US Policy Toward the Indo-Pacific through 2030: Continuity, Consequences, and Change
Whether 2025 marks the beginning of a first Harris administration or a second term for former President Trump, it is almost assured that the United States (US) government will pursue geopolitical competition with China through an “Indo-Pacific Strategy.” Although the tone has varied across the last three US administrations, a shared underlying characterization of interests and associated principles have driven a significant degree of continuity in American foreign policy toward the Indo-Pacific. Behind this continuity, there is a mainstream assumption that sustaining these policies—whether they are fully implemented or not—preserves the status quo in the region, despite the significant geopolitical and geoeconomic changes underway.
The logic driving the Indo-Pacific focus is understandable given the mounting threats in the region. And busy government officials can be forgiven for leaning on policies and programs that are well-established and seemingly uncontroversial, versus asking politically difficult (and perhaps career-risking) questions about the wisdom of sustaining the default approach. Nevertheless, an US Indo-Pacific strategy on autopilot seems increasingly blind to the consequences of continuity, namely the ways in which it is exacerbating dangers of crisis or conflict. The next US administration likely will feel constrained in its choices, but it should carefully assess the efficacy of the existing approach and the challenges to its implementation and consider more seriously policy alternatives that could arrest the slide toward insecurity in the region.
Continuities
As viewed from Washington, the Indo-Pacific problem is mainly driven by Sino-American competition. The Trump and Biden administrations both described the China challenge in similar terms and amplified policies aimed at strengthening the US hand in that competition. The Trump administration’s “Free and Open” Indo-Pacific framework and the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy speak of China as the principal destabilizing agent whose perceived revisionist aims threaten US interests in the region. Influenced by what they assess as the return of great power competition, both administrations’ National Security Strategy (NSS) documents elaborated on the need to contain China and build a “balance of influence” favorable to the United States. Importantly, four areas of continuity can be observed across the two administrations’ strategies toward the region—trends that seem likely to sustain in a second Trump or Harris administration.
The first policy continuity is countering the perceived regional military threat from China, especially toward Taiwan. When he took office in 2017, Donald Trump vowed to preserve US military superiority in Asia. His National Security Strategy (NSS) argued that American “advantages are shrinking as rival states modernize and augment their nuclear and conventional forces,” and—believing that military superiority is predicated on the ability to prevail in areas where the US is weakest relative to its adversary—placed a premium on denying Chinese military superiority around Taiwan.
One presidential administration later, Joe Biden’s NSS strikes a similar tone, reaffirming the US would maintain its “capacity to resist any resort to force or coercion against Taiwan,” and adds in his National Defense Strategy (NDS) that the Defense Department’s first priority would be to develop anti-access/area-denial-insensitive strike capabilities. While traveling to Japan in 2022 to meet with Japanese, South Korean, and Australian leaders, Vice President Harris similarly noted that “peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is an essential feature of a free and open Indo-Pacific” and that the US “will continue to deepen our unofficial ties” with Taipei and “will continue to support Taiwan’s self-defense, consistent with our longstanding policy.” Both the Trump and Biden administrations emphasized the need to strengthen deterrence against China and North Korea by conducting military deployments, nuclear-capable bomber overflights, and joint exercises with allies.
A second area of continuity has been the further strengthening of alliances. Sustaining a reliable alliance system has been a cornerstone of the US approach to the region for over seventy years. In their strategy documents, both the Trump and Biden administrations emphasized the importance of existing security alliances and expanded partnerships via the Quad and related frameworks. Admittedly, during his presidency, Trump was rhetorically more hostile toward the alliances with Japan and South Korea in particular, yet, like his successor, he underwrote actions to sustain those alliances and forge new regional partnerships in the face of mounting Chinese and North Korean pressures. The Biden Administration adopted and drove the Indo-Pacific Strategy further, complemented by strategic asset rotations to the Korean Peninsula and closer trilateral defense and deterrence cooperation with Japan and South Korea.
A third area of continuity, underscored by similar language in both administrations’ national security documents, has been the commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Every president since Bill Clinton has, with varying degrees of effort, sought to negotiate constraints on North Korea’s nuclear activities, all under the rubric of denuclearization. The promise of inducements resulting from negotiations has been backed by “maximum pressure” campaigns to convince North Korean leaders to abandon their nuclear ambitions, a policy that continues under Biden and seems likely also to be a feature of a putative Harris administration’s future policy toward the Korean Peninsula. Trump departed from this strategy in form by holding summits and exchanging letters with Kim Jong Un, but not in substance.
