[Note: This is the free preview within the dedicated podcast section of the ASEAN Wonk website, with the full version in a post published on April 16, 2026 available to our paying subscribers. This is not meant to serve as new content and is part of our free preview content within the dedicated website podcast section].
INTRODUCTION
ASEAN Wonk: Welcome to the ASEAN Wonk Podcast, where we bring you expert insights and regional perspectives on Southeast Asia and Indo-Pacific geopolitics and geoeconomics. I’m your host Dr. Prashanth Parameswaran. If you haven’t already, do subscribe to the ASEAN Wonk platform at www.aseanwonk.com so you don’t miss our full posts.
Our guest today is Dr. Michael Green who worked at the National Security Council on Asia policy and is now the CEO of the US Studies Center at the University of Sydney. We’ll start our conversation talking about contemporary US Asia policy dynamics. Be sure to stay tuned as we also look ahead on other subjects, including what to expect with respect to future US policy in the region and the dynamics we might expect with upcoming midterm elections.
Note: The transcript that follows the above free clip preview has been lightly edited for clarity and organized into sections for ease of quick browsing. For all ASEAN Wonk Podcast episodes, full video and audio podcasts, along with edited and sectioned transcripts as well as block quotes, will be a premium product for our paying subscribers, but we will include a short free transcript preview and a clip for all readers to maintain accessibility. Paying subscribers can find the rest of the full transcript and the full video podcast right below the paywall. If you have not already, do consider subscribing, and, if you have already done so and like what you see and hear, do consider forwarding this to others as well who may be interested. Thank you for your support as always!
US ASIA STRATEGY TODAY IN PERSPECTIVE
ASEAN Wonk: So welcome to the podcast, Mike, and let’s start if we could on US Asia strategy more generally, with the caveat, of course, that we are in the midst of Iran war fallout and a president who has some of the greatest latitude we’ve seen in terms of policymaking in recent history. You’ve written what I would say is the most extensive book on the subject of US Asia strategy By More Than Providence, and that looks at US Asia strategy even before the founding of the United States all the way up to some of the contemporary dynamics that we’re sort of talking about. With the second administration of US President Donald Trump, there’s a lot of focus on some of the personalistic dynamics. I’m hoping that we can get beyond that and talk a little bit more about some of the structural realities and some of the measures of continuity and change. If you talk to administration officials, they point out that there are still some gains and signs of continuity in terms of security networking with Australia, Japan, and the Philippines, and some of the things that we saw in the first Trump administration like the Development Finance Corporation, some of the rebranded minilaterals like Pax Silica. At the same time, if you look at some of the big broader trends in terms of trade, in terms of values, and in terms of some of the aspects of the policy ecosystem, there’s some really dramatic change there as well. So having long been a professor yourself and also written a book on this subject, how would you grade the administration’s approach to Asia so far?
Dr. Michael Green: Well thanks Prashanth. It’s great to be an honorary ASEAN wonk for an hour and to spend time with a CSIS alum. How would I grade them? Gosh. I would send them to the school counselor for examination is the honest answer, but I wouldn’t expel them from school because there are, as you suggest, some real points of continuity. We’re in this strange situation where there has perhaps never been as much consensus on Asia, the importance of Asia, the nature of the strategic challenge from China, and the criticality of alliances. There hasn’t been this much consensus – and this consensus has been around for eight, ten years now – in the whole postwar era, but we haven’t had a president who is as disinterested or almost hostile to that consensus as we have with Donald Trump. So when my book came out, it was 2017, so it was the first year of the Trump administration. And the reviews were all generally very good, but some reviewers said, well, you know, that’s been a fine explanation for the last two hundred and forty years. But now that Donald Trump is president, America doesn’t have a foreign policy or strategy anymore. And, you know, actually, in the first Trump administration, they did. The National Security Strategy put out by the Trump administration was the first to say that our focus has got to be on strategic competition with China and with Russia. Officials like Steve Biegun at state, Matt Pottinger at the NSC, General Mattis, the secretary of defense, and a lot of others really built a kind of balance of power – what my old boss Condoleezza Rice used to call a balance of power that favors freedom – upgrading the Quad, strengthening the alliance with Japan. And the first Trump term gets reasonably high marks in places like Tokyo and the Philippines. Then the Biden administration continued a lot of it. The Quad, for example, which was made a foreign minister’s summit by Secretary Mike Pompeo, the Biden administration made a presidential level summit. They didn’t undo basically anything that the Trump administration done in Asia.
