U.S. Indo-Pacific Deterrence Depends on Sustained Allied Capacity

The central strategic question is whether coordination among the United States, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan can make a Chinese quarantine or blockade of Taiwan too difficult to execute. Rahm Emanuel argues that the island chains from Okinawa through the Philippines complicate that option: once the United States built trilateral arrangements with Japan and South Korea, and with Japan and the Philippines, the geography became more constraining for Beijing.

In Emanuel’s account, China’s pressure on Japan and the Philippines reflects the strategic consequence of that coordination. Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi, he says, made explicit what prior leaders had left implied: that a move against Taiwan would threaten Japan’s own security. A quarantine would not be impossible, he argues, but it would be much harder if Japan, the Philippines, and the United States were aligned.

Anja Manuel describes the immediate pressure around Taiwan as a tightening noose. Since the Xi-Trump summit, she says, the pattern has intensified: Beijing claims coast-guard jurisdiction east of Taiwan, toward the open Pacific; it is practicing a blockade of Taiwan’s two busiest ports; and Taiwanese infrastructure faces 2.6 million attempted cyberattacks each day. Much of this predates the summit, Manuel notes, but the accumulating activity is dangerous.

Emanuel argues that Washington has effectively given China a “permission slip” to escalate coercion: in the South China Sea against Vietnam and the Philippines, around Taiwan, and against Japan. His charge is not simply that the United States has taken the wrong rhetorical line, but that it has been absent across the security, diplomatic, and economic dimensions that make deterrence credible.

Japan is central to that assessment. Emanuel calls it the “long pole” of the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy: home to U.S. bases in Okinawa, the only place where the United States permanently bases an aircraft carrier, and, he says, the United States’ leading foreign investor for five years running.

He is especially concerned that Japan has had to bear political and military risks without visible U.S. backing. China is applying economic coercion and conducting military incursions around the Senkaku Islands, he says, while Tokyo has stepped up. He points to Japan’s unusually favorable standing in Southeast Asia as an underused strategic asset: hard U.S. power and Japanese soft power could reinforce one another. When ASEAN countries backed condemnation of Russia at the United Nations, he notes, eight of 10 voted with the United States and four—including Cambodia—co-sponsored the resolution.

The risk of leaving Japan exposed is regional rather than bilateral. As Emanuel puts it:

Military relationships have not disappeared, but diplomatic reassurance and military capacity are moving at different speeds. Anja Manuel says Indo-Pacific allies feel rhetorically abandoned even as U.S. forces remain in the region and military-to-military relationships are still strong. For Taiwan, she says, the Trump administration pushed through an $11 billion arms package—the biggest ever—while holding up a second package worth $14 billion.

Rahm Emanuel accepts that Indo-Pacific Command’s training and exercises continue, but argues that demands elsewhere are degrading the available posture. In the Philippines, he says, the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz has left only a Coast Guard cutter at a moment of tension in the South China Sea. The cost of a conflict in one theater, in his telling, is already showing up in another.

His larger concern is the mismatch between China’s possible operational logic and America’s ability to respond. Emanuel repeatedly characterizes the comparison as metaphorical: if China were to move against Taiwan, he says, Beijing could pursue a “96-hour strategy” to finish before the United States could act effectively. Washington, by contrast, has what he calls a “96-day strategy”: stretch out the conflict, make it costly, and deny China the short victory it expects. He compares that logic to Russia’s expectation of a quick parade in Kyiv and to a U.S. operation in the Strait of Hormuz that, he says, has reached its fifth month.

That strategy depends on munitions and stockpiles that Emanuel says were already insufficient before the Iran conflict. The question is not only whether allies such as Japan receive promised weapons; it is whether the United States can sustain the prolonged, resource-intensive contest that its denial strategy presumes.

Michael Fullilove offers a more favorable reading of one administration decision: support for AUKUS, under which the United States and United Kingdom will help Australia acquire and operate nuclear-powered submarines. He says President Trump’s decision to keep the arrangement moving was a meaningful contribution to regional deterrence.

Exercises, basing arrangements, arms sales, and alliance mechanisms can endure through political turbulence. They do not, by themselves, resolve doubts about stockpiles, political resolve, or whether U.S. forces can be pulled away by crises elsewhere.

China’s economic pull and America’s political standing shape the alliance bargain alongside military power. Sevastopulo cited Pew findings that 27 of 36 surveyed countries viewed China more favorably than the United States, including Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. Anja Manuel calls those results an important warning signal, although not necessarily a permanent shift. She contrasts them with the change between the prior Trump administration and the Biden years: in the survey she cites, confidence that the American president would do the right thing in foreign policy rose from 17% under Trump to roughly 77% under Biden.

