Trump's Middle East Wars Are Swallowing His Own Pivot to Asia

For two decades the logic behind Washington's “pivot to Asia” held that shrinking America's Middle Eastern commitments would free resources to counter a rising China. Foreign Policy argues Donald Trump has done the opposite: instead of winding the region down, he reopened Gaza and then, in February, joined Israel in an all-out war against Iran. Eighteen months on, the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz dominate both the White House's daily attention and its military posture, with warships, munitions and diplomatic capital flowing toward the Middle East rather than the Indo-Pacific. Promised troop drawdowns and “burden-shifting” to regional partners have instead produced deeper entanglement, the analysis finds, leaving allies from Seoul to Manila unsure whether Washington's attention will ever fully arrive. China, meanwhile, keeps expanding its footprint across the Pacific largely unchallenged by any coordinated American counter-strategy. Six months into economic warfare against Tehran, the piece's broader point is structural rather than partisan: a superpower fighting to end one Middle Eastern war cannot simultaneously build the order its own strategists insist Asia requires. The same overstretch, it warns, will outlast this administration unless a future one makes an explicit choice between theaters rather than drifting into both.