defend their sovereignty, thus preventing China from overturning the regional order. In practice, however, only the security pillar received sustained U.S. attention and resources. Washington deepened its alliances with Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea and pledged to shift 60 percent of U.S. Navy assets to the Indo-Pacific. But it never delivered on its vision for economic engagement or good governance.

At first, the United States had a plan for regional economic engagement. The Obama administration championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-country trade agreement that included many of Washington’s most important regional partners. The objective, in Obama’s words, was to enshrine “an open international economic system, where rules are clear and every nation plays by them.” But the United States proved unwilling to be bound by the very rules it had helped write. The Senate refused to ratify the TPP by the end of Obama’s term, and then the first Trump administration withdrew from the accord altogether in 2017 and began imposing tariffs on Chinese goods. The Biden administration did little to change course. It kept most of Trump’s tariffs in place and showed no interest in joining the successor to the TPP. An intended replacement put forward in 2022, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, did not offer increased access to the U.S. market, disappointing foreign partners. As Singapore’s ambassador to the United States lamented in 2023, “We’re not getting the kind of trade agenda that we would have liked” from the Biden administration.

In Trump’s second term, coercive and protectionist economic policies, combined with the dissolution of development aid and humanitarian assistance programs, have made the situation worse. For leaders in Asia who want to deliver economic growth to their people, a more protectionist United States is less attractive as a partner—and China looks more attractive by comparison. Asian officials are fond of saying that they “don’t want to choose” between Washington and Beijing. But regional leaders worry that, when it comes to their economic relationships, choices are becoming unavoidable, and many may favor China.

U.S. commitments have lost credibility.

The pivot’s governance pillar has crumbled even more spectacularly. Democracy, anticorruption, and human rights were important elements of this agenda when it was first announced. The Obama and Biden administrations made the promotion of democracy and human rights central to their policies, seeing them as both moral and strategic imperatives. This aroused suspicion across much of Asia, where less than half of people live in free societies. When the Biden administration held its 2021 Summit for Democracy, it excluded Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam. The omissions put many South and Southeast Asian governments on the defensive, worried that the United States was undermining their domestic political systems.

The second Trump administration has been quiet about human rights and democracy, which has comforted some autocrats. Yet many regional leaders find it troubling that the United States is now rejecting many of the rules, norms, and institutions that it once advanced as part of its good governance initiative. Washington is using economic coercion against its own allies and partners. It has launched military strikes against Iran and Venezuela, which many smaller Asian countries worry will be perceived as a dangerous precedent that China or other great powers might use to justify attacks on weaker neighbors. Finally, U.S. anticorruption efforts stalled when Trump paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act shortly after his 2025 inauguration. Countries are now supporting major commercial projects that involve the Trump family in hopes of currying favor with the U.S. government.

Not surprisingly, Washington’s reputation has taken a hit across much of Asia. According to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey conducted during the first few months of Trump’s second term, favorable attitudes toward the United States in Australia, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea had declined by nine to 16 percentage points from a year earlier. If the United States continues to embrace force and coercion—dismissing the rules, norms, and institutions that once tied American hands but bought the country influence—its favorability ratings will decline further, and other countries will be even less inclined to follow Washington’s lead.

PIVOT WITHIN THE PIVOT

As the economic and governance agendas have collapsed, the full weight of the rebalance has come to rest on the security pillar. Yet even on security, Washington has not delivered all it initially promised. The United States has remained distracted by crises elsewhere in the world. It never shifted away from the Middle East, and the Biden administration, faced with a major war in Europe, rightly chose to support Ukraine. The Trump administration’s focus on the Americas adds yet another competing priority. As a result, U.S. leaders have never had enough time to consistently engage South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Only Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan have attracted sustained attention and resources from the United States.

The problem has worsened lately. In the last year, top-tier U.S. military assets—carrier strike groups and air and missile defense units—have been pulled away from Asia to assist with other missions. Recent increases in overall U.S. defense spending have barely kept pace with inflation, and even if the Trump administration succeeds in forcing allies and partners to spend more, their contributions cannot offset China’s massive outlays. This leaves Washington without the means to execute a region-wide approach. Recognizing this constraint, U.S. policymakers have tightened their focus, concentrating American diplomacy and defense strategy on the Taiwan Strait to the detriment of other parts of the region. This shift has been most obvious under the Trump administration, but it has been underway for nearly a decade.

Nowhere are the effects more evident than in South Asia. For two decades, U.S. officials pursued a deeper relationship with India. But the second Trump administration has undone much of this progress. American intervention in the May 2025 conflict between India and Pakistan created the perception that Trump was prioritizing Islamabad over New Delhi, and the fallout has pierced hopes that India might align more with the United States. The Quad, the security partnership among Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, had strong backing in Trump’s first term but now appears to be on the verge of obsolescence: a planned 2025 summit never materialized because of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s obvious irritation with Trump and Trump’s apparent indifference to the group.