But then the second Trump administration turned out to be much more of a departure from that trend. And a lot of it is because President Trump himself clearly believes that he now has the authority and the experience and maybe even the mission to do big things. And what those big things are, it kind of changes from day to day. And so, you know, he’s not strategic at all, he’s extremely tactical. It’s day to day. He is interested in enhancing his ways and means, his reputation, his power, his tools. But what for is never clear, and I don’t buy these arguments that he believes in spheres of influence or that we are in a neo-monarchical [state], I think that’s just basically kind of the vibe or the mood or as he puts it his gut on any given day. So that makes it very hard to sustain strategy, and he’s appointed a lot of people who frankly think that the enemy of America is within. That’s not the best frame of mind to deal with strategic competition from without. So there’s a lot more uncertainty. But underneath it all, as you suggested in your intro, if you look at congressional views including Republicans, if you look at public opinion, if you look at military alliances in Asia, there’s far more continuity than change underneath the surface. And we can talk about how much the surface matters. It matters. But I don’t see us on a new trajectory. I see us in a period of incredible turbulence, but not a fundamental change in the way that the American system is going to be viewing competition in Asia for the coming decades.
RECONSIDERING “PIVOT” DYNAMICS AND CONTEMPORARY REALITIES
ASEAN Wonk: So another point you referenced earlier Mike is that there’s chatter with respect to this US episode with Iran in terms of “we’ve seen this playbook before” with respect to the war on terrorism and the Bush administration which you were in as well. My issue with that is that the world has changed pretty fundamentally in the last twenty years. We’ve had a war in Ukraine that has reinforced connectivity between different regions, rather than this notion that we were in the Obama administration of a pivot or rebalance to Asia. And in fact, some of the advocates of the pivot, including Kurt Campbell, have actually admitted that these realities are actually much more sophisticated relative to where they were twenty years ago. The US position is also quite different in terms of hydrocarbons from where it was twenty years ago. And the China challenge is a much more fundamental challenge today than it was twenty years ago as well. So how would you sort of think about this notion of the sort of evolution from the pivot and rebalance to where we are at now, where we’re seeing a lot more focus on hemispheric and homeland concerns. When I look back further at U. S. history, whether it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Monroe Doctrine, these things are not exactly new. It seems like a rebalancing of US interests on Asia relative to the rest of the world.
Dr. Michael Green: Yeah. None of this is new in a way. I started my book By More Than Providence in 1783 because that’s when Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to the commander of US forces in the frontier, which was somewhere in Pennsylvania at the time, warning that our spies in London had learned that the British were planning an expedition across Canada to find a fast route to the Pacific Northwest and access to the Pacific Ocean. And Jefferson said to Colonel Clark, we need to find a way to get there first, which, of course, was a big part of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It was geopolitical. So geopolitics is in the American DNA even if it’s sloppy and contested and inconsistent. I was actually surprised to find that when I did my research. What was going to be a two-year project became a seven-year project because there’s so much rich strategic debate about the Pacific in Congress, in congressional hearings, among men of letters. And so that’s one of the reasons, frankly, why I think we have to look at the Trump era not as a new unprecedented trajectory in American foreign policy, but a period of turbulence. And how much damage the turbulence does, we can discuss.
“So geopolitics is in the American DNA even if it’s sloppy and contested and inconsistent… we have to look at the Trump era not as a new unprecedented trajectory in American foreign policy, but a period of turbulence. And how much damage the turbulence does, we can discuss.”
I don’t think I put this in my book, I use it in class, but there’s a great cartoon by Herb Block, the famous Washington Post cartoonist you’re old enough to remember: he had a cartoon in the 1940s during World War Two, and it shows General MacArthur who commanded in the Far East meeting with General Marshall, the chief of staff of the army. And MacArthur has brought in a globe of the world to discuss strategy, and the globe is a cube, and East Asia’s on top. And Marshall says, well, you know, general, here, we prefer to use a round globe. And it was making fun of the fact that MacArthur wanted everything in North Africa and Europe put in second place or dropped to pivot military resources to the Pacific. And I do that at Georgetown in my class because I don’t want people who major in Asian studies to think that good Asia strategy is neglecting the rest of the world, and especially for the US, which is a global power, a two-ocean power, and all the rest.
