America’s Pivot to Asia Takes a U-Turn

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Lacking a coherent or even discernible strategy in geopolitics, Donald Trump has inadvertently reversed the direction in which American foreign and security policy was going for the past three presidential administrations, including his first. Two more veers took place this week in Asia.

One is the literal change in course of the USS George Washington, one of America’s 11 active aircraft carriers. It’s now steaming away from the Far East and toward the Middle East, where it will replace another carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been doing duty in Trump’s unwinnable war against Iran, and on which conditions have gotten so bad that some sailors have reportedly tried to jump overboard.

Yet again, the US is shifting resources away from the Indo-Pacific region and toward the Middle East, as it already did when sending scarce ammunition westward. For the time being, America will have no aircraft carrier in the Far East at all.

So much for the shift from west to east envisioned (though never accomplished) by the administrations of Barack Obama, Trump 1.0, Joe Biden and even Trump 2.0 at its outset.

The second jaw-dropper is Trump’s abrupt decision to scale down military exercises with South Korea that were meant to hone the two allies’ joint defense in case of an attack by North Korea. If the drills hadn’t already started, he would have cancelled them.

Somehow Trump got this peninsula, like the wider world, upside down too: He deems Kim Jong Un, one of the planet’s worst dictators and gravest threats to world peace, “unthreatening and respectful.” Simultaneously, he calls the military drills, which his own American military had planned as it does every year, “totally inappropriate and hostile.”

Trump is clear about his motivation. Far from playing chess in any dimension, he is sulking: He asked South Korea to help fight that war he started in the Persian Gulf, and South Korea had the temerity to say “No thanks!”

In that, and so many other ways, Trump’s epic folly in launching Epic Fury will now overshadow and compromise every relationship, alliance and strategic objective that America might have developed if foresight rather than petulance reigned in the White House.

By way of summary: Trump is weakening America’s ability to deter China from threatening Taiwan (a de facto if not de jure ally) and the Philippines (a treaty ally). He is also being conciliatory toward Pyongyang, which nowadays has a mutual-defense treaty with Russia and sends  troops to fight against Ukraine, and which (unlike Iran) not only has, but is rapidly adding to, a nuclear arsenal.

And he keeps snubbing America’s closest allies, in this case Seoul, with which the US has a mutual-defense treaty. Like Tokyo and several NATO partners, South Korea must now plan for the “worst-case scenario” — in which the US abandons its treaty obligations in the event of an attack — and contemplate building its own nuclear arsenal.

For good measure, Trump also keeps threatening to bomb other partners and friends, most recently Oman. And he’s constantly waging economic war against almost all of them with his tariffs.

Confused? Spare a dollop of sympathy for those strategically minded members of the administration who now have to contort themselves to explain whatever just dropped on the president’s Truth Social account.

One of these is Elbridge Colby. He is Under Secretary of Defense (meaning policy thinker) in the Pentagon and spent years articulating the view that the US should shrink its military footprint in the Middle East and Europe in order to gear up for the contest that will matter most during this century: the one between the US and China as they vie for dominance in the Pacific.

Colby used to be explicit — as indeed are the administration’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, which he helped draft — that this meant preparing America to be able to “deny” (meaning repel) any Chinese aggression along the First Island Chain, which runs from Japan and Okinawa through Taiwan and the Philippines to Borneo.

When talking to journalists these days, though, Colby is suddenly cagey about whether Taiwan is even part of that island chain. (Where could it have gone?) Swinging through Southeast Asia this month and facing questions everywhere about America’s waning commitments, he clung desperately to a new phrase, “flexible realism,” in which “flexible” seems to mean “whatever the boss posts next.”

Even Republican strategists, provided they are not in the current government, increasingly acknowledge that this amounts to intellectual bankruptcy. The US must “husband military resources to defend the first island chain while encouraging allies to do more in their own defense,” observes Richard Fontaine, chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security (and a national-security veteran who advised the late senator John McCain): “Ok. But how do moves in Venezuela, Iran, and possibly Cuba fit into the picture?”

They don’t. In effect, the president is surrendering in slow motion to America’s most menacing adversaries. And he apparently doesn’t even understand that this is what he’s doing.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

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