source: Pablo Martinez Monsivais
by Paolo Edlmann
Introduction
In the fifteen years preceding the second – and current – term of Donald Trump, the Asia-Pacific has constituted the strategic priority of the United States. Announced by Obama before the Australian parliament in November 2011, the “strategic pivot” toward the Asia-Pacific, officially known as the “Pivot to Asia”, sought to contain the rise and expansionism of the People’s Republic of China in the region, marking the beginning of the most significant competition of the 21st century. In November 2025, however, the Trump administration formally deprioritized the Asia-Pacific to a secondary theater of interest, closing the era of the Pivot to Asia. This article examines the evolution of American strategy in Asia as developed by the Obama (2008–17), Trump (2017–21), and Biden (2021–25) administrations, highlighting the strategic errors that laid the groundwork for the current confrontation between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.
Obama and the Origins of the Pivot to Asia
The Pivot to Asia was a product of the perception of American hegemonic decline inherited by the Obama administration at the twilight of the 2000s. The wars in the Middle East waged by the Bush administration and the fiscal crisis of 2007 had caused an immense loss of economic resources and human lives, undermining the credibility of the United States as guarantor of the world order. In those years, thanks to rapid economic and military development, China had begun constructing a “sphere of influence” in the Asia-Pacific through an assertive and revisionist foreign policy, expanding into the South and East China Seas and threatening the sovereignty of Taiwan. Supported by messianic propaganda that described the region as the “key driver of global politics”, the Pivot to Asia was tasked with rebalancing the balance of power with China and restoring America’s lost credibility in the region.
At the heart of the new strategy laid the relationship with China, considered a “Responsible Stakeholder”, that is, a rising power to be “educated” in the rules of the American game. This approach was methodologically influenced by realist theories such as Graham Allison’s “Thucydides Trap” and David Lai’s “Power Transition Theory”, which described Sino-American relations as destined for hegemonic confrontation. Obama conceived the pivot as a long-term strategy that combined diplomatic soft power with economic revitalization, with the military dimension as a guarantee of regional integrity. A commitment to robust, cooperative, and peaceful relations with China formed the basis of the U.S.–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, a forum that from 2009 to 2017 engaged the leadership in discussing a broad agenda of issues focused on the regional stability of the Asia-Pacific.
Through the Pivot, Obama gained standing within ASEAN by personally attending regional forums such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the East Asia Summit (EAS). Also, he strengthened the “Hub and Spokes” system of military alliances and implemented a free trade agreement for better integration of Pacific economies with the American economy. This agreement, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), would have facilitated the lowering of trade barriers for the free movement of American products, opening Asian access to the US market and reducing the region’s economic dependence on China, which was excluded from the agreement. The administration justified the exclusion by asserting that China had not met the high standards for compliance with labor, environmental, and intellectual property norms required for participation in the TPP, while indicating it would support Chinese entry once those standards were achieved. This decision, however, revealed the fragility of Sino-American relations, sharply diminishing the value of the U.S.–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue; it undermined the primary objective of robust bilateral relations and legitimized China’s pursuit of a “national path” to economic hegemony, achieved by late 2013 with the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Trump and the “Revisionist Threat”
Elected president in 2017, Donald Trump rewrote the rules of engagement in Asia, withdrawing the United States from the TPP, which contradicted the concept of “America First” – the ideological cornerstone of his operational code. Between 2017 and 2021, the Asian context was shaped by the Trumpian vision of the world order: a system of separate sovereignties bound by a logic of survival. The effects of this vision were reflected in a different geopolitical approach: Trump replaced the Asia-Pacific terminology, centered on integrating East Asia and China into the American system, with the concept of the Indo-Pacific, which broadened the field to the Western Pacific and elevated India and Japan to pillars of the American system. In the new order, China was no longer seen a “responsible stakeholder” and became a “revisionist threat”. On these assumptions, the new pivot aimed to ensure the Indo-Pacific region as free from revisionist threats and open to trade and freedom of navigation – hence the official name of the strategy, the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP).
