The Pivot That Wasn’t
Did America Wait Too Long to Counter China?
By Oriana Skylar Mastro
July/August 2024
Published on June 18, 2024
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/pivot-wasnt-mastro-lost-decade-china During the past two decades, many American leaders have argued that U.S. foreign policy must focus more on Asia. In 2009, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that “the center of gravity of international affairs is importantly shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans.” In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the United States would “pivot to Asia” after having devoted too many resources to other areas of the world, particularly Afghanistan and the Middle East. And in 2022, President Joe Biden said that “the future of the twenty-first-century economy is going to be largely written in the Indo-Pacific.”
By any metric, Asia is the world’s most strategically important region today. It is home to over half the world’s population and boasts six of the world’s 25 largest economies, 14 of its 25 biggest militaries, and four of the nine countries with nuclear weapons. Asian-Pacific states have been engines of worldwide growth, accounting for over 70 percent of the increase in global GDP over the last decade; China alone has contributed a staggering 31 percent. The region hosts 19 of the top 100 universities, according to the Times Higher Education’s ranking, and ten of the 25 countries that filed the most patents in 2021. If the United States wants to remain the planet’s most powerful country, it will have to tap into Asia and prevent China from dominating it.
But as Robert Blackwill and Richard Fontaine demonstrate in their insightful new book, Lost Decade, the United States has repeatedly failed to achieve its promised shift. The efforts of successive administrations to complete the pivot, they write, have “foundered on the shoals of execution.” The United States has continued to allocate more military resources and pay more attention to the Middle East and Europe. Despite its sporadic attempts to engage more deeply with Asian countries, Washington did not coherently respond to China’s growing power in the second decade of this century. Blackwill and Fontaine soberly conclude that this is “perhaps the most consequential” U.S. policy failure since 1945.
