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SEOUL, South Korea — A potential U.S. strategy long feared by America’s Asian allies has been given shape.
The proposal: A U.S. withdrawal from Indo-Pacific front lines to a more distant, defensible perimeter; a shift to a non-interventionist position on Taiwan; and the nullification of regional alliances.
The concept was put forth in a no-holds-barred report, “A second island chain strategy for Asia,” by Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow at libertarian U.S. think tank Defense Priorities.
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The report advocates that the U.S. withdraw from Asia’s First Island Chain, a string of islands near China’s coast that includes Japan’s main islands and the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Borneo, and instead focus its assets on the Second Island Chain farther east of China. That chain stretches from the Ogasawara Islands south of Japan, through Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, down to Palau and Western New Guinea.
Published in August, the report landed like a bombshell in Indo-Pacific capitals as President Trump pushes to refocus American power and influence more directly on the Western Hemisphere while upgrading ties with China and North Korea.
The report, combining “America First” and neo-isolationist thinking, has hit a nerve.
“Defense Priorities has its Indo-Pacific priorities wrong,” the Japan Times wrote. “U.S. Think Tank: South Korea Alliance Offers Minimal Benefit, Should End,” fretted South Korea’s bestselling daily, the Chosun Ilbo.
“It has certainly attracted attention,” said Yu Ji-hoon, a former South Korean naval officer who read the report “with considerable interest” as it raised questions “about the long-term credibility and shape of American engagement in the region.”
Others say the proposition would abandon vital strategic geography to China, leave the U.S. bereft of allied capabilities in all-domain security and generate severe consequences.
Time to pull back?
America has “two core interests in Asia worth protecting with military power: defending the U.S. homeland and safeguarding access to key economic markets and trade routes,” Ms. Kavanagh wrote. “The first priority requires little in the way of a forward military presence while the second benefits from a modest air and naval presence.”
She advocated withdrawing U.S. assets from the vulnerable First Island Chain to the distant but defensible Second Island Chain to “reduce U.S. military requirements and the risk of a war with China, while still protecting U.S. interests.”
Washington should “narrow its defense commitments … shifting to a clear non-intervention position on Taiwan, ending mutual defense alliances … and negotiating narrower and flexible security partnerships in their place.”
The 90,000 U.S. troops in Asia “should be consolidated at more survivable bases farther from China’s coast and tasked with securing U.S. economic interests and signaling continued U.S. involvement,” she suggested while adding that East Asia’s strategic terrain is critical.
Geoeconomically, China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan dominate global manufacturing.
Geopolitically, U.S. forces were severely tested in Asia in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Currently, they are deployed on the Korean Peninsula and across three island chains in an echeloned defense of the continental U.S.
Today, “the only serious U.S. peer competitor” is China, Ms. Kavanagh said.
Beijing’s fleet is based along the country’s long littoral. In the South China Sea, Beijing has defied Vietnam, the Philippines and international law, building a land-sea-air base network on atolls and reefs, dominating the seascape.
Elsewhere, East Asia’s geographies favor U.S. troops. Positions on allied soils enable sensor observation and fire control over straits that are current commercial trade routes and potential naval choke points.
South Korea faces China and North Korea, while its Jeju Island overlooks the junction of the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea and the East Sea/Sea of Japan.
Singapore lies at the southern end of the Strait of Malacca, China’s route west to the Indian Ocean.
To Singapore’s east lies the First Island Chain. The Philippines and Taiwan dominate the Bashi Channel, Japan’s Ryukyu Islands guard Taiwan’s eastern flank and the Miyako Strait, and Japan’s northern islands cover Russia’s east coast.
The U.S. and allied navies are not the only assets in play. U.S. Marines and soldiers have drilled dispersed, littoral defense tactics using mobile rocket systems in the Ryukyus and the Philippines.
However, these forward deployments are variously in range of strikes from China, North Korea and Russia.
U.S. troops in South Korea face risks of war with North Korea, a responsibility that is not in “core U.S. interests,” Ms. Kavanagh said. American forces have limited “strategic flexibility” for off-peninsula missions.
U.S. pledges to defend Taiwan are “increasingly untenable, carrying risks far out of proportion to … U.S. interests,” she wrote. Conflict over Taiwan “would be immense and unmanageable,” and a Chinese seizure of it does not “warrant the costs of war.”
