The Trump Administration Promised a Pivot From the Middle East to East Asia. It’s Doing the Opposite.

The U.S. military is more naked in East Asia than it has been for a while. The USS George Washington, the last U.S. aircraft carrier in the region, is heading out to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East. President Donald Trump also announced on Sunday that he would “substantially reduce” planned military exercises in South Korea.

“​​While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, ‘No thanks!'” he wrote in his announcement.

In other words, the U.S. presence in Asia is taking a back seat to the U.S. presence in the Middle East. (Three months ago, a Navy official also admitted to Congress that the U.S. was pausing weapons sales to Taiwan because of how much ammunition it used up in Iran.) That is a complete reversal of the strategy that the Trump administration promised when it came to office.

Trump’s top military planner, Elbridge Colby, has long preached that the cold war with China is the single greatest challenge to U.S. power, and that Middle Eastern wars are sapping resources away from it. Vice President J.D. Vance expressed similar views, calling potential war with Iran a “huge distraction of resources.” The National Security Strategy published by the administration in 2025 declared that “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”

The Middle East is now, in fact, dominating both the long-term planning and day-to-day execution of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. It was largely by choice. Trump came to office with a ceasefire in Gaza, calm in Yemen, and an Iranian leadership that was willing to negotiate. He chose to reopen the former two wars in spring 2025 and then launched an all-out surprise attack on Iran alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in February 2026.

Trump and his allies have publicly said that they expected the war with Iran to last only days or weeks. Some hawks, such as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, even sold the war as an opportunity to wash America’s hands of the Middle East once and for all. The apparent success of the U.S. regime change operation in Venezuela and the massive uprising in Iran, both of which happened in the first week of January 2026, probably contributed to their confidence.

But the problem is deeper than the hubris of one president. U.S. strategic planners have actually been promising a “pivot to [East] Asia” since the days of President Barack Obama. The term pivot came from a 2011 essay by then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arguing that ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would allow for more serious “economic and strategic commitments” in the “Asia-Pacific region.” Yet Obama and Clinton themselves oversaw new U.S. wars in Libya and Syria.

The two sides of the political ledger were simply unbalanced. The pivot was not really any politician’s top priority; it was driven by an abstract recognition that the U.S. had interests in East Asia, and vague public dissatisfaction with wars in the Middle East. The wars in the Middle East, on the other hand, had powerful and single-minded political constituencies backing them.

Obama’s view that other countries would have to “share the neighborhood” with Iran mobilized a hawkish coalition of oil-rich Arab monarchies, Israel, and American war-on-terror dead-enders. They lobbied hard against Obama’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran, his first real move toward implementing the pivot. Although this campaign failed to stop a U.S.-Iran deal, it did impose a political price. Obama was cowed into supporting a Saudi war in Yemen and stepping up U.S. military cooperation with Israel, described by The Jerusalem Post as a “compensation package” for the deal with Iran.

President Joe Biden went through a similar process in his own presidency. After finally pulling the plug on the U.S. war in Afghanistan—and facing serious political pushback—he spent the rest of his presidency trying to reassure Arab states that the U.S. wasn’t going to abandon them. “The United States is not going anywhere,” Biden said in a 2022 speech in Saudi Arabia. Those states took the opportunity to push for permanent U.S. security guarantees.

Meanwhile, lawmakers and bureaucrats worked to quietly embed the U.S. military in Middle Eastern countries. Congress passed a law in 2022 requiring the U.S. military to help integrate Arab and Israeli air defenses, and another law in 2023 requiring the U.S. military to help integrate regional navies.

Although politicians were willing to rant against “endless wars” in the abstract, they were rarely willing to fight specific political battles, especially on arcane defense issues. After all, the tradeoff between Middle Eastern wars and an East Asian buildup didn’t seem urgent. Congress could pour money into both at the same time.

Some major advocates for the pivot bent over backward to avoid offending Middle Eastern partners, especially Israel. Colby wrote in July 2023 that pivoting to East Asia would actually allow the U.S. to “defer more to Israel’s judgment.” Vance argued in May 2024 that the “enduring defeat of Hamas” would allow Israel and the Arab states to “police their region of the world” without as much U.S. involvement.

In practice, these states were happy to take American help in building their own capacities and push for more direct U.S. involvement in their wars. And the quiet U.S.-Arab-Israeli integration of the past few years turned out to be a trip wire for U.S. intervention. After the Hamas attacks of October 2023 provoked a regional war, Israel attacked Iranian forces twice and allowed U.S. troops to absorb the retaliation.

By the time the tradeoffs between the Middle East and East Asia became a live political issue, it was too late to change course. The war with Iran ate up a massive amount of American ammunition, both for air defense and long-range strike weapons. U.S. aircraft carriers were deployed for record amounts of time—remember, the war was only supposed to last days or months—causing maintenance and morale issues. These are problems of physical bottlenecks rather than budgets.

The Pentagon is drawing up plans to reduce its forces in the Persian Gulf after the war, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, which seems a bit like closing the barn door after the horses have all escaped. The ammunition shortage will take years to resolve, while China has been able to build uninterrupted. (North Korea has also been going through a military buildup.) Rather than loosening its grip on one region to prioritize another, the U.S. may end up being forced to give up on both.

In 2017, the historian Alfred McCoy predicted five possible future world orders, from a peaceful U.S.-Chinese accommodation to an apocalypse driven by World War III or climate change. One of his more pessimistic scenarios was Washington launching a “psychologically compensatory” war in the Middle East, only to destroy its own global standing.

“As black clouds billow skyward from the Gulf’s oil ports and diplomats rise at the [United Nations] to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire,” McCoy wrote, referring to the Suez Crisis. Nearly a decade later, Politico put the exact phrase that McCoy predicted in a headline: “America’s Suez.”