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An aerial view of the U.S. Naval Base Yokosuka.
(Image: Wiki Commons)
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By Carnes Lord and Andrew S. Erickson
The first part of a two-part series that evaluates the United States’ evolving network of bases in the Asia - Pacific and the opportunities and challenges each brings to the table moving forward.
The Asia-Pacific region, central to global economic and geopolitical development in the twenty-first century, is the logical focus of the Obama Administration’s ongoing rebalancing of capabilities, relations, and presence thereto. This effort is inspired by profound challenges and opportunities emerging in the region. Aspects of China’s rapid, broad-based development fall into both categories, with challenges including increasingly potent anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) systems that threaten the viability of potential opponents’ forces with long-range precision strike capabilities. Central to American presence and influence in the vital Asia-Pacific, but facing increasing vulnerabilities, is a complex network of bases and access points that has been too long neglected by both scholars and the American public. This two-part series addresses these timely and important issues, surveys present U.S. basing infrastructure, and examines key challenges and trends that Washington confronts as attempts to preserve its capabilities and influence in the Asia-Pacific.
In an address to the Australian Parliament on November 17, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that the United States, as part of a general upgrade of its security cooperation with Australia, would deploy up to 2,500 U.S. Marines at Darwin in northern Australia. Although the United States has long enjoyed a close military (and intelligence) relationship with Australia, not since World War II has any significant American military force been stationed permanently on the continent. This move, the president explained, reflected “a deliberate and strategic decision—as a Pacific nation, the United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future.” Together with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s late 2011 visit to Myanmar (Burma), the first by an American secretary of State in more than half a century, this is the most striking manifestation of a new determination on the part of the Obama administration to reassert the United States’ traditional interests in the Asia-Pacific region, to reassure its friends and allies there of the long-term nature of its commitment to them, and to send an unmistakable signal to the People’s Republic of China that the United States is and intends to remain a “Pacific power” fully prepared to meet the challenge of China’s rise and its regional ambitions.
Read the full story at The Diplomat