IMAGE: BLOOMBERG
IN HANOI IN 2010, Robert Gates, then America’s defence secretary, stood before his regional counterparts at the inaugural ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus and signalled a new era of engagement. The United States was formally embedding itself in Asia’s security architecture for the first time.
The following year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made it official doctrine: America would pivot to Asia. It would deepen its military ties, of course, but also its economic and diplomatic engagement. The message was that America was back, and it would help write the region’s rules.
Fifteen years later, Gates’s successor, Pete Hegseth, delivered a more ambivalent message to the same forum—this time convened in Kuala Lumpur. America would stand with its allies, he said, but under an “America First” banner that asked more of partners and offered fewer unconditional guarantees. “America First does not mean America alone,” Hegseth insisted. The pivot, it seems, has pivoted somewhere more complicated.
The original strategy had three legs. The first, security, involved shifting naval assets to the Indo-Pacific and reinforcing alliances from Tokyo to Manila. The second was economic: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal that would embed American rules and offer Asian countries privileged access to its market. The third was about values: promoting democracy and good governance as a bulwark against Chinese coercion. All three were meant to work in tandem. None of them do.
The economic leg collapsed first. The TPP never made it through the America’s Senate. Donald Trump withdrew from it in 2017, and Joe Biden did not rejoin. Mr Biden’s own Indo-Pacific Economic Framework offered plenty of talk about supply chains and digital rules but no tariff cuts. Mr Trump’s second term has brought more tariffs, not fewer, and a protectionist turn that leaves Asian exporters looking elsewhere. Vietnam, which once hoped for a free-trade deal with America, now sends a third of its exports to China.
The governance pillar has frayed, too. America’s democracy-promotion efforts tended to land awkwardly in places with different traditions. But the deeper damage came from hypocrisy. When the United States used economic coercion against allies, paused anti-corruption enforcement for political convenience, or carried out drone strikes that killed civilians, its lectures on values rang hollow. Favourability ratings for America have slid across the region. In Indonesia, a decade ago, two-thirds of people viewed the United States positively. Now fewer than half do.
That leaves security—and even there, the picture has narrowed. The Pentagon’s 2025 strategy talks less about the broad Indo-Pacific and more about the “first island chain”, the arc of islands from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. Defend that, the thinking goes, and scale back elsewhere. It is a tacit admission that America cannot do everything. Hegseth did strike a hawkish tone in Kuala Lumpur, vowing the U.S. would “stoutly defend” its Indo-Pacific interests and that he had highlighted to his Chinese counterpart “the importance of maintaining a balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.” But a strategy that rests on military deterrence alone, stripped of economic and political engagement, is brittle. Allies notice when the only thing reliably on offer is a defence pact.
A government must balance its commitments with its power. When it does not, it suffers a credibility gap. America now has such a gap in Asia. It promises much but delivers little on the economic and diplomatic fronts that matter most to the region. And in international politics, a deterrence gap invites testing.
China for its part does not need to exploit this aggressively. It just needs to be predictable. Under Mr Trump, American policy lurches. Tariffs land on allies one day, talks of annexation the next. Countries struggle to know what compliance even looks like. China, by contrast, offers clarity. Cross its red lines on Taiwan or Xinjiang, and retaliation is fast and consistent. Stay in its good books, and the investment and market access flow. Canada, squeezed by American tariffs and threatened with economic coercion, recently sent its prime minister, Mark Carney, to Beijing. He cut tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and called the relationship “more predictable”.
The result is a slow realignment. Countries are not abandoning America but they are hedging. Partners remain uncertain about the depth of U.S. commitment on issues like the South China Sea and Taiwan—anxieties that trace to President Trump’s unclear position on competition with China, and which no secretary of defence can fully assuage. They diversify their trade, their supply chains and their diplomatic outreach. They watch as China builds ports, signs trade deals and sets technical standards. They note that the United States, once the region’s indispensable power, now struggles to pass a budget, let alone a trade pact. They calculate that America’s attention is elsewhere.
The pivot was meant to lock in American leadership for decades. Its failure may instead lock in China’s advantage. The first island chain may hold, for now, but the waters beyond it are shifting. And in Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur and many Asian capitals besides, officials are asking a question they rarely asked a decade ago: if America cannot sustain its commitment across all its dimensions—military, economic, diplomatic—who will fill the space? ■
