By Richard Weitz
Talk of a U.S. pivot toward the Asia-Pacific is being replaced with the idea of a rebalancing. Regardless, U.S. military strategy is taking on an interesting shape.
Asian security issues were prominent at this year’s annual security conference of the U.S. Army War College that I attended. U.S. experts considered sustaining U.S. engagement in East Asia especially important due to the rising power of China, North Korea’s threatening behavior, and the potential for further nuclear weapons proliferation in the region.
But the terms “Asian Pivot” and “back to Asia” were no longer in fashion, with the speakers emphasizing that the United States had never left Asia. Instead, they stressed the elements of continuity in the current administration’s strategy with those of its predecessor. The fact is that even before the recent announcement of the Pentagon’s new Asian orientation, the United States was quietly strengthening its forces in the region. For example, despite the ongoing commitments in the Middle East and Afghanistan, half of the U.S. Air Force’s top-of-the-line F-22 fighters are deployed in the Asia-Pacific region.
So what is the preferred description now, and what do we know about the likely direction of U.S. policy? The term now being used is “re-balancing,” which encompasses two separate processes – the U.S. military is rebalancing its global assets from other regions to Asia, as well as rebalancing within the Asia-Pacific region, reducing the concentration of forces from northeast Asia to a more widely distributed focus throughout the entire region.
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