US Official Reassures Asia of Commitment, Calls for Greater Burden Sharing

The United States remains strongly committed to Asia but wants its partners to bear more of the burden for their own defense, a senior Pentagon official said in the Philippines yesterday.

Seeking to counter concerns about Washington’s reliability, given the capricious character of U.S. foreign policy under the second Trump administration, Undersecretary of War Elbridge Colby said that U.S. interests were “more engaged than ever in the Indo-Pacific.”

“America is definitely not disengaging from Asia,” Colby said in a speech in Manila. “We are not leaving; in fact, we are digging in to ensure a favorable balance of power where it matters most.”

Colby made the remarks at a forum in the Philippines, his first stop on a Southeast Asian tour that will also take him and Assistant Secretary of War John Noh to Indonesia, Thailand, and Cambodia. In a statement, the Department of War said that trip, which will involve meetings with senior officials in each country, “reaffirms the Department’s commitment to build a durable peace in the region through strength.”

During the trip, Colby said in his Manila speech, he intended to “deliver a clear message that is at once both realistic and perhaps bracing but also reassuring: That America’s interests are more engaged than ever in the Indo-Pacific, and that we at the Department of War are concentrated on ensuring those interests are stoutly defended.”

Colby said maintaining a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific required a “posture of deterrence by denial along the First Island Chain,” the barrier of islands that stretches from Japan down to Taiwan, the Philippines, and the northern coast of Borneo.

He pointed to what he said was a growing U.S. military commitment in the region, which has involved the deployment of additional troops, ships, aircraft, and missile systems throughout the First Island Chain. Colby described this as “a formidable, resource-backed posture calibrated to actual structural realities,” contrasting it with the “hollow, merely symbolic engagement of previous decades.”

However, he said that Washington could not manage this itself, and that local partners would need to shoulder more of the burden for their defense.

“When we ask our allies and partners to step up, to invest more in their own defense, and to take responsibility for their own sovereign security, we are not signaling abandonment,” Colby said.

He added, “We are looking for partners, not protectorates.”

The Southeast Asian tour is Colby’s official trip to Southeast Asia as undersecretary of war for policy, and in some ways, it is surprising that it has taken him 18 months to do so. But the intent of yesterday’s speech speaks to an awareness within the Pentagon of the reputational damage that Washington has suffered, in particular due to its indiscriminate tariff policy and misadventure in the Middle East.

Both of these have sent economic reverberations through Asia, and undermined the policy approach preferred by Colby. A hard-nosed realist and advocate of strategic prioritization, he has long advocated a reorientation of U.S. strategic focus from the Middle East toward East Asia, with the goal of preventing China from establishing its hegemony over the region.

While Colby did not explicitly mention China in the speech, his deterrence-focused message is likely to find a receptive audience in parts of the region that face its challenge most acutely. Chief among these is the Philippines, which has recently faced a resumption of China’s maritime pressure campaign in the South China Sea. This culminated in a clash at Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly Islands on July 20, during which a Philippine sailor sustained a head injury after being struck with a baton by a China Coast Guard member.

Despite its attendant risks, most Southeast Asian governments would prefer the U.S. to maintain a strong presence in Asia, in order to act as a counterweight against China’s growing military power. But security commitments have never been the greatest shortcoming of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. Indeed, the long-standing complaint is that this is the only thing the U.S. does consistently in the region. This has especially been the case since President Donald Trump’s first electoral victory in 2016, which marked a decisive turn toward economic protectionism and saw the U.S. withdraw from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade pact.

This and the increasingly acrimonious strategic competition with China detracted from the fundamental goals of most governments in the region: trade and economic growth. Despite some stillborn efforts by the Biden administration, such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, these goals have been undermined by much of the agenda of Trump 2.0, in particular the tariffing of close regional partners and allies and the war in Iran, which has led to the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, through which the region gets a significant proportion of its crude oil.

While the U.S. can help maintain a stable balance of power in Asia, it remains – at least for now – an economically disruptive force on the global stage, to the detriment of its long-term standing in Southeast Asia.