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Donald Trump’s second term could solidify the U.S. pivot to Asia, focusing resources on countering China’s assertiveness. Prioritizing the Indo-Pacific requires downgrading European commitments, leveraging alliances like Japan and Taiwan, and strengthening the first island chain’s defenses to thwart Chinese ambitions.
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:
Pivot to Asia—for real this time
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 to do everything, everywhere, at all times, sets itself up for failure. Its leadership scatters resources about in smaller and smaller packets, to a point where it’s apt to find itself weaker than some local antagonist somewhere on the map. It courts piecemeal defeat. It accomplishes little after setting out to accomplish everything. This is where the United States stands. Bipartisan consensus may hold that the Indo-Pacific is America’s priority theater, yet through some combination of happenstance and deliberate design, hostile Eurasian coastal states—mainly China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran—have managed to embroil the U.S. military around the Eurasian supercontinent.
They can stretch us because Washington doesn’t know how to say No to secondary commitments.
Strategy 101 teaches that you can’t do it all. But the Trump team has an opportunity. Any new administration wants to set itself apart from its predecessor, especially if that predecessor hails from a different party. Thus it enjoys political space to elevate some priorities while demoting others. The new administration has the option to downgrade Europe in order to favor Asia. Europe warrants a downgrade in any event. A full decade ago, NATO members solemnly resolved to spend 2 percent of GDP apiece—an amount possibly, barely, adequate to cope with tranquil times—on their defense. And yet they dawdle a decade on, pushing three years into Russia’s war on Ukraine. They scant their defense amid a war that has placed them in direct and mortal danger.
But so be it. Europeans seem comfortable with their security situation vis-à-vis Russia, judging by their budgetary—a.k.a. strategic—decisions. U.S. leaders should accept their judgment. They should impress upon their European counterparts that Europe must shoulder primary responsibility for defense of what they consider a placid continent, with America playing a secondary enabling role. To fulfill its own strategic aims, meanwhile, Washington should channel policy energy and martial resources toward allies that see themselves as under duress and are fervently committed to their own defense. That means Asian allies such as the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea along with de facto allies such as Taiwan.
In short, the Trump administration should pivot from Europe to Asia, making Barack Obama’s vision a reality at last. It should back longstanding priorities with resources.
Keep the first island chain strong
What should the Trump administration do with resources newly liberated from secondary theaters? Simple. Above all, administration chieftains must grok that Asia’s offshore island chains, chiefly the first island chain, are geostrategic assets of inestimable price, inhabited by allies, partners, and friends of America. Two insights flow from this. One, the United States has no strategic position in East Asia without allies indigenous to the region. From the U.S. bastion of Guam, which lies at the midpoint of the second island chain and well offshore, the U.S. military could never sustain combat power sufficient to prevail in the East China Sea, Taiwan Strait, or South China Sea. If it tried its military presence would be thin, intermittent, or more likely both. It could never overpower China’s military close to Chinese shores. Declining to keep solemn, longstanding security commitments to Asian allies, then, is tantamount to forfeiting the United States’ say in East Asian affairs.
Unlike Europeans, Asians are investing in their own well-being. The United States should match their commitment. Nor should U.S. spokesmen—or the president himself—casually muse aloud that abandoning an ally is an option if, say, its government refuses to bear a greater share of the expense of hosting U.S. forces. Raising the possibility of betrayal would represent diplomatic malpractice toward friends.
And two, the first island chain constitutes not just a strategic foothold in East Asia but a formidable impediment to China’s commercial, diplomatic, and military ambitions in the wider world. It’s a lever. You can deter or coerce an antagonist like China if you can veto its ambitions in the wider world. That’s why Taiwan commands surpassing importance to U.S. interests. It’s not because the island dominates the semiconductor industry, which it does, or because it is an open society menaced by a powerful malefactor, which is also true. Taiwan is the central link in the first island chain. Let it fall and you surrender the United States’ chief source of leverage vis-à-vis mainland China.
Neglect would be self-defeating behavior of an extreme sort.
Not only should the administration rededicate itself politically to Taiwan’s defense, the Trump Pentagon should press ahead with the family of operational concepts broached in recent years by the U.S. Marine Corps, Army, and Navy. These concepts champion deploying integrated land, sea, and air power to shield allied soil from Chinese amphibious assault while closing the first island chain to maritime movement by China’s navy, air force, and mercantile fleet. Implementing them would safeguard allies while keeping the island chain stout and impenetrable.
The ability to bar Chinese shipping and aircraft from the Western Pacific and points beyond equates to the ability to bring the military, diplomatic, and economic hurt against China. Knowing its opponents could thwart its maritime destiny at their discretion, Beijing might well desist from aggression. In particular the administration should put a premium on hastening the U.S. Marines’ “Force Design” effort, an initiative designed to strew amphibious forces along the island chain to deny China access to the islands as well as nearby waters and skies, and on the Army’s “Multi-Domain Operations” effort, a parallel endeavor that entertains similar goals, methods, and implements.
Both services aim to put land power to work supporting the Navy fleet while blocking aggressors’ access to critical waters and skies. Let’s march jointly—harnessing geography, alliance relations, and military technology to confound China’s designs.
Persevere with the U.S. sea services’ “great relearning.”
Trump administration strategy should strive to reform the institutional cultures within the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. After victory in the Cold War the sea services told themselves they had won the struggle to rule the seas for all time. With the fall of the Soviet Navy, they assumed no one could oppose American mastery of vital seaways. With no peer enemy to fight, the services could and must transform themselves into a “fundamentally different naval force.” They should reduce the emphasis on tactics, techniques, and hardware for vying for maritime command. In effect sea-service leaders announced that their prime function—dueling rivals for command—was no longer relevant. The West owned the sea.
And that’s exactly what the services did during the 1990s. They more or less lay down arms, obediently recasting themselves to project power onto hostile coasts from the safe sanctuary that was the sea. Surface, antisubmarine, and antiair warfare languished even as China resolved to construct maritime forces of repute.
This delusion exacted heavy, long-lasting costs reminiscent of the novelist and gadfly Tom Wolfe’s amusing account of “The Great Relearning.” Wandering the Sixties redoubt of San Francisco, Wolfe reported encountering smelly hippies who insisted they had absolutely nothing to learn from benighted past generations. They were starting anew! Deliberate forgetfulness reigned. They rejected all wisdom handed down by tradition—including basic hygiene. As a result the City by the Bay was suffering outbreaks of diseases not seen since the Middle Ages.
