On the road to Asia, President Trump and his aides have taken a sharp detour back to the deserts of the Middle East.
Instead of flying to Beijing for a summit early next month, Mr. Trump has said he will stay in Washington to deal with the war against Iran that he started with Israel. Thousands of U.S. Marines are heading on warships from Japan and California toward Iran. American air defense equipment is being shipped from South Korea and other parts of the region to the Middle East.
So goes the American “pivot” to Asia, which looks increasingly out of reach.
Three American presidents have come into office vowing to focus resources on the challenges posed by China, a superpower rival to the United States with the world’s fastest-growing military and second-largest economy.
Each one has instead turned to crises in other parts of the world — often to conflicts in the Middle East that they began or supported, despite earlier promises that they had learned the lessons of the costly American “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For weeks, Mr. Trump had billed the summit in Beijing as a critical meeting with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in which they would hash out their differences on trade, defense and diplomacy.
Then on March 17, Mr. Trump said he would delay the meeting by five or six weeks to stay focused on Iran.
When asked that day by a reporter whether Iran was now a bigger foreign policy issue than China, Mr. Trump said: “Iran is just a military operation to me. Iran is just something that essentially was largely over in two or three days.”
But the war continues, and the Pentagon’s request for a $200 billion supplemental budget indicates it could go on for many months.
Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war directly contradicts his administration’s national security strategy. Released in December, it said that the U.S. government’s traditional focus on the Middle East “will recede,” and that the administration would prioritize the Western Hemisphere and the Asia-Pacific region.
Specifically, it said the United States would challenge China on trade and build up military deterrence around the “first island chain,” an area east of coastal China that includes Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan, the de facto independent island that Chinese leaders aim to control.
War in the Middle East, Again
Several senior political appointees in the Trump administration had said in recent years that prioritizing Asia was necessary given limits on America’s military resources and the slow production of weapons.
One of them, Elbridge A. Colby, now the under secretary of defense for policy, criticized the expenditure of resources in Ukraine and the Middle East — and warned against getting into a “significant conflict” with Iran. He wrote a book on the need for a “strategy of denial” focused on Taiwan.
Those same aides, once called “prioritzers,” are now publicly supporting Mr. Trump’s war against Iran. And some analysts have noted the irony of how, after years of U.S. officials denouncing China’s military buildup, Mr. Trump is beseeching China to send a naval expeditionary force to the Middle East to help secure the Strait of Hormuz.
“I think the Iran war just demonstrates how hard it is for the United States to focus on Asia,” said Zack Cooper, a scholar of U.S. strategy in Asia at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. “Even when an administration comes in with a strategy that explicitly downgrades the Middle East in the list of regional priorities, Washington often ends up getting pulled back into conflicts in the region.”
“Ultimately, I think this will increase concerns about whether the United States is too distracted and resource-constrained to maintain regional security,” he said. “This will drive some countries to hedge more, and it could risk emboldening China in the mid- to long term.”
Mr. Cooper argued in an essay in Foreign Affairs that the pivot announced by President Barack Obama in 2011 has been a failure, and that expectations that the United States would engage deeply across Asia were “no longer realistic.”
Although the Biden administration bolstered military cooperation with Asian allies, it failed to forge the kinds of free-trade pacts that those governments wanted as an alternative to commerce with China. The idea of free trade has been attacked by American politicians across the political spectrum, including by Mr. Trump, since Mr. Obama made the last serious attempt to engineer an ambitious trade pact in Asia.
The Biden administration also had to pour military and diplomatic resources into both Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s full-scale invasion and Israel’s war in Gaza.
Even before the war against Iran, Mr. Trump’s approach to China had raised questions among many current and former American officials about his understanding of U.S.-China competition.
Unlike President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump calls Mr. Xi a “very good friend,” and he rarely mentions China’s military and technological advances or its human rights record. His administration has lifted export controls on the sale of powerful semiconductor chips to China. And it has delayed a $13 billion arms sale to Taiwan that had been approved by Congress so as not to jeopardize plans for the leadership summit in Beijing, The New York Times reported.
Mr. Trump announced steep tariffs on Chinese imports, to be paid by American companies, but froze those after China threatened to halt exports of processed critical minerals to the United States.
Mr. Trump also imposed tariffs on Asian allies, straining those relationships.
What’s more, Mr. Trump refrained from publicly supporting Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, when she signaled in November that Japan might deploy its military if China tried to blockade or invade Taiwan. Last Thursday, Ms. Takaichi widened her eyes in the Oval Office when Mr. Trump cracked a joke about why he did not inform Japan of his plans to attack Iran on Feb. 28.
“We wanted surprise,” he said. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK? Right?”
‘A Weaker Hand With Beijing’
The Iran war has been a shock to Asian economies. U.S. partners and allies are grappling with plummeting oil and gas supplies caused by the shutdown of tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. Stock markets have fallen.
Meanwhile, governments are watching the United States redirect military resources to the Middle East: an aircraft carrier strike group, a contingent of up to 2,500 Marines from Okinawa and parts of a missile defense system called THAAD in South Korea. The Pentagon is also diverting some Patriot interceptor missiles from Asia for use against Iran.
The United States is burning through munitions — an estimated $5.6 billion worth in the first two days of the war alone — and it could take years to replenish stockpiles.
“Taking the risk of causing a much broader war in the Middle East and getting the U.S. potentially bogged down as we were in Iraq, that’s not what our allies really want to see,” said Bonnie S. Glaser, the managing director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund. “They view this as probably very detrimental to their security interests.”
Chinese officials are weighing how their country might benefit from what they see as Mr. Trump’s missteps. Some officials are no doubt anxious about energy markets, but Iran continues to ship oil to Chinese companies, and the global economic turmoil could mean Mr. Trump is less likely to reopen his trade war with China or take other disruptive actions.
“The prolongment of war with Iran will cause Trump to have to play a weaker hand with Beijing,” said Ryan Hass, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who was a career diplomat posted to China and a White House national security official. “He simply has less space to credibly threaten Beijing that he will escalate if his demands are not met.”
Yun Sun, a scholar at the Stimson Center in Washington who is visiting China, said that “a prevailing Chinese assessment is President Trump miscalculated the outcome of the war before he launched it.” Beijing prefers not to get deeply involved, she added, and is not discussing sending military forces to the region, as Mr. Trump had requested.
However, China watching American aggression from afar could have its drawbacks. The aloofness limits the country’s diplomatic stature and means it has less power to shape outcomes. In 2023, China played a guarantor role when it helped to finalize a diplomatic reopening between Iran and Saudi Arabia, but it has done little during this war to try to bring about a cease-fire.
“China’s credibility as an ally of both Iran and Venezuela has been called into question,” said R. Nicholas Burns, the ambassador to China in the Biden administration. “It has not mounted anything close to an effective diplomatic response to defend either. China had boasted it was becoming a power player in the Middle East in recent years but has been left on the sidelines in the recent crisis.”
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
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