02-05-2017, 03:35 AM
(02-03-2017, 02:44 PM)Mikebert Wrote: Back in the early 1980’s when I was a deficit hawk and a foreign policy realist, I favored something I called aggressive withdrawal.* The idea was the US would begin a phased withdrawal from Europe and a full pullout from Japan and S. Korea, which would include a withdrawal of naval forces from the Western Pacific and redeployment in the Indian Ocean. The idea was that Western Europe and Japan were now strong powers and they could easily afford to the conventional forces in Europe and the Far East necessary to keep the Soviets in check. The US would focus on making sure the oil routes would stay open and deter any Soviet intrusion into the Middle East or South Asia that had been made more likely by the loss of the Shah and the Soviet intrusion into Afghanistan, both relatively recent events at the time. It was simply a more cost-effective (for us) way to continue the US containment strategy.
The US started the maritime part of this in 2013. Regular carrier task force patrols stopped, and the only carriers deployed at sea were the ones supporting the war in Afghanistan.
Somehow, the result was not the Philippines building their own supercarriers, but instead China building artificial islands to control the South China Sea.
Honestly, there can only be two results from this:
1. Our existing adversaries take over the abandoned territory.
2. Our current allies develop strong militaries and, with the associated power, chart their own geopolitical course independent of ours, becoming adversaries.
Neither seems a good result for us.