The economic-strategic choices of the Trump administration, however, differed from the idea of freedom and openness expressed in government documents, contradicting the classic procedures of hegemonic construction. On the economic front, Trump demonstrated his “disdain for multilateralism” by withdrawing the United States from the TPP and, through the BUILD Act, incentivizing private initiative and investment – an example of the competition between the US-led free market and Chinese statism as embodied by the BRI. On the military front, by contrast, Trump adopted a muscular approach to the challenge of Chinese geopolitical revisionism in the Indo-Pacific. Through the “Preserve Peace Through Strength” principle that guided military organization, Trump revived Cold War-era doctrines such as J.F. Dulles’s “massive retaliation”, demanding that the American command in the Indo-Pacific – USINDOPACOM – prepare “lethal” responses (NSS, 2017) against Chinese attempts to alter the regional status quo. The aggressiveness of Trump’s approach in Asia and the self-referential nature of the “America First” rhetoric, however, opened the door to Chinese influence, producing an unprecedented American isolation: lacking security guarantees, regional allies were reluctant to openly align with the FOIP for fear of compromising their economic relations with Beijing.
Joe Biden and Systemic Competition
The Biden administration, which succeeded Trump in 2021, inherited the difficult task of rebuilding American credibility in its commitment to Asia. The new administration developed a strategy that combined elements of the Obama and Trump pivots, adapting the return to liberal internationalism of “America is Back” to the conditions of great-power competition with Beijing. Like Trump, Biden abandoned the concept of “responsible stakeholder”, yet made use of diplomatic multilateralism to internationalize the Sino-American rivalry, embedding it within a network of alliances and shared norms. Competition with China was elevated to a systemic level, seeking to demonstrate – in full Cold War style – the superiority of democracy over authoritarianism.
The testing ground for the new approach was the economic sphere, in which Biden attempted to rebuild credibility by betting on the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), a TPP-like agreement that positioned itself as a regional alternative to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – the free trade agreement implemented by China with ASEAN in 2022, which excluded the United States. The IPEF, however, differed substantially from the previous TPP: as an expression of the American governance model, the new agreement promoted investment in advanced manufacturing, supply chains, clean energy, and technology, but did not open the American market to Asian goods. The IPEF looked to the future while missing the present: without the lowering of tariffs or trade barriers, the agreement offered no tangible growth prospects for Asian economies. Allies and regional partners perceived the initiative for what it was: an updated version of America First, designed more to contain China than to develop the region. The IPEF thus concluded after eight rounds without producing a trade treaty.
As highlighted by Kishore Mahbubani, the Biden administration committed a significant strategic error by “fighting tomorrow’s war with yesterday’s strategies”. By placing competition at the systemic level, the administration demonstrated an inability to distinguish China from the former Soviet Union: unlike the USSR, China neither exported nor imposed its own ideological-state model. China did not build hegemony through the coercive methods of the Soviets, but expanded through the economic and infrastructural investments of the Belt and Road Initiative, adapting “Marshall Plan”-style strategies to the needs of developing countries. Moreover, by overestimating the appeal of American values, Biden underestimated the “non-aligned” position of the ASEAN countries. States such as Indonesia and Malaysia interpreted the democratic emphasis as interference in internal affairs and perceived exclusive alignment as a new form of colonialism. These countries adopt a “principle of convenience” in foreign policy, orienting themselves toward the highest bidder: in this context, democratic-liberal values lose appeal.
Conclusion
The failure of the IPEF has, in effect, concluded the era of the Pivot to Asia. The United States did not achieve its stated objectives, leaving the Asian economy within China’s orbit and reducing American credibility as a reliable partner. The main errors were committed in the strategic formulation phase, placing excessive trust in the appeal of American values and underestimating the political will of regional actors. In the implementation phase, differences among the Presidents operational codes limited the effectiveness of the Pivot to Asia. Indeed, against a background of sustained commitment to military containment – which prevented China from entirely subverting the regional order – efforts toward diplomatic and economic multilateralism, the keys to regional consensus, produced no meaningful outcomes.
Today, the military architecture of the Pivot to Asia survives only cause the Chinese aggressiveness, which pushes regional allies to seek American defense guarantees. Trump’s foreign policy, however, with its interventions in Venezuela and Iran, is eroding allied trust and increasing Chinese influence. Consequently, we face an ironic reversal of roles: China is now the one calling on the United States to act as a ‘responsible stakeholder’ and to restrain its aggressive revisionism of the global international order.