Asia without America, part 1: The cupboards are bare

History has multiple equilibria. Seemingly stable arrangements can turn on a dime. “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen,” Vladimir Lenin wrote in 2017, his last year in exile.

Or, as President Xi Jinping said at the door of the Kremlin after a 2023 meeting with Vladimir Putin, “Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years.” Within earshot of the press, President Xi slyly added, “and we are the ones driving these changes together.”

Let us not beat around the bush: We’re talking to you, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. The changes that President Xi was referring to are the collapse of America’s alliance system and, along with it, the collapse of the rules-based international order.

Every nation should be prepared. The savviest actors will front-run events. When President Xi said “we are the ones driving these changes,” it was an open invitation to bet on and become part of the “we.”

Fast forward to 2025 and trends have only accelerated. President Trump, in his second term, has gratuitously insulted Europe, strong-armed Panama, threatened to annex Greenland and Canada and launched a chaotic trade war on the world.

This is not 4D chess, people. This is President Trump using whatever is left of American power to kick over the chessboard, hoping the scattered pieces magically rearrange themselves in advantageous positions. It is also sheer madness.           

In his book And Tomorrow the World: The Birth of US Global Supremacy, Stephen Wertheim tells the story of how, over just a few years preceding Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations and leaders such as President Franklin Roosevelt maneuvered America’s global posture away from wariness over foreign entanglements and towards global primacy.

Of course, none of this could be said out loud. As the new posture developed during and after World War II, it had to be buried in euphemisms like “liberal international order” and administered through neutered institutions including the World Bank/IMF (1944), the United Nations (1945), NATO (1949) and even the US Congress.

All of this runs counter to the legacy many founding fathers hoped to bequeath the young republic fortunately separated from a fractious Europe by the Atlantic Ocean. In his valedictory address, George Washington famously warned against involvement in foreign wars and entanglements:

Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation?Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements.

According to Wertheim, the thinkers and leaders who planned American primacy were not acting in bad faith; these were not Pentagon paper pushers angling for a retirement gig at Lockheed Martin. These were men genuinely fearful of a world where fascists controlled the Eurasian landmass. Wertheim writes:

Peace, however, came at an unprecedented price after Germany conquered France and briefly bestrode Europe. For the United States to maintain a hemispheric military posture could potentially leave Europe to the worst Europeans and Asia to the worst Asians – totalitarian dictatorships harnessing the tools of industrial modernity to achieve armed conquest and subjugation.

After saving Europe and Asia from fascist domination in WWII (or at least joining mop-up operations in act four), the US lost no time declaring itself leader of the free world in the long twilight struggle against the Soviet Union. George Kennan, in his famous long telegram, wrote:

The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.… Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.

Primacy, it turns out, is a hard drug to quit. After the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union and China voluntarily joining the American led economic system, the US quickly appointed itself permanent world leader under the Wolfowitz doctrine:

The US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. In non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. We must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

It was around that time that “liberal international order” morphed into “rules-based international order.”

After the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, the US updated the Wolfowitz doctrine with the Bush doctrine, an aggressive foreign policy posture that assumed the right to preemptively eliminate – through military means – nascent threats before they fully materialize. At West Point’s 2002 graduation speech, George W Bush said:

We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties and then systemically break them.

If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.

Our security will require transforming the military you will lead – a military that must be ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.

The hangover from botched military adventures under the Wolfowitz/Bush doctrines has ignited calls for a foreign policy closer to what the founding fathers had intended, now pejoratively labelled “isolationism” by primacists. Some, like self-proclaimed realist Elbridge Colby, favor a husbanding of resources to specifically contain China – a Sino-only primacist, if you will.

As with everything else, President Trump’s foreign policy has been schizophrenic and incoherent. Let us not pretend there is a Trump doctrine. There is no plan. There is no strategy. There is no theory. He’s just making it up as he goes along, driven by appetites and constrained by resources. 

American primacists deliberately reject that the purpose of regional hegemony is to not have to expend resources on the military. The nation had been amply warned and not just by George Washington. John Quincy Adams, 6^th President of the United States, urged against searching for “monsters to destroy” in an 1821 speech:   

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.… She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.

America first heard the term “military industrial complex” from Dwight Eisenhower, 34^th President of the United States, in his 1961 farewell address:  

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience…. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications…. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Hegemonic dynasties coalesced in China specifically to divert resources away from fractious wars and towards public works projects (for example, the Dujiangyuan water diversion project, the Grand Canal, the Great Wall).

The PRC dynasty is no different, spending less than 2% of its GDP on defense and getting the Three Gorges Dam, high speed rail, the South-North Water Transfer project and a national highway system in return.

The “freedom to roam,” popularized by John Mearsheimer, is demonstrably not a universal imperative of regional hegemons. Ming Dynasty China at the height of its power famously burned the imperial treasure fleet. The American impulse to roam is a legacy of European (mostly British) maritime imperialism which has long since outlived its utility, now incurring more costs than benefits.

Russia is challenging NATO in Ukraine, China is challenging the US in East Asia, Iran is challenging the US in the Middle East and god knows what Kim Jong Un is doing in North Korea. The neglected home front is awash in drugs, obesity, crime and mental illness. America, spread thin after decades of mindless war in Iraq and Afghanistan, now maintains what’s left of primacy though an alphabet soup of multilateral alliances (G7, NATO, AUKUS, the Quad).    

These alliances are inherently unstable – pitting free riding against buck passing. The US is trying to do global hegemony on the cheap through alliance partners. An overstretched America wants to pass the buck – to offload the costs of its rules-based international order onto partners. Meanwhile, alliance partners want to free ride – to enjoy benefits of the rules-based order without chipping in.

For alliances to be stable, America must demonstrate that it is willing and able to shoulder all the costs – with or without partners.

The United States did this for most of the post-World War II era, as John F. Kennedy promised in his January 1961 inauguration speech:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge – and more.

While partners waxed and waned based on shifting domestic politics (for example, France, the Philippines, Thailand), America’s resolve had long been assumed, even if erroneously (for example, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Vietnam 1973, Lebanon 1984, Somalia 1993, Iraq 2011, Afghanistan in 2021).

But now, as President Trump abandons alliances and the capabilities of challengers grow, America’s resolve can no longer be assumed. The US is not just trying to pass the buck, it is all but telling Europe that the buck does not stop here. Asia is left in a lurch unsure what President Trump will decide. It could be anything – from an honest-to-god strategic pivot to Asia to trading Taiwan for flattery and a ham sandwich to anything in between. We just do not know.

What everyone does know is that China’s capabilities are growing and, over time, the costs of maintaining America’s position in Asia will rise. And if trends continue, buck passing will intensify and free riders will have uncomfortable decisions to make.