And so I was in the White House on 9/11, I was in the White House during Afghanistan and Iraq. I did not go into meetings and say: we can’t be doing any of this. We’ve got to focus on Asia. I thought, how do we — and I was hardly alone in this [Richard Armitage] and many others — but how do we basically take advantage of this crisis to strengthen our alliances and partnerships in Asia? And I think sometimes advocates of Asia strategy think we can hit pause on the Middle East or on Europe, but especially on the Middle East because it’s such a quagmire. You keep trying to get out, you get pulled back in. But as Lee Kuan Yew said, Americans think geopolitics is a video game and you can hit pause in one part of the world and then come back, and nothing will have happened while you’re dealing with another. And Lee Kuan Yew actually recognized the US and Singapore’s and Asia’s interests had to tend to security in the Middle East, had to tend to security in Europe.
So I’m not an advocate of just ignoring Iran. And there’s a lot that the Trump administration did wrong with the Iran war in terms of their assumptions, poor planning, complete disregard for allies and for the congress and the American public. It’s a pretty long list. But the underlying challenge for Iran was not created by Donald Trump. The missile program in particular was potentially heading towards ten thousand ballistic missiles in a few years. Unacceptable. So you can’t just hit pause in the Middle East and hope everything will be fine. It’s going to take some level of resources. Now maybe more resources than we needed because of the way the war’s been prosecuted. We’ll see. But you have to have an Asia strategy within a global strategy. And I don’t know if you want me to talk more about Trump’s lack of strategy or what we see as continuity, but, obviously, one big feature of his second term is going to be Iran. And it’s undoing his presidency. You can see it in public opinion in the fights in MAGA. The effect on Asia is not – you know, people who say this is that he’s Bismarck and this is brilliant are wrong, obviously – but people who say this is a complete destruction of interest in Asia are also wrong. It’s a mixed picture, and I think you have to be balanced in how you look at it.
DEFENSE PERIMETER, ISLAND CHAIN STAKES AND SECURITY FUTURES
ASEAN Wonk: One of the things you mentioned with respect to MacArthur is the conversation around the defense perimeter and how the United States is looking at its worldview and its vision for the region. Some of the chatter around the narrowing of the administration’s approach to the first island chain, for example, and the implications for – if you’re looking at, say, Vietnam and the South China Sea, for example – there are some elements of change there and concern, which I understand. There are also some elements of continuity that I see as well: in the last couple of administrations, the Philippines has really cemented its role in terms of the US security architecture around the alliances, but also Guam, Hawaii, and so on and so forth with respect to Japan, Australia: the networking there is pretty intense. What’s your view on this notion of the defense perimeter and the forward defense line relative to what we’ve seen in other periods in history, including MacArthur, the Korean War, and so on: is it as much of a change, or do you see more continuity there with respect to the security aspect?
Dr. Michael Green: You know, drawing your defense perimeter – put it another way, where you’re willing to fight or risk war – is one of the hardest things in grand strategy. And in my book it’s a conundrum for American strategists for 250 years. In the book I wrote after that on Japan’s current strategy called Line of Advantage, it’s a conundrum. Where do you draw the line? Where do you decide you’re going to take risk? John Lewis Gaddis, in his book on strategy, says you need the discipline to sit inside the castle walls and listen to the villagers being burned alive or something like that. He’s obviously an advocate of clear defensive perimeters and being disciplined. And one of my old bosses, Steve Hadley, to say, you keep drawing red lines and you don’t defend them, you end up creating a red carpet. I love that line. And so it’s very, very tricky. I think one problem US strategists make sometimes is, to quote Homer Simpson, the great geopolitical thinker, sometimes they make the mistake of saying the loud part soft and the soft part loud. So when Dean Acheson in January 1950, after a review within the State Department of how to protect our interests and contain communism after the fall of mainland China to Mao, decided, well, don’t worry – it was a political thing as much as it was strategic for the Democrats – he said, don’t worry. We’ve got this very strong defensive line with the first island chain, which was all thinking in American geopolitics. And he had that famous line between Japan and Korea in January 1950, which was a red carpet. It was an invitation to Mao, Stalin, and Kim Il Sung to test containment and allow Kim Il Sung to attack six months later, June 1950. That was a mistake to draw that defensive perimeter so clearly. Of course, the Vietnam War had the flip problem, which is they didn’t know where the defensive perimeter was. So, you know, strategy is basically about reconciling two mutually contradictory goals. If you didn’t have mutually contradictory goals, you wouldn’t need to think about it: you just pursue your interests. But sometimes the goals compete.