The story is not much better in Southeast Asia or the Pacific Islands. In his first term, Trump admirably improved ties with the Philippines, Vietnam, and many Pacific Island countries. Today, the U.S. treaty alliance with the Philippines remains strong, with frequent bilateral meetings and deepening defense cooperation. Yet other Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore, are reevaluating their policies toward the United States. Singapore’s prime minister has lamented that the United States “is rejecting the very system it created,” by adopting protectionist policies and imposing tariffs on its friends. This view is also held by many Pacific Island countries, where Washington’s downgrading of issues that matter to them—including development, public health, and climate change—is incentivizing closer cooperation with Beijing.

The one subregion the United States seems committed to is Northeast Asia, home to Washington’s top security concern: China. In the 2025 National Security Strategy, China is mentioned more than any other U.S. adversary, and Taiwan is mentioned more than any other American ally or partner. The section on deterring military threats in Asia is almost entirely focused on preventing an invasion of Taiwan; North Korea is not mentioned once. In effect, the United States has narrowed its conception of its security interests in Asia to cross-strait security.

Yet even U.S. policy toward China and Taiwan remains muddled. Trump insists that Chinese leader Xi Jinping will not take Taiwan on his watch, and his administration has pressed regional allies to allow American forces to use their territory and to contribute their own forces if a conflict breaks out in the Taiwan Strait. But Trump himself has not publicly stated what he would do in a cross-strait conflict, instead commenting in January that it is “up to Xi” how to handle Taiwan. He has even referred to the U.S.-Chinese relationship as a “G-2,” suggesting he is interested in some kind of great-power compact.

The basic logic of the pivot was that it was in the United States’ interest to help build strong economies, effective governments, and capable militaries across Asia because this would make it harder for China to overturn the regional order through coercion or the use of force. Countries in Asia would then be free to make the choices that benefited them most, which Washington assumed meant continued cooperation with the United States. But with all three pillars cracked or crumbled, the constraints U.S. policymakers tried to place on China’s regional influence are giving way.

IN SEARCH OF PLAN B

As Washington’s economic and political engagement recedes, with no reversal in sight, military deterrence is all that remains of U.S. strategy in Asia. But the United States’ traditional approach to regional security, weakened as it has been, is increasingly courting danger. Its original objective was to prevent China from altering the territorial status quo anywhere in the region, which required the United States to maintain a forward defense perimeter up to the coast of the Asian continent. Washington aimed to help allies and partners with which Beijing or Pyongyang had territorial or maritime disputes—including India, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam—to deter the use of force or coercion. The United States regularly sent ships and aircraft just off China’s coast in an effort to prevent China from coercing Washington’s friends or exerting control over disputed territories, waters, and airspace. It also invested in regional militaries to ensure that they could better defend themselves and work more closely with American forces. And as the American military edge deteriorated, the United States called on receptive Asian allies to increase their own defense spending and host additional U.S. forces on their territory.

The main problem with this approach was that it required not just American military engagement but also a positive economic and governance agenda to be successful. Building effective militaries requires dynamic economies and efficient governments, and only a network of strong regional militaries can help smaller states defend their interests against China. Without steady U.S. support for economic growth, good governance, and regional integration, the entire region’s deterrence posture suffers. Making matters worse, a growing chorus of critics in Washington argues that it is no longer powerful enough to execute such an expansive strategy, that the strategy is needlessly provocative to Beijing, and that too few countries in the region are willing or able to step up military cooperation with the United States. Others insist that the American people are tired of foreign entanglements and unwilling to support the rise in military spending that this strategy demands.

In short, meeting the most expansive version of American security aims in Asia has become unrealistic. The gap between those objectives and U.S. and allied capabilities is apparent to all, including China. And Beijing has been only too willing to take advantage. Despite long-standing U.S. opposition to Chinese land reclamation in the South China Sea, Beijing has restarted its island-building campaign there. It is also stepping up military pressure on Taiwan, raising the risk of a cross-strait crisis. Deterrence is eroding across the region, intensifying the danger of a major war in the years ahead.

Military deterrence is all that remains of U.S. strategy in Asia.

Avoiding that outcome requires that the United States align its commitments and capabilities. Yet there is danger in pushing retrenchment too far, such as by concentrating U.S. defenses along the second island chain, thousands of miles east of the Chinese mainland (or even on the third island chain, which includes Hawaii). In this scenario, Australia and Japan, established U.S. allies that lie at the southern and northern ends of the second chain, could still anchor the American regional military presence. Between them, the defensive line would comprise many small isles stretching over thousands of miles, including the Bonin Islands, the Mariana Islands (most notably Guam), Yap, and Palau. This strategy would exclude several friends in East Asia from the U.S. defense perimeter—the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan—effectively conceding that the United States would not defend them against an attack.