Finally, one additional area of continuity between Trump and Biden that does not have the same lineage yet is an increasingly prominent element of US strategy toward the region, is a sharp shift away from Sino-American economic interdependence. The turn toward economic protectionism predated Trump, but he accelerated it by implementing steep tariffs on steel and aluminum, which were rapidly followed by additional tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports. The ensuing trade war set-off a process of partial economic de-coupling – or “de-risking” as the Biden administration has termed it. China-US trade fell by 14.5% between 2022 and the first half of 2023. Like Trump, Biden’s strategy documents all point to Chinese economic coercion and weaponization of interconnectivity as reasons for the US to strengthen its economic competitiveness and impose costs via tariffs, sanctions, and export controls. Harris has few antecedents on trade policy, but in her presidential debate with Trump in September 2024, she charged that Trump “sold us out on China” by “selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military,” and advocated for targeted restrictions, particularly on AI and quantum computing, coordinated with US allies.
Consequences of Continuity
For American foreign policy practitioners, these policies may seem like an anchor of stability in a turbulent geopolitical sea. However, policy continuity risks ignoring the ways in which the region itself is changing. It is important, therefore, to consider the negative externalities these policies help generate, which contribute to growing instability and escalation risks over the long run. If ignored, these accumulating risks could lead to catastrophic deterrence failures.
First, defining Taiwan as the worst-case-stress test for US military planning has over time increased arms racing pressures and exacerbated crisis instability. Since China cannot match the US “ship for ship, tank for tank,” Beijing focuses on investing in capabilities that target US weaknesses, predominantly in anti-access/area denial (A2AD). To maintain deterrence based on military superiority feeds a perception in Washington that it must continually increase arms production to overcome the growth in Chinese capabilities. At the same time, the centrality of the Taiwan scenario to US military planning—coupled with arms sales to Taipei and rhetorical support perceived by Beijing as advancing Taiwanese independence—drives more bellicose and aggressive Chinese behavior. This further reinforces US perceptions that deterrence is failing and needs to be re-established via augmented forces and greater support for Taiwan.
This vicious cycle is already highly escalatory on its own, but attempting to deny China area superiority around Taiwan also requires US military planners to target multiple locations in the Chinese mainland, where most of Beijing’s anti-access/area denial capabilities are based. Even if the US would not strike these capabilities directly to avoid escalation in a conflict, military planners might nevertheless be prompted to target Chinese dual-use command, control, communication, and intelligence assets as a way to blunt China’s A2AD. Given the probable entanglement of these systems with China’s nuclear arsenal, this strategy carries substantial risks of inadvertent nuclear escalation, over and above the costs of arms racing.
Second, worst-case planning by both Washington and Beijing is part of another spiral driving increased prominence of nuclear deterrence in the region. China is currently engaged in a substantial build-up of its nuclear arsenal, seemingly motivated by concerns about the survivability of its nuclear second-strike capability against the combination of US missile defenses and precision conventional strike arms. China’s fears are exacerbated by Washington’s reluctance to acknowledge mutual nuclear vulnerability—a strategic reassurance that the US does not seek to undermine China’s nuclear deterrent. This is another feature of US policy continuity, partly due to domestic politics (not wanting to be branded as “weak” on China), and partly due to allies’ concerns that acknowledging mutual vulnerability could attenuate US extended deterrence. The combination of growing nuclear threats from China (and North Korea) compounds the stress on US extended deterrence commitments, driving South Korea and Japan to seek more and more visible US nuclear capability in the region. In turn, efforts by the United States and its allies to continually “strengthen” deterrence drive arms race perceptions in Beijing and Pyongyang.
Meanwhile, the sustained commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula as a policy objective and the coercive posturing to achieve it have, over time, driven North Korea to accelerate its nuclear and missiles programs and posture its nuclear weapons in more aggressive ways. Continuing to condition negotiations with North Korea on Pyongyang’s willingness to commit to the ultimate objective of denuclearization—as opposed to focusing instead on shorter-term risk reduction options—is therefore inadvertently increasing conflict escalation risks on the Korean Peninsula. In this sense, continuity in US policy toward North Korea is part of yet another perilous action-reaction cycle, in which North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal and its ability to threaten the US homeland incentivizes American deterrence investments, especially in national and regional missile defense capabilities. North Korea and China—which also perceives US and allied missile defense as a threat—respond with further increases and improvements in capabilities to defeat US missile defenses, thus fueling arms racing in the region.
Finally, the continuation of efforts to “de-risk” US-China trade could unintentionally become a conflict driver. For instance, US policies to prevent the export of computer chips to China necessary for artificial intelligence may provide the US with advantages in AI-enabled military capabilities for the foreseeable future. Before that advantage becomes highly significant, however, some analysts worry that China might decide to risk a military conflict before its relative power declines further. More broadly, this raises a question about whether economic decoupling increases or decreases the prospect of war. Many leaders in Asia have long believed that economic interdependence is a key to stability, even as that interdependence could be weaponized to damage their economies and is thought by some scholars to have enabled structural violence and corruption.
