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, combined with the nullification of regional alliances.
The highly controversial concept was put forth in a no-holds-barred report, “A second island chain strategy for Asia,” by Senior Fellow Jennifer Kavanagh of the U.S. think tank Defense Priorities.
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Published in August, the report landed like a bombshell in Indo-Pacific capitals, and comes as President Trump has pushed 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,” huffed The Japan Times. “U.S. Think Tank: South Korea Alliance Offers Minimal Benefit, Should End,” fretted South Korea’s best-selling 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 raises 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 writes. “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 advocates 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.”
Asia’s 90,000 GIs, “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 suggests 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. Kavangh notes.
Beijing’s fleet is based along the country’s long littoral. In the South China Sea, Beijing has defied Hanoi, Manila and international law, building a land-sea-air base network on atolls and reefs, dominating the seascape.
But 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, Yellow Sea and Sea of Japan.
Singapore covers the southern end of the Malacca Strait, 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, while 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 Philippines.
However, these forward deployments are variously in range of strikes from China, North Korea and Russia.
GIs in South Korea face risks of war with North Korea, a responsibility that is not in “core U.S. interests,” Ms. Kavanagh notes. American forces have limited “strategic flexibility” for off-peninsula missions.
And U.S. pledges to defend Taiwan are “increasingly untenable, carrying risks far out of proportion to… U.S. interests,” she writes. Conflict over Taiwan “would be immense and unmanageable,” and a Chinese seizure of it does not “warrant the costs of war.”
She dismisses the loss of Taiwan’s world-leading chip manufacturers: The U.S holds plentiful intellectual property in semiconductors and could domesticize fabrication.
Regarding the Philippines, she fears that the U.S. could be dragged into war with China over “rocks and reefs,” and delineates Manila’s military weaknesses.
She believes Australia offers the U.S. low 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 suggests retaining some bases while upgrading domestic capabilities.
She suggests U.S forces should consolidate at “more survivable bases” in the Second Island China, 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,” notes Ms. Kavanagh.
The Third Island China ranges from the Aleutians, through Hawaii, Midway, American Samoa, down to New Zealand.
Of the three chains, the first is the densest; the third the most dispersed.
Ms. Kavanagh’s proposals would dismantle the regional post-1945 security architecture, but some pundits offered her a nod.
“She gets right that the U.S. is way over-extended,” 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.”
Others were harsher.
Pushback pile-up
“Ceding defense hegemony in the First Island Chain is preposterous,” said Alex Neill, a Singapore-based research fellow with 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.”
While current U.S. garrisons are vulnerable to a pre-emptive 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,” said Mr. Yu.
The report appears mistimed, suggested Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. Washington has, for years, been unhappy with underinvested allies, but things are 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.”
Pacific Forum Regional Affairs Director Rob York says likely consequences are overlooked.
“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 PRC.”
Consequences could be seismic, suggested Mr. Yu.
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, shrunk the globe and the idea that the U.S. could self-isolate disappeared.”
Renewed talk of global disentanglement is naïve, he cautioned, 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,” said Mr. Pinkston. “Alliances are more important than ever.”
“Abrogating U.S. alliances in East Asia is an over-reaction,” agreed 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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