A second-island-chain strategy would push many Asian leaders to cut deals with Beijing. All of Southeast Asia would be within China’s sphere of influence, so the Philippines and other claimants bordering the South China Sea would have little hope of upholding their rights in disputed waters. South Korea would find itself isolated and surrounded by nuclear powers in China, North Korea, and Russia; without the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent, Seoul would have to choose between acquiring its own nuclear weapons and submitting to demands from Pyongyang and Beijing. Taiwan, which China would never permit to have nuclear weapons, would likely be forced to unify with the mainland or face an unwinnable war.

There is no guarantee that China would be satisfied with this U.S. withdrawal, either. It is likely that a stronger, more confident Beijing would expand its horizons to match its growing capabilities. Japan, then, could be particularly vulnerable. Beijing is already contesting Japan’s legal claims to Okinawa and other parts of the Ryukyu Island chain. Japan’s westernmost island, Yonaguni, is only 70 miles from Taiwan, so defending it and isles near it with conventional weapons would be difficult, perhaps impossible, if Chinese forces were stationed in Taiwan. The United States could threaten nuclear escalation to deter Chinese encroachment, but that threat might not seem credible amid a broader regional withdrawal. Japan might then decide to go nuclear itself or at least reach a nuclear sharing arrangement with the United States, to more credibly defend its territory.

The geography of the second island chain presents a final problem. These small, remote islands and the facilities they house would be vulnerable to Chinese military strikes and political influence. Without facilities in the Philippines and Taiwan able to track Chinese air and naval forces passing through the first island chain, it would be harder to detect these forces before they reached Guam or other second-island-chain territories. Additionally, leaders in some Pacific Islands might prefer to remain neutral and accept Chinese investment offers rather than allow the United States to operate from their territory. This is already a concern in Yap, where Chinese companies are rebuilding a World War II–era airfield. A second-­island-­chain defensive line might therefore look more like a set of scattered defense bubbles than a full-fledged defensive perimeter. Ultimately, this minimal strategy might not protect U.S. territories in the Pacific and could leave even the most capable American allies feeling they had no choice but to submit to a vast Chinese sphere of influence.

Withdrawal to the second island chain, in sum, would likely be catastrophic. The more realistic option is thus U.S. retrenchment to the first island chain. This approach would trim U.S. commitments while retaining some of the most capable U.S. allies and partners, including Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The United States would likely maintain its presence in Australia and South Korea, given its enduring alliances with both countries and its desire to avoid leaving crucial allies out of the U.S. defense perimeter, a costly mistake Washington made ahead of the Korean War. But it would leave most of the rest of the region off the list of U.S. priorities, including the treaty ally Thailand and the emerging great power India. In practice, this could mean, for example, abrogating the U.S. alliance with Thailand and stating explicitly that the United States will not intervene if China encroaches on the territory or maritime claims of partners on the Asian mainland.

This strategy still faces several challenges. First, it is not clear that American leaders would be willing to devote the resources it requires. Although Trump has floated a $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027, few in Congress seem inclined to support what would amount to a 50 percent increase in defense spending. The United States would still have commitments up and down the first island chain, including to the Philippines and Taiwan, neither of which can deter China without considerable U.S. assistance. Additional defense spending, or at least redeployments from other regions, might therefore be necessary. After all, China can focus most of its military might on its near seas, whereas Asia remains one of several areas of operation for the U.S. military. If Beijing fields nine aircraft carriers by 2035, as a recent Pentagon report predicted it will, U.S. forces would be badly outnumbered, even if Washington economized elsewhere.

Furthermore, the first-island-chain strategy would require key allies and partners to strengthen their cooperation with Washington while the United States pulled back elsewhere. The United States simply cannot balance China’s military power unless Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan spend more on defense, give U.S. forces greater access to their territory, or do both. Yet their leaders could be wary of doing more if they see overall commitment to U.S. alliances waning; some might even consider whether it would be wiser to improve relations with Beijing than to give in to Washington’s demands. This problem is compounded by domestic divisions in the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan. Political parties in each country take sharply different approaches to foreign policy, so changes of government often bring strategic reassessments. The more the United States is seen as unpredictable and coercive, the more pressure there will be on a new leader to change course. And as Beijing’s economic and political influence grows, it will become harder for Washington to respond to Chinese efforts to affect decision-making in Manila, Seoul, and Taipei.