The countries leaning more favorably toward China tend to have the deepest economic relationships with it, Manuel says. But there is no clean split between China-oriented and U.S.-oriented states. As Sevastopulo observes, countries more favorable to the United States also have major and growing economic relationships with China. Southeast Asian governments are caught between the two powers regardless of Washington’s assurances that they need not choose.

Michael Fullilove describes the Chinese economy as a magnetic force the United States must reckon with. He argues that Washington should avoid self-inflicted economic damage, citing tariffs and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as events that produced economic emergencies in Southeast Asia.

Australia illustrates the gap between deteriorating public trust and the durability of security ties. Fullilove says one in five Australians trust Donald Trump, and that the president’s unpopularity has now affected how Australians view the United States itself. Only 31% trust the United States to act responsibly in the world, close to the number trusting China. Under Biden, he says, the gap between trust in the United States and China had been 53 points; it is now three.

Yet seven in 10 Australians still regard the U.S. alliance as important to their security. Fullilove sees a similar distinction in Japan and South Korea: publics can separate a particular president from the United States and from the alliance relationship. Emanuel’s point is that this distinction is valuable but insufficient. Trust matters when allied governments are asked to take politically difficult steps beyond their normal comfort zone. He points to the diplomacy preceding the Camp David meeting among the United States, Japan, and South Korea: trust in the Biden administration, he argues, helped the Japanese prime minister and South Korean president accept risks that were difficult at home.

That political problem does not mean middle powers should wait passively for Washington. Fullilove says Australia and other countries are diversifying relationships, investing in their own capabilities, and working more directly with one another. Australia’s purchase of frigates from Japan is one example. He agrees that a middle-power strategy has value, but rejects the idea that it can become a substitute for the United States.

For Fullilove, U.S. geography, economic scale, and capacity to provide what he calls “democratic AI” make the country irreplaceable. Emanuel makes the same point in military terms: Australia-Japan naval shipbuilding cooperation is important, but it does not replace the Seventh Fleet, U.S. forces in Okinawa, or American satellite, cyber, and infrastructure capacity.

The practical task, Manuel argues, is to build a more integrated allied system. The United States should expand its own shipbuilding, but ships built in South Korea can be five times cheaper, based on her experience as a shipping-company director. The United States is building missile interceptors with Japan, she says, while Taiwan’s experience of Chinese cyber intrusions and information operations should be treated as an allied asset, rather than simply as a vulnerability. She also identifies a potentially useful beginning in new memorandums of understanding negotiated by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, which seek to align export controls and investment-screening policies.

Emanuel’s formulation is to “isolate the isolator.” China’s strategy, he argues, is to single out a country that resists it and use economic, political, diplomatic, and military coercion to constrain its independence of action. Australia offers a counterexample in his telling: after three years of Chinese economic coercion, it diversified trade, drew on alliances and trading partners, and became less dependent on the Chinese economy. China eventually dropped the effort, he says. The aim is to make the first island chain both a physical and psychological barrier to coercion.

Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister framed the issue differently from the usual debate over what Taiwan needs from others. Taiwan is often treated as a “dependent variable,” he said: a place acted upon, planned around, and discussed by larger powers. His question was how Taiwan could become an “independent variable,” contributing more directly to regional security with the United States, Australia, and its neighbors.

Anja Manuel answered that the urgency is not theoretical. Taiwan can contribute the operational knowledge it has accumulated under sustained Chinese pressure, but she argues that partners must also move faster in a technological competition that is already changing the character of a conflict.

Manuel cited an Australian think tank’s assessment that China leads in 69 of 74 key technologies, while allowing that the exact number may be lower. The broader point, in her view, is that China’s capabilities have become concrete military and operational problems rather than future possibilities. She says China is using drones in the South China Sea to impersonate Typhoon fighter jets as part of masking and deception. She also says China has advanced anti-satellite capabilities, missiles that can take down satellites, and satellite constellations as large as Starlink.

Manuel’s concern is that allies are not acquiring and integrating relevant capabilities at the speed she says China’s advances require. Taiwan’s accumulated knowledge of Chinese cyber incursions and information operations, in her view, is one resource that a more integrated allied system should use.

Rahm Emanuel rejects the idea that China should be treated as an unstoppable force. He says he is not afraid of China; he is afraid of American failures of domestic capacity and political will.

He extends that argument to cuts to the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and DARPA, and to an energy infrastructure he describes as 20th-century rather than 21st-century. China does not determine those choices, Emanuel says. Nor does it determine whether the United States provides the economic, diplomatic, and political presence that must accompany military power.

His recurring formulation is that China exports domestic economic dysfunction while the United States exports domestic political dysfunction. The Indo-Pacific is where those failures meet: regional states must manage China’s market power and coercive activity while asking whether the United States can act coherently with allies.

Anja Manuel puts the remaining choice simply: China does not decide whether the United States and its allies operate as one team. Washington and its partners do.