I wrote a couple op-eds this week on this question of the ‘pivot’ in the wake of yet another US Mideast war – one at Channel News Asia, another at 1945. Here’s the basic argumeent:

• the strategic case for the pivot to Asia (China) is stronger than ever
• the Iran War is probably going to be bigger and longer than we thought
• so we can’t pivot more to East Asia for while
• in fact, we are ‘de-pivoting’ – i.e., moving resources from East Asia to the Persian Gulf
• a lot of Americans don’t want the US to pivot out of the Middle East for religious reasons
• at least we are pivoting out of Europe. It’s long overdue that Europe do far more for its own defense and take the lead
• Trump’s interest in Western Hemispheric hegemony will pull away resources better sent to East Asia
• So the pivot is probably dead
• So Japan and South Korea better start spending more on defense and cooperating more

I wrote an academic article on the pivot twelve years ago (here), where I argued that American Protestant fundamentalism is the big domestic reason the US can’t quit the Middle East for East Asia. 40+% of Americans believe that Israel plays a major role in the End Times and/or sees it as a Western, civilizational bulwark against Islam which they hate/fear. So you’ve got both eschatology and the ‘clash of civilzations’ motivating a deep, religious conservative commitment to America’s presence in the Middle East.

China does not move Americans like that. To most Americans, China is some place farway which makes cheap stuff you buy at Walmart. Does grandma care that much about Taiwan? Probably not. Yeah, the American foreign policy community is really worried about China, but the voters don’t care about foreign policy much, and the GOP detests America’s intellectual class. So nobody is listening to us. If they did, we wouldn’t be fighting Iran right now.

So here we are, in yet another Middle Eastern war with yet another president talking about regime change and fighting evil, with the pivot pushed off into the future yet again.