This strategy would also do little to discourage the rest of the region from engaging more deeply with China, because it would not make the United States more attractive as an export market or more active diplomatically. Thailand is already strengthening economic and military ties with Beijing. If others, such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, also choose to work more closely with China, the United States could be forced to watch from the sidelines as Beijing builds a sphere of influence covering most of continental Asia and part of maritime Asia, as well—making a defense of the first island chain increasingly difficult to sustain.

HARD CHOICES

However flawed a pullback to the first island chain may be, it is the most likely outcome in the years ahead. The challenge will be to shore up this thin defensive line as much as possible to maintain deterrence for as long as possible. Allies and partners along that chain will need to be strong and confident enough to work with the United States to counterbalance China, even in the absence of a U.S. economic and political strategy in the region. What will determine success, therefore, is not just how well Washington resources its military posture but also how it navigates complex regional geopolitics.

American policymakers will need to decide whether the United States can build an interlocking set of security alliances or let a scattering of individual defense partnerships suffice. The Biden administration encouraged allies and partners in Asia to work more closely together, whereas the Trump administration has at times preferred a bilateral approach because it maximizes U.S. leverage. Even an informal arrangement bringing American allies together would require a substantial investment of time and resources from Washington and regional capitals. Some countries would no doubt remain hesitant to cooperate with one another because of historical tensions, legal restrictions on foreign entanglements, fears of being dragged into others’ conflicts, and concerns about China’s response. Yet without deeper defense industry cooperation and operational integration among regional militaries, it might not be possible to build a sufficiently strong defensive system along the first island chain.

The United States will also have to decide how to handle allied interest in acquiring nuclear weapons—something it has, until now, opposed. If the United States abrogates some of its commitments and pulls back some of its conventional forces, the likelihood of allied proliferation will increase. Japan and South Korea, in particular, may pursue nuclear deterrents of their own if they perceive U.S. extended deterrence to be weakening. Simply rejecting nuclear discussions may not dampen interest, particularly in Seoul, which is surrounded by nuclear-armed states. Indeed, some in Washington might even welcome allied proliferation to offset the worsening conventional military balance and thereby deter encroachment by China or North Korea. One option to examine seriously is the development of nuclear sharing arrangements, which might mollify Asian allies without resulting in significant regional or global nuclear proliferation.

There is danger in pushing retrenchment too far.

As Washington retrenches, Beijing is likely to test the remaining American positions, raising questions about what Washington is and isn’t willing to defend. Chinese forces are already pushing closer to Taiwan and operating more frequently and in larger numbers around Japan, around the Philippines, and farther into the Western Pacific. To date, the United States has been most clear about what it will do to protect its closest allies but more ambiguous when it comes to other partners’ defense. Friends that Washington asks to do more are likely to press for clearer U.S. commitments in return. Such clarity might deter dangerous tests of those commitments, but it also entails risk. Removing ambiguity about what the United States considers to be within its defense perimeter—especially when it comes to contested outlying islands, which are harder to defend—would make it necessary to react more forcefully to any violation to maintain deterrence. In cases in which the United States is genuinely willing to escalate, clarity is often the best policy, but that means that vaguer commitments will likely be tested.

Finally, the United States will need to decide whether to retrench abruptly or incrementally. A slow withdrawal might prevent panic but leave all allies and partners fearful that they could be next on the chopping block; a rapid adjustment could avoid a slow-moving landslide but cause immediate instability if allies and partners do not have time to prepare. Either way, Washington will need to reset allies’ expectations about future American policies, making some disruption unavoidable. But a one-time change in the U.S. defensive position might be preferable to repeated reminders that the United States is shifting its posture. Allied leaders must be quietly consulted beforehand, however, so that they can adjust their own strategies accordingly and express confidence about the new approach to their publics.

It would have been far better for the United States to properly resource a strategy featuring deep economic engagement and support for good governance alongside a stronger security posture. Yet wondering whether that version of the pivot to Asia would have succeeded is now just an academic exercise. An incomplete pivot, with expansive security objectives but no economic or governance strategy to speak of, will certainly not succeed. Instead, it will risk—in fact, it is already risking—a catastrophic failure of deterrence. Moving on from the pivot and accepting retrenchment is not the best way to protect U.S. interests in Asia. But it is unavoidable.

In 2024, Fumio Kishida, then Japan’s prime minister, told the U.S. Congress that he detected “an undercurrent of self-doubt among some Americans about what [the United States’] role in the world should be.” Today, that undercurrent looks more like a tsunami, and countries in the Asia-Pacific region are already seeking higher ground. What is left in its wake—where the United States maintains its commitments, and where it pulls back—will affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people in Asia. It is therefore time for Americans to discuss not what would make for an ideal strategy, but how to enact a realistic one. Even that may not be enough to contain China’s growing influence. But after falling short of its grand ambitions in Asia, the United States has left itself no other option.