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 chain,” as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby has articulated, and the rhythm of joint military exercises, planning, and consultations were par for the course.
Similarly, Trump tariffs notwithstanding, U.S. trade and investment in Asia remains robust in absolute terms—over $1.5 trillion in two-way trade in 2025, with some $1.1 trillion in total direct investment in 2024. As Asia is growing faster, in relative terms, it is diminishing, but these are still huge sums.
Yet somehow the whole process seems hollow. The idea of an American Asia-Pacific is dead, yet it keeps walking, zombie-like. Why? It’s not that the network of alliances and security ties are about to unravel. The reality of China, powerful bureaucratic inertia, and the absence of alternatives to the U.S. security umbrella keep the U.S. presence ambulatory. The future may prove like Hemingway’s description of how bankruptcy happens in The Sun Also Rises: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
There are signs of building drift as U.S. allies and partners pursue coping mechanisms in response to U.S. retrenchment and capriciousness. Japan is perhaps the closest ally of the United States; the alliance with Washington has been the foundation of its foreign policy since the end of the occupation after World War II. So when the national security advisor to Tokyo’s previous government, Masataka Okano, cites a litany of Trump actions, from tariffs and Venezuela to Greenland, and writes of shock at the U.S. undoing the order it built and calls for Tokyo “to develop a new strategy,” pay attention.
Echoing Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech, Okano writes to adjust to the world Trump wrought “requires Japan and other countries to look beyond the United States to address shared concerns.”
He’s not alone. I have been struck in recent conversations with Asian officials and experts in and out of government by their sense of disillusionment and anxiety at the direction of the U.S.—even as they still embrace U.S. security assurances. Chun Yungwoo, a prominent South Korean strategist and former national security advisor, said he was genuinely concerned by what was not in the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy. There was “no reaffirmation of the extended deterrence commitment,” and the defense strategy “gives the impression of prioritizing the First Island Chain … over the defense of treaty allies like ROK and Japan.”
That distinction, which uses the language of protecting the first island chain rather than explicitly defending allies, reveals a U.S. Asia policy derivative of, and seen through the prism of, China. Trump’s path toward a “decent peace” with China raises concerns in the region of a successful “G2,” which he has flaunted, though U.S. confrontation with China raises still more fears.
A burgeoning nationalist logic is discernible in the way U.S. allies are behaving. Take Japan’s military buildup, defense networks, and growing regional role. On the one hand, it satisfies U.S. demands for burden shifting, bolstering the alliance. On the other, there is an independently nationalist component evident in Tokyo’s attainment of long-range strike capabilities, tough line on Taiwan, whispers of nuclear weapons and regional assertiveness.
There is a similar quiet hedging and rumbling of “strategic autonomy” in South Korea’s increasingly independent strategic profile. As the U.S. demands it take “primary responsibility” for its own defense, Seoul pursues a burgeoning military strength, popular support for nuclear weapons grows, it seeks nuclear reprocessing to build nuclear submarines, and diversifies its global ties. The trend of derisking from both the U.S. and China is discernible across Asia.
These aren’t the only signs that this is a walking-dead policy. Back in Washington, there is the stark “America First” transactionalism and predatory, coercive economic statecraft, expressed through wildly shifting tariffs on allies and partners (even those, like Australia and Singapore, with whom the U.S. has a trade surplus), and lopsided trade deals to underscore their vassal status.
Among middle powers there is an explosion of hedging and balancing, highlighted by Carney’s landmark speech at Davos. Much of this turns around trade, measurable by accelerating the trend for regional and plurilateral trade arrangements to preserve rules-based trade in contrast to Trump’s mercurial and predatory approach.
In the Asia-Pacific, the largest (and overlapping) trade agreements, the 15-member Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), neither of which includes the United States, have evolved over the past eight years. RCEP includes U.S. allies and partners as well as China, the largest trading partner of U.S. allies and partners in East Asia, particularly deepening economic and tech ties to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). CPTPP, which Japan stewarded after the U.S. rejected it, is growing, adding the United Kingdom, with Indonesia and several others applying to join. Then there is the recent EU-India trade accord, and talks to align the EU with the CPTPP. The list goes on.
At the same time, there is a thickening web of intra-Asian defense cooperation, many such as AUKUS and U.S.-Japan-Australia-Philippines including the U.S., but a growing number of separate groupings, such as Japan-India, India-Vietnam, Canada-Philippines-ASEAN, and the Indonesia-Philippines-Vietnam maritime triangle illustrate growing patterns, though how consequential it may be for a future Asia-Pacific security architecture compared to trade formations is uncertain.
Trump’s policies are the logical conclusion to the gap between the promise and reality of U.S. policies toward the region. They never lived up to their hype, in part, from the pull of U.S. global interests. But not least, because the dynamism of China and Asia’s rise as the center of economic gravity and military capabilities outpaced U.S. ability to adapt.
Former President Barack Obama’s failure to respond to China’s land grab of the disputed South China Sea islet of Scarborough Shoal is viewed by many as a seminal moment. Subsequent Chinese military facilities on other disputed South China Sea territories and other gray-zone actions that followed were largely unchallenged by the U.S.—even after the International Court of Justice found Chinese claims illegal in 2016.
At the same time, Obama was unable to finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a major trade agreement that he described as the centerpiece of his Asia pivot. The TPP would have decided, as he argued, who would “write the rules of the road for trade.” Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Trump both campaigned against the TPP in the 2016 election, and it’s been all downhill since.
The U.S. has yet to put in place a competitive economic pillar in what has become an increasingly one-dimensional, military-centric Asia-Pacific policy, as Evan Feigenbaum and I argued in these pages in 2012. Retreating from stewardship of the global trade system and a dominant multidimensional actor as China’s mushrooming trade and investment profile in Asia unfolded was a costly blunder.
Zombies don’t die naturally, but they can be killed. A new pattern of change in the essence of the economic and security arrangements, a gradual fraying of the sinews, the bonds, between the U.S. and its allies and partners is unfolding. For the foreseeable future, change is likely to be gradual and incremental. But the world is in a transitory interregnum with more uncertainty than at any period since World War II. Many things—a war over Taiwan, South Korea and Japan going nuclear, a governmental crisis in China or the United States, a global financial meltdown—could put the undead to rest.
Trump or not, the structural trends driving the current geopolitical trajectory are likely to persist: U.S.-China competition, economic/tech nationalism, and the rest of Asia (as well as middle powers writ large) trying to forge coping mechanisms to maximize autonomy from both major powers. So will the tension from the paradox of an Asia-Pacific deepening its economic integration (including China), while hoping for the U.S. to sustain its security guarantor role, even as U.S. power sheds responsibility and public goods.
And as the borrowing of high-end U.S. military assets from East Asia to fight Gulf War 3.0 illustrates, another overstretched U.S. president, proclaiming Asia a priority, is being lured deeper into an unstable Middle East. When the guns fall silent, the war’s aftermath will be an unsettled region with two broken and battered states, Iran and Lebanon, an unresolved U.S.-led mess in Gaza, and persisting tensions between Iran, its Gulf neighbors, and Israel. It is difficult to see the U.S. extricating itself from the region for the remainder of Trump’s term and likely beyond, draining resources and focus from U.S. Asia policy.
In the interim, U.S. narcissism and Trump whims continue to dissipate reliability and trust, and a rewiring world will continue to drive the current slow-motion transition.
