Since his return to the White House, Donald Trump has attempted to reduce the U.S. focus on Europe in order to shift resources to the Indo-Pacific. But geopolitical rivalry can neither resolve America’s own problems nor the challenges facing the world.
The book on the major shift in American foreign policy, its interests and assets, to Asia by U.S. former assistant secretary of state Kurt M. Campbell.
Europe has always been the fulcrum of U.S. global strategy. Controlling Europe is the foundation of U.S. global hegemony. U.S. strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski once identified the transatlantic alliance as the most important of all global relationships for the United States, describing it as a springboard for American participation in global affairs, enabling it to play a decisive arbitration role in Eurasia, the central stage of world power, and to create an alliance that holds a dominant position in all the world’s critical realms of power and influence. Thus, “Europe first” was the inevitable need and logical outcome of America’s grand global strategy.
From the beginning of World War II and extending for a time after the Cold War, the U.S. had always prioritized European affairs. After taking office, Barack Obama adjusted U.S. global strategy and formally proposed “rebalancing” the Asia-Pacific. That was the start of America’s strategic pivot eastward and a new focus. As the Biden administration stated in its Indo-Pacific Strategy: “The Obama administration significantly accelerated American prioritization of Asia, investing new diplomatic, economic and military resources there.”
In a sense the Obama government opened up a new era for America in the Asia-Pacific. The policy was a hallmark of U.S. global strategy, for the first time focusing on the Asia-Pacific. Under the Indo-Pacific Strategy put forward during Trump 1.0, and further promoted during the Joe Biden presidency, the U.S. demonstrated greater concern about the Asia-Pacific. It increased resources both in policy and practice, and came up with a vision for the region’s development, as well as way to accomplish it.
Yet America’s Asia-Pacific Strategy has remained in a state of relative restraint thanks to inadequate resources, domestic policy failures, loss of industry, high deficits and increasingly prominent problems — intensifying social contradictions, a fierce confrontation between Democrats and Republicans, as well as the Ukraine crisis, tensions in the Middle East and other regional conflicts, all of which consume U.S. strategic resources.
Since his return to the White House, Donald Trump has attempted to reduce the U.S. focus on Europe in order to shift resources to the Indo-Pacific. This, to a great extent, reflects the new strategic orientation of “Asia first.”
Trump spoke with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodomyr Zelenskyy on February 12, the same day U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained the new administration’s position at a Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting. Both made the following points:
• It is unrealistic to restore Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. Obsessing over such an “illusory” goal would only prolong the war and cause greater suffering;
• Ukraine must not join NATO. And any lasting peace agreement must include powerful security guarantees ensuring that war doesn’t break out again;
• European troops, not Americans, should be responsible for security in a postwar Ukraine;
• Future peace-keeping troops in Ukraine from Europe and elsewhere should not act in NATO’s name, and NATO’s principle of collective defense does not apply to peace-keeping there;
• NATO members must shoulder the bulk of future aid to Ukraine, and raise the proportion of defense spending from 2 percent to 5 percent of GDP. Their core message is that European affairs should be taken care of by the Europeans.
Hegseth stated that Europe needs to assume primary responsibility for its own security, as the U.S. military’s main mission is to preserve border safety and cope with challenges from the Indo-Pacific. Hegseth said:
“We’re also here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe. The Unitd States faces consequential threats to our homeland. We must — and we are — focusing on the security of our own borders.
“We also face a peer competitor in the Communist Chinese with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity, and making the resourcing tradeoffs to ensure deterrence does not fail.”
During a Feb. 10 interview, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said U.S. competition with China was the dominant subject in the 21st century. “We’re going to be competing with them for the rest of the century and beyond. And I think the story of the 21st century is going to be about what happened between the U.S. and China,” Rubio said.
In a speech on Feb. 14 at the Munich Security Conference, Vice President JD Vance told Europe to share greater responsibility for its own security.
“I’m sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defense spending over the next few years in line with some new target,” he said. “And that’s great, because as President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think you hear this term ‘burden sharing,’ but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together — that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.”
During a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Vance said, “NATO is an important alliance, of course, and we’re the most significant part of it. But we want to make sure that NATO is actually built for the future. We think a big part of that is ensuring that NATO does a little bit more burden-sharing in Europe so the United States can focus more on certain challenges in East Asia.”
From March 24 to March 30, Hegseth’s first trip to Asia followed a highly symbolic route — Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines and Japan. He became the first cabinet-level U.S. official to visit the Indo-Pacific region, illustrating the Trump administration’s “security first” policy orientation. During the visits, Hegseth on multiple occasions stated positions featuring heavier emphasis on Asia and containment of China. His words can be understood as laying the groundwork for Trump’s future planning for Asia-Pacific security. The Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance Hegseth signed on March 29 marks the most profound adjustment in U.S. military strategy since the end of the Cold War. The document explicitly defined China as a singular “pacing threat” and revealed plans to concentrate military resources in the Indo-Pacific. It prioritized contingency plans tailored to conflict in the Taiwan Strait, and asked NATO member nations to cope with Russian threats on their own.
These many statements show a strategic reorientation of the United States and should remind people of the new U.S. Asia policy that former President Richard Nixon proposed at a new conference in Guam in 1969. It was later clarified in Nixon’s Nov. 3 address to the nation on the War in Vietnam. He said that the U.S. would honor all treaty commitments, but Asian nations should assume primary responsibility for their own defense. The U.S. would present its umbrella of nuclear protection only when allies — or nations with significant implications for U.S. defense security — come under threat. This is the so-called Nixon Doctrine.
The U.S. and Soviet Union were locked in fierce competition at the time, while the latter was believed to have the upper hand. Nixon’s idea was to reduce pressure on the U.S. via burden-sharing, so as to concentrate on competition with the Soviet Union in Europe. This was a continuation of the “Europe first” strategy. Today the U.S. has maneuvered a major reversal by proposing the strategy of “Asia first,” showing how fluid things could be in the world.
Judging from present conditions, the U.S. is mainly mounting economic pressure on China, exposing its unilateralist bully’s logic. But it is easily foreseeable that Trump 2.0’s “Asia first” strategic orientation in foreign policy reflects in-depth turbulence in global geopolitical conditions. The U.S. seeks to pressure China in all realms, while the key area — specifically the Asia-Pacific — will again find itself in a time of torrential change.
Peace and development remain the main themes and strongest aspirations in today’s world. Seeking peace, development, cooperation and win-win scenarios has become the common wish of people in every land. Major power competition is out of tune with our time. Stirring up camp confrontation and geopolitical rivalry will not only endanger regional stability, but cannot resolve America’s own problems, let alone the challenges facing the world. Nor is it in line with the great trend of peace and development of our time.
