Pentagon Policy Chief Reassures Indo-Pacific Allies but Neglects Korea Ahead of Joint War Games

The Pentagon’s top policymaker, Elbridge Colby, has borrowed a phrase from America’s 26th president, Teddy Roosevelt, declaring, “We are speaking softly and carrying a big stick.”While Roosvelt pursued war against Spain and revolutionary forces in the Caribbean and the Philippines, Mr. Colby, undersecretary of war for policy, used the famous phrase to dramatize an approach in Asia that he said was “strong and quiet.”“We do not feel the need to engage in needless, loud, rhetorical provocations to prove our resolve,” he said in a speech this week at a Manila think tank, the Stratbase Institute for International and Strategic Studies. “We are putting our alliances on a sustainable, realistic, and durable footing for the long haul.”Mr. Colby’s speech set the tone for a mission that is taking him from the Philippines to Indonesia, Thailand, and Cambodia in a bid to shore up American influence in a region in which Communist China has been aggressively asserting its influence. In the process, he’s trying to get all of America’s friends and allies, from Northeast to Southeast Asia, to buttress their defenses on their own.“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,” he said. “We are doing the exact opposite: We are inviting you to build a true partnership … based on shared responsibility — mutual interest, governed by pragmatic respect, and underwritten by real capability on both sides.”Mr. Colby’s remarks were if anything more noteworthy for what he did not say about America’s two Northeast Asian allies, South Korea and Japan, just as American and South Korean forces are gearing up for annual joint military exercises beginning Monday. The omission of Korea in particular is puzzling to a retired Army special forces colonel, David Maxwell. Mr. Colby “came all the way to Asia and talked about alliances on the eve of the largest ROK/US readiness exercise, and yet he did not mention Korea,” says Colonel Maxwell, now vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy. “What kind of message does that transmit?”To which he adds, in a reference to mounting difficulties besetting the Korean-American alliance, “At least he did not invoke the ‘model ally’ BS again.”A veteran of five tours as a special forces officer in South Korea, Colonel Maxwell sees the “credibility” of the alliance as the “central vulnerability” of Mr. Colby’s 4,000-word defense of America’s evolving policy.Mr. Colby “argues that stronger allies produce stronger deterrence,” Colonel Maxwell observes in an email to the Sun. “Yet adversaries will search for seams between American prioritization and allied perceptions of abandonment. Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang can exploit those seams through political warfare and information operations even when U.S. military capability remains formidable.”In his response to Mr. Colby’s remarks, Colonel Maxwell poses two rhetorical questions. “Can deterrence by denial succeed if U.S. and allied magazines, logistics, shipbuilding, and industrial production cannot sustain a prolonged multi-theater war?” he asks. “How will Washington know whether ‘flexible realism’ is strengthening allied confidence or quietly encouraging allies to prepare for an America they believe may someday choose not to come?”Mr. Colby, in his rambling address, spent much of the time dismissing the views of what he repeatedly called “the commentariat” — a reference to the legion of critics of America’s foreign and defense policies.“What the commentariat frequently misinterprets as ‘disengagement’ or ‘retrenchment’ is, in reality, a disciplined and necessary strategic prioritization,” he said. “We are replacing the hollow, merely symbolic engagement of previous decades with a formidable, resource-backed posture calibrated to actual structural realities.”Interestingly, Mr. Colby, who has acquired a reputation as a “China hawk” for his frequent warnings about Communist China’s rising influence in the Indo-Pacific, did not name China in his speech. There was no doubt, though, that he intended to reassure Asian leaders that America would stand up against the Chinese.“Our driving and abiding purpose is to maintain a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific,” he said. This requires us to maintain a posture of deterrence by denial along the first island chain,” meaning the chain of islands extending from Japan and the Korean peninsula to Free China or Taiwan, and the Philippines, down through Indonesia to Australia and New Zealand.Accomplishing that mission will not be easy. China has long claimed almost the entire South China Sea, from the Philippines on the east to Vietnam and Malaysia on the west, and has just conducted a joint naval exercise with Indonesia in the East China Sea to the north and east of Taiwan.China’s English-language Global Times, a government propaganda paper, said a Chinese guided missile frigate and an Indonesia frigate “had completed all scheduled exercises in waters east of China’s Taiwan island,” including “maritime communications, formation maneuvering, replenishment at sea and a farewell ceremony.”The Taiwan Mainland Affairs Council said the joint exercise was intended “to create a false impression that China has jurisdiction over waters east of Taiwan.” It condemned what it called “a dangerous drill for political manipulation.”

Pentagon Policy Chief Reassures Indo-Pacific Allies but Neglects Korea Ahead of Joint War Games

Pentagon Policy Chief Reassures Indo-Pacific Allies but Neglects Korea Ahead of Joint War Games

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