Are we about to see Trump pull the US Navy out of the western Pacific?
It didn't take Donald Trump and his cronies, including unelected billionaire Elon Musk, very long to begin dismantling US strategy and foreign policy that had endured for decades.
Within weeks of taking the oath of office, Trump ended lifesaving food and medical assistance in poor countries, cancelled asylum for Afghans who'd assisted US forces and proposed a 'peace plan' for Ukraine that amounts to unilateral surrender to Russian demands.
Equally absurdly, he threatened to invade and annex Canada and Panama.
In that chaotic, increasingly despotic context, it's tempting to read any proposal for US withdrawal from longstanding security arrangements as part of Trump's institutional destruction.
But one controversial take from Jonathan Panter, a Stanton nuclear security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City and a 'conservatism and governing fellow' at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, actually makes cold hard sense. In an essay for War on the Rocks, Panter has forcefully argued for the US Navy to pull back from the western Pacific and reposition warships – currently forward-deployed to Japan and other friendly countries – closer to American shores.
'Naval forward presence – the practice of maintaining combat-credible naval forces worldwide to deter adversaries, reassure allies, respond to crises and perform constabulary functions for the global commons – has dominated US foreign policy since the 1990s,' Panter wrote.
But the decades of forward presence has taken a toll on the cash-strapped US fleet as fewer and fewer warships and their crews work harder and harder in more distant locales. 'If the United States wishes to deter China, Beijing must believe Washington can fight a sustained, brutal war – one in which the US Navy can take major losses and still fight on,' Panter wrote. 'Today, that is not the case, and the concept of 'naval forward presence' bears much of the blame.'
There are two basic approaches to naval deterrence. One: to keep ships on patrol in the likeliest conflict zones as a constant show of force. Two: to keep the same ships at home – and surge them into action only when it's time to fight.
For decades, it was the consensus in US navalist circles that forward patrols were more effective as deterrence. The sight of an American warship, looming on the horizon, would surely make some aggressor think twice before doing something rash, right?
Maybe, but forward presence comes at a cost. And while Panter's argument hinges on the material cost – the strain on hardworking ships and their crews at a time when the US Navy is struggling to grow its fleet – there's an equally compelling corollary. In short, forward-deployed
ships are vulnerable to sneak attacks by China's growing missile arsenal and fast-improving submarine fleet.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC proved this vulnerability in its seminal 2023 war game simulating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan – and a US and allied intervention on Taiwan's behalf.
'Military doctrine calls for forward deployments to enhance deterrence during a crisis, but these forces make tempting targets,' CSIS warned. In most iterations of the war game, even the ones in which the Chinese invasion failed and Taiwan remained free, Chinese missiles – streaking down without warning in the first hours of the war – ultimately sank all of the roughly 50 major warships the US Navy sails from Japan.
It would be safer for the Americans' Japan-based aircraft carrier and amphibious ships and their cruiser and destroyer escorts to return home to the US West Coast, wait out in the initial waves of Chinese attacks and then steam toward Taiwan to relieve the island nation's beleaguered defenders, CSIS concluded. American losses in ships and sailors were lightest when the US Navy 'did not push its fleet forward as a deterrent signal prior to the start of conflict.'
The calculus favouring a US-based fleet that responds to crises over a forward fleet that attempts to deter them assumes the United States is actually interested in fighting for its allies. There's a dark third alternative: a withdrawn US fleet that escapes the attention of Chinese missiles during the opening barrages of an attack on Taiwan and then does … nothing.
Last year, Trump famously threatened to let Russians do 'whatever the Hell they want in Europe.' And with his current push to end the Russia-Ukraine war on Russia's terms, he's actually making good on that threat.
Given what we now know, do we believe Trump would mobilise the US military to fight for Taiwan? If not, the end of forward presence wouldn't represent some smart strategy for winning a war in the western Pacific. It would represent surrender in advance to whatever China aims to do in the region.
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