But I do think we are guilty in the United States sometimes of drawing the line too crisply, too clearly sometimes, and too much. So to give you more recent examples – the National Defense Strategy that came out. It was a dog’s breakfast, as they say in Australia – it had all kinds of stuff in it, some of it was ridiculous – but it did have a very clear and very historic focus on, as you said, on defending the first and second island chain in the Western Pacific. But it was very reductionist, and this sort of follows Bridge Colby’s thinking about Taiwan being the major central front. It was very reductionist. So everything’s about Taiwan. And this is also a mistake because the defense of Taiwan is not just – and certainly not in the first instance – about military deterrence in North Asia and in the first island chain. I mean, that’s absolutely core to the strategy, but Beijing’s strategy is to win without fighting. So if you overly focus on the military deterrence piece – which is critical – but if that’s all you’re worried about, you neglect, for example, diplomacy and development in Southeast Asia or the transatlantic alliance. And the flavor of the National Defense Strategy, Bridge’s thinking is – I mean, he’s a smart guy, and he’s very focused on the core problem – he’s worried about U.S. resources. But the danger of being overly reductionist and drawing a very clear line around what you’re willing to fight for too much is you end up ceding in Phase Zero – in peacetime – strategic influence in Southeast Asia that allows China to flank you from the south with their own power projection or prevent U.S. access to the archipelagic southern flank, which is critical for access basing overflight and dealing with a PLA campaign strategy that’s the entire first and second island chain.
“[T]he defense of Taiwan is not just – and certainly not in the first instance – about military deterrence in North Asia and in the first island chain. I mean, that’s absolutely core to the strategy, but Beijing’s strategy is to win without fighting. So if you overly focus on the military deterrence piece – which is critical – but if that’s all you’re worried about, you neglect, for example, diplomacy and development in Southeast Asia or the transatlantic alliance.”
And it’s not a simple matter of deterrence as you know well from your work. It’s much more complicated. It’s about development. It’s about diplomacy. It’s about soft power. It’s about partnering with Australia, Japan, and others. It’s not a kind of John Mearsheimer simple war and peace, black and white issue. It’s complex. And if you get it wrong, you make it easier for China to fight without winning. And in a similar way, the transatlantic relationship: it is way too reductionist to say the central problem we have – the pacing threat – is dealing with the PLA on the Taiwan contingency so we don’t have time for Europe. And then to gratuitously sort of beat up Europeans and tell them we don’t want your ships in Asia. Life’s not that simple, and strategy is not that simple. And Beijing would love to have Europe remain neutral, NATO remain neutral in a Taiwan contingency.
And it’s not whether the order of battle changes because the Dutch send a frigate. It’s about the geopolitical dissuasion effect, the geopolitical cost imposition that NATO can impose on China. And so, like losing interest in the IP-4 – the Australia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand summits with NATO – the gratuitously fighting with Europe, especially right now, is just an onside goal. So yes, as a historian and a geography nut, I love the focus on the first and second island chain, you’re absolutely right. But don’t reduce the whole strategic problem to the military equation in the first island chain. Got to get that right. But if you get only that right, you lose anyway. So kind of a long answer. But a strategy, you know the famous dime construct, you need diplomacy, informational, military tools and economic. And I think part of the problem there is continuity for sure on the military side. For sure, we can talk about it. But the dime construct overall, we’re not performing on the d and i and the e in Asia. We’re doing a lot of good stuff on the m, and there’s a lot of continuity, which is why the alliances will survive. But in terms of strategic competition, we are not using our toolkit fully.
FORECASTING US ASIA STRATEGY AND POLICY FUTURES BEYOND TRUMP II
ASEAN Wonk: And on that Mike, just looking ahead, the conversation that we will get to as the midterms loom closer, diplomats and officials from the region will be asking including in allied capitals: how do we think about this question of Trumpism or America First after Trump in terms of US Asia policy? And what is that going to look like in terms of that sort of new bipartisan consensus around strategic competition, China, but also the famous DIME construct – and the very difficult balance that policymakers have to make between the security and military inroads where the United States has always led, and the difficulties on the economic, diplomatic, and informational aspects that we’ve seen?
Dr. Michael Green: Well…
[Note: This is the end of a free preview podcast, with the full version in an earlier post published on April 16, 2026 available to our paying subscribers. This is not meant to serve as new content and is part of our free preview content within the dedicated website podcast section].
