Asia Program

Asia Engagement

This program seeks to operationalize and promote a strategy of restraint for the U.S. in Asia.

This means capitalizing on a balance of power that favors defense to do less militarily and encourage allies and partners to do more. While engaging with this dynamic region, the strategy seeks, above all, to advance U.S. security and prosperity.

Within that broad framework, this program works to define U.S. defense policy goals in Asia and to chart a course of meeting them by laying out policies in the following areas:

• Responsible competition with China: evaluating how exactly China challenges U.S. interests, bearing in mind the imperative to avoid a dangerous overreaction and treating it as an enemy

• U.S. military posture, basing, force structure, and procurement and how these align with U.S. security interests

• U.S. relations with major military allies in the region—Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia—and distribution of burdens and responsibilities within the alliances

• The role of the U.S. on the Korean Peninsula and dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea

• Issues of common concern with China, including sea lane security, peacekeeping, anti-terrorism, energy, public health, climate change, arms control, and nuclear proliferation

• Crisis management and escalation issues related to the delicate Taiwan issue and how the island could pursue viable self-defense

• U.S. naval assets, presence, and patrols in the region, including freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea

• China’s prospects for continued improvement in its military capabilities and the implications for regional arms racing

• U.S. relations with India and how that bilateral relationship might impact the regional security architecture

• The closer relationship between China and Russia and resulting strategic implications for the U.S.