Change
The most significant and widely discussed potential source of disruption to US policy continuity—and the one of greatest concern to US allies—is the uncertainty and chaos that could result from a second Trump presidency. Indeed, the policy continuity during his first term described above probably held despite Trump, reflecting the efforts of his advisors and the national security bureaucracy to stymie major departures from established policies. By all accounts, Trump intends to overcome these obstacles in a second term, not least by forcing the departure of large numbers of government civil servants, including those whose jobs are to implement policy toward Asia. In this regard, change in a second Trump administration is likely to be driven less by national security principle, more by ego and personal instincts, while continuity could apply to issues that don’t come on his radar. This degree of uncertainty means that any current policy could be up for change, with wide ranging implications for the region. For example, Trump seems likely to sustain or even deepen a trade war with China—he has recently proposed a 60 percent tariff on goods from China—unless he believed that a modus vivendi with Xi Jinping would elevate him as a statesman or further enrich his family enterprises. Some of these changes could increase the chances of blundering into conflict, while others might actually mitigate risks; the point is the lack of certainty in contrast with the relative continuity of the past.
Of all the potential changes to alliances under Trump, the most consequential would be a decision to withdraw from the region or any one allied country in particular, given the latent isolationist and protectionist tendencies he represents, as well as Trump’s record of capricious behavior. Some political commentators believe that in a second term Trump would be less restrained by “moderate” advisors and could more easily overcome bureaucratic resistance to such a major departure from US security practice. Trump’s views of alliances as protection rackets are relatively well understood. He argued in the past that the presence of US forces in the Korean Peninsula was “no guarantee we’ll have peace” and he asked what the US was “getting out” of stationing troops, aircraft, ships and bases in Japan.
There is little evidence to indicate whether or not in a second term Trump would go so far as to actually disband the US alliance system in Asia, an act that would be in serious tension with the Indo-Pacific policies he pursued from 2017-2021. Perhaps a less extreme course might be a switch to an offshore balancing strategy, in which the US would refrain from deploying large forces abroad and instead encourage other countries to take the lead in checking a rising China. This strategy could provoke nuclear proliferation by Japan and/or South Korea, which Trump himself stated was only a question of time.
Another plausible change in a second Trump administration—one with a bit more evidence behind it, fake news or otherwise—is a shift in US policy toward North Korea. Clearly, Trump has a fascination with Kim Jong Un and may well regret that he did not seal a nuclear deal at their Hanoi summit in 2019. Thus, it is imaginable that Trump could attempt to resurrect a deal: to accept the existence of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and to “buy down” the threat, with Pyongyang ceasing missile testing in return for sanctions relief or other aid. This approach could effectively end denuclearization policy as it has existed for the last three decades. It might have some salutary short-term effects in reducing the potential for conflict around the Korean Peninsula, but could also exacerbate long-term risks, especially regarding South Korea’s potential nuclearization.
Finally, although US extended nuclear deterrence also aims to disincentivize Japan and South Korea from developing their own nuclear arsenals, the increasing prominence of nuclear weapons in the region is inadvertently creating constituencies for independent nuclear capabilities among US allies. Even if the next US administration sustains an alliance-centric policy, it is plausible that an ally might choose to pursue nuclear weapons. South Korea appears to be the most likely case. There, domestic politics and public opinion favorable to nuclear weapons, concern about North Korea’s growing nuclear capabilities, and fear of abandonment by the US create fertile ground for a proliferation decision.
This trend exists even apart from the prospect of a second Trump administration, which some in South Korea would welcome in the belief that Trump would be more likely to tolerate proliferation by Seoul. For Washington, South Korean nuclearization would pose a sharp tension between its long-standing support for nonproliferation and its desire to sustain alliances. Risks of nuclear conflict on the Korean Peninsula would increase, especially during the early buildout of an ROK arsenal, when it would be at greatest risk to North Korean and/or Chinese pre-emption. There also could be effects well beyond the region if leaders in other states decided that they should follow the ROK example and seek nuclear weapons.
Conclusion
As the next administration takes office in January 2025, it will inherit policies toward the Indo-Pacific that have long tails. There are good reasons these policies have remained in place. There are also good reasons to re-assess the wisdom of sustaining them given the changes under way in the region. The next administration is not locked into an inevitable course. There are alternative choices it could explore to mitigate dangers exacerbated by continuity. Perpetuating a policy of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is one such choice. Arms competition with China is another. Instead, the next administration could pursue comprehensive risk reduction strategies toward both Beijing and Pyongyang.
Though it would be costly (politically, diplomatically, and perhaps economically) to back away from continuity, the risks of not doing so in some instances may be greater. At the same time, radical change—an overt US shift to offshore balancing for instance—could result in a region at far greater risk of military conflict, even nuclear war.