The Obama administration’s masturbatory announcement of a strategic military pivot from Europe (and, by implication, the Middle East) to the Pacific region combined historical illiteracy, strategic naivety, and political cynicism. Within the Pentagon, the “pivot” is simply part of the ploy for budget dollars (espoused by the Navy and Air Force). Within the Obama White House it was viewed as a chance to burnish the president’s strategic credentials. In reality, the pivot is much ado about nothing.
In 1492, Columbus discovered the Americas. In 2012, Obama apparently discovered the Pacific. But the notion that the United States has ignored the Pacific region simply reveals the astonishing lack of historical perspective in an administration that sees the past as a blank page upon which anything convenient might be written.
The United States has been the key Pacific power since the final years of the Nineteenth Century and the Spanish-American War. Even then, we already had been an important military presence in the extreme western Pacific for a half-century, since Commodore Perry’s “opening” of Japan in the 1850s. Prior even to that, American gunboats had been witness to the European involvement in China as we showed the flag to safeguard our China trade. Far from neglectful, we have been attentive for two centuries.
Indeed, throughout most of the twentieth century our military involvement in the Pacific was more extensive and consistent than our engagement in Europe. From the occupation of the Philippines and other inherited territories, through the deployment of Army regiments on the Chinese mainland and Navy gunboats on Chinese rivers (plus a Siberian interlude), we were anything but absent. Between 1941 and 1945, historians with arcane interests may recall a minor conflict with Japan. Then came the Korean War and an enduring U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula. We fought in Vietnam, with incursions into Cambodia and operations in Laos, and we long based U.S. forces in Thailand. We returned the key naval base at Subic Bay to Manila at the Philippines’ request (a demand Manila quietly rues, given China’s saber-rattling today), but we maintain key bases in Japan, on Guam, in Hawaii—our enduring Pacific outpost—and elsewhere in the region. We have enduring alliances with English-speaking Pacific powers, sealed in the blood of wartime alliances. And, on the civilian side, American entrepreneurs have been making fortunes out of China for two centuries.
Obama’s Pacific pivot? A few hundred Marines sent to Australia.
When have we been absent from the Pacific? By contrast, the last century saw U.S. forces stationed only on European (initially, only British) soil from 1942—and our European presence had already dwindled by three-quarters before the Obama presidency.
All the fuss ignores two obvious points. First, the United States is and must remain both a Pacific and Atlantic power, with strategic power projection beyond those great buffer oceans. Second, the current administration views everything as politics, hence the absurdity of trumpeting a course of action—the pivot—that discourages old allies in Europe, while antagonizing potential enemies in Asia. Were we strategically serious about a pivot toward East Asia, we would have shut our governmental mouth and just done it, quietly coordinating with allies and letting prospective enemies draw their own conclusions.
Combining a Pentagon fight for dollars with the most-strategically amateurish presidential administration in our history, the Pacific Pivot initiative made nonsense of deadly serious concerns.
