It’s Time the United States Put the ‘Pivot to Asia’ Behind

The Trump administration’s decision to abruptly halt the U.S. rotational deployment to Poland not only caught Warsaw off guard, but it also highlights the ongoing strategic shortsightedness that has defined multiple U.S. administrations, whether Democrat or Republican. Since 2012 and President Obama’s ill-conceived “pivot to Asia” policy guidance, Washington has been caught up in building support for the “Asia First” strategy. More than a decade later, the same logic continues to dominate Washington’s strategic debate, even though the U.S. military is involved in another war in the Middle East—a theater that was supposed to be fourth in priority according to the latest 2025 National Security Strategy. Once more, the U.S. can operate in the Middle East only because of its bases and weapon supplies in Europe; without these, projecting power from the Continental United States would be impossible. And yet, the “Asia-Firsters” continue to insist that China must take priority, primarily by virtue of China’s economic weight. Yet the argument often rests on surprisingly thin geopolitical foundations.

The main reason for the Asia-First strategy has been the cost — after twenty years of GWOT “scheduled wars” in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which failed to achieve their goals and for which the U.S. taxpayer paid some eight trillion dollars, no administration had been willing to increase defense spending to the necessary level until the Trump administration’s recent request for a $1.5 trillion defense budget for FY2027.[i] This left the U.S. military dangerously underfunded in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, while the “just-in-time” weapons and munitions production schedules drained the Joint Force of the magazine depth and redundancies needed to fight a peer adversary. In effect, the ‘pivot’ became a substitute for the resource commitments required to sustain credible deterrence in both key theaters simultaneously. It is ironic that only after depleting munitions during the campaign against Iran, we are finally talking about a defense budget large enough for the task.

Worse still, the Trump administration decided to dismiss European NATO allies as supposedly unable to contribute to America’s defense, bluntly criticizing them even as – under pressure from Donald Trump – they finally started allocating significant funds to rearmament. All this was happening while the U.S. bases in Europe supported direct power projection into the Persian Gulf, and access to U.S. stocks in Europe facilitated the operation. Granted, some allies, especially Spain, acted poorly by refusing the U.S. use of their airspace; however, overall, Europe has remained what it has been since 1945: the United States’ indispensable strategic platform across the Atlantic.