She dismissed the loss of Taiwan’s world-leading chip manufacturers, noting that the U.S. holds ample semiconductor intellectual property and could fabricate chips domestically.
Regarding the Philippines, she warned that the U.S. could be dragged into war with China over “rocks and reefs” and delineated Manila’s military weaknesses.
She said Australia offers the U.S. few benefits, and so — like the above alliances — Washington could exit it “without major consequences.”
Japan is trickier. To keep it from China’s orbit, Ms. Kavanagh suggested keeping some bases while upgrading domestic capabilities.
She suggested that U.S. forces should consolidate at “more survivable bases” in the Second Island Chain, comprising Japan’s Ogasawara Islands, Marianas, including Guam and Palau, and areas of eastern Indonesia.
No sites there “are natural conflict ’flashpoints’ in the way Taiwan or the South China Sea might be,” Ms. Kavanagh wrote.
The Third Island Chain ranges from the Aleutians through Hawaii, Midway and American Samoa down to New Zealand.
Of the three chains, the first is the densest; the third is the most dispersed.
Ms. Kavanagh’s proposals would dismantle the regional post-1945 security architecture, but some pundits offered her a nod.
“She is correct that the U.S. is way overextended,” said Paul Midford, a foreign policy expert at Japan’s Meiji Gakuin University. “Another reason why her article has resonance is because the Iran war is not only unpopular, but raises doubts about U.S. capacity.”
Pushback pileup
Others were harsher.
“Ceding defense hegemony in the First Island Chain is preposterous,” said Alex Neill, a Singapore-based research fellow with the Pacific Forum. “It would be a massive windfall for Beijing. … U.S. reliance on the Second Island Chain would allow Chinese forces to move closer to the U.S. homeland.”
Although current U.S. garrisons are vulnerable to a preemptive strike, “You need assured retaliation,” he said.
To increase force survivability, “Hardening, mobility, undersea forces and greater reliance on distributed operations will clearly become increasingly important,” Mr. Yu said.
The report appears mistimed, suggested Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. For years, Washington has been unhappy with underinvested allies, but the situation is changing.
“The threat of abandonment has woken some allies up, leading them to increase spending and invest in new defense capabilities that will make them more valuable allies,” he said. “This will contribute to more durable and mutually beneficial alliances … negating the impetus in Washington to abandon allies completely.”
Rob York, regional affairs director of the Pacific Forum, said Ms. Kavanagh overlooked some likely consequences.
“The idea that the U.S. could downgrade treaty commitments and still secure economic interests suggests that there would not be ripple effects following its retreat,” he said. “No collapse in confidence, no contraction in investment, no discrediting of pro-U.S. political forces in those places in favor of those who advocate accommodating Beijing, and no escalation in Beijing’s efforts to intimidate those countries into censoring its critics and adopting policies that favor the [People’s Republic of China].”
The consequences could be seismic, Mr. Yu said.
U.S. disengagement could generate “stronger incentives for independent nuclear capabilities,” he said.
Ill will is another likelihood.
“If Washington terminated alliances then attempted to negotiate access to bases and ports, it cannot assume the same access would remain available,” Mr. Yu said. “Access is partly a product of alliance trust.”
Alliances are increasingly important, given how security issues are expanding into new domains.
“Up to the 20th century, the U.S. was isolationist due to being surrounded by huge oceans,” said Dan Pinkston, a Seoul-based international relations expert with Troy University. “But military technologies, particularly ballistic missiles, shrank the globe, and the idea that the U.S. could self-isolate disappeared.”
Renewed talk of global disentanglement is naive, he said, citing trans-boundary security challenges: space, cyber, supply chain, narcotics, terrorism, migration and the environment.
“The world is more integrated and networked, and that requires partnerships and coalitions,” Mr. Pinkston said. “Alliances are more important than ever.”
“Abrogating U.S. alliances in East Asia is an overreaction,” said Mr. Midford. “A more moderate version of her argument … is that the U.S. should adopt a less aggressive regional posture and engage in serious diplomacy.”
That could include halting freedom of navigation operations and ending calls for Taiwanese independence — issues that infuriate Beijing — while proposing arms control, not denuclearization, to North Korea, he said.
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