What Happens When China Eclipses the U.S. in Asia

Contrary to what you might read or hear, President Donald Trump alone hasn't surrendered U.S. strategic leadership in Asia to China. What he has done is accelerate long-term trends that have severely diminished America's position in the Western Pacific, an area where the U.S. had held sway largely unchallenged since World War II.

That era of primacy is close to an end. In fact, the U.S. strategic position is eroding so quickly that even sharing the region with China isn't really a valid option any longer, argues Hugh White, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. America's allies in Southeast Asia and Australia say they don't want to choose between the U.S. and China, but underneath those platitudes, nobody in the region wants to make an enemy of Beijing. All the more so because officials increasingly doubt the U.S. will be there in the end, according to White.