Early in April, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter previewed his two-week Asia-Pacific tour by reaffirming the administration’s belief that this is the “single most consequential region” for U.S. national security interests. Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, he celebrated America’s “essential and pivotal role” in the Pacific. The centerpiece of the trip itself was a speech aboard the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis as it sailed through the disputed waters of the South China Sea, where China is expanding its claims on a series of small islands and reefs within striking distance of the Philippines. Beijing duly complained about U.S. “militarization” of the region, but Carter asserted, “We have been here for decade upon decade.”
This was Carter’s second recent carrier photo-op in the South China Sea. In November, he visited the USS Theodore Roosevelt, describing the ship as a “symbol and sign of the critical role the United States’ military power plays in a very consequential region.” And Carter is correct: Since World War II, the Pacific has been something of an American lake. Despite inconclusive wars in Korea and Vietnam, U.S. military power has provided a framework for a series of Pacific economic miracles and, in places like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, a flowering of democratic governance among “Confucian” cultures supposedly habituated to authoritarianism.
But a closer look at the military realities belies much of Carter’s rhetoric. Yes, we’ve been in the western Pacific for decades and decades. Yet we’re not there much now. Despite the administration’s ballyhooed “Pacific Pivot” of 2012, the U.S. naval presence in the region has been declining and has reached a minimal level. Nowhere is this truth more apparent than in the South China Sea, where China’s aggression is due in part to America’s absence.
Take the cases of the two carriers that hosted Carter. The Stennis, one of five carriers in the Pacific fleet, is homeported in Bremerton, Washington. She put to sea in the middle of January, as part of the Navy’s “Great Green Fleet” project. Unlike the “Great White Fleet” circumnavigation of 1907, dreamed up by President Theodore Roosevelt to demonstrate America’s global military reach, the Great Green Fleet is a demonstration of the Navy’s commitment to reducing its carbon footprint and reliance on fossil fuels. Once across the Pacific, Stennis took part in the annual “Foal Eagle” exercises with Korea. She entered the South China Sea in April, hosted Carter on April 15, and is now back in waters off Japan. All told, Stennis spent about a week in the South China Sea—it “militarized” the region only briefly, if at all.
And it was something of a novelty to have the Stennis in the Pacific in the first place. She’s spent most of the last three years in drydock, conducting basic training near her home port, or assigned to the U.S. Fifth Fleet in the Middle East. In this regard, the Stennis is much like the Roosevelt, the carrier Carter visited in the fall. The Roosevelt, too, spent most of its last deployment in the Middle East, just passing through the South China Sea for a week on its way, via the Indian Ocean, to its new homeport in San Diego.
The Pacific carrier fleet is about to take another hit. The mainstay of the U.S. carrier presence in the region has been the USS George Washington, in its forward port of Yokosuka, Japan. But the Washington is due to undergo its midlife nuclear “refueling and complex overhaul,” a process that takes about three years. Budget cuts have delayed this needed repair, and in the midst of the 2014 showdown with Congress over the “sequestration” provision of the Budget Control Act, the administration proposed scrapping the Washington entirely and cutting the overall carrier fleet to just nine. While the fate of the Washington is being worked out, the USS Ronald Reagan will take its place in Japan. The Reagan has spent 44 of the last 48 months either in port or conducting local training maneuvers.
In sum, U.S. carrier presence is a global shell game, with too few ships chasing too many missions. The combination of a shrinking fleet and demands elsewhere, mostly in the Middle East, means the Navy almost never has sufficient presence anywhere in Asia, and especially in the South China Sea. Indeed, in the last four years, the Navy has only once had two carriers operating in the western Pacific—which would be a minimum to deter Chinese adventurism both in Northeast and Southeast Asia—and then only for a single month.
To be fair to Secretary Carter, and particularly to Admiral Harry Harris, chief of U.S. Pacific Command, the Defense Department has been arguing forcefully to adopt a more robust posture in the western Pacific and throughout East Asia. But they have not been able to convince a White House dedicated to “de-militarizing” American foreign policy. National security adviser Susan Rice reportedly placed a “gag order” on Harris prior to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington for the recent nuclear summit. There has also been a debate about the nature of U.S. Navy maneuvers in the region; Carter characterizes them as “freedom of navigation” operations—allowing the full spectrum of military tactics—while the White House calls them “innocent passage,” meaning limited operations—halting air patrols, for example.
It’s the People’s Liberation Army that now has that “decade upon decade” look to it. A few days after the Stennis left the area, the Chinese deployed a military aircraft to Fiery Cross Reef, one of the new man-made bases—sporting a 10,000-foot runway—just a few hundred miles from the Philippines. State Department spokesman John Kirby, a former Navy officer and Pentagon flack, said it was “difficult to understand” why the Chinese had used a military plane to evacuate injured workers. The Chinese middle-finger response was that the People’s Liberation Army “wholeheartedly serve[s] the people.” America’s Pacific allies—including treaty allies like the Philippines—have no trouble grasping the Chinese message.
These days, the presence of a U.S. aircraft carrier in the South China Sea is a big deal, or at least a big enough one to yank the secretary of defense halfway around the world, along with his public relations team. And while there’s more to American military power than aircraft carriers, the gap between Carter’s breast-beating and the day-to-day balance in the western Pacific is not just dissonant. It is the very emblem of weakness.
Thomas Donnelly is co-director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
