Absent Without Leave? Gauging US Commitment to the Indo-Pacific

The Obama administration’s “rebalance to Asia” and the Trump administration’s “free and open Indo-Pacific strategy” both included rhetorical commitments that the United States would do more in the Indo-Pacific region. Have words been matched by action?

Tom Donilon, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, asserted that executing the rebalance to Asia “means devoting the time, effort and resources necessary.” The 2019 “free and open Indo-Pacific strategy” stated that “President Donald J. Trump has made U.S. engagement in the Indo-Pacific region a top priority of his administration” and asserted that “under the Indo-Pacific strategy, the United States has increased its tempo and level of cooperation with allies and partners in the region.”

Given that the scarcest resource in government is high level attention, a critical metric of U.S. commitment is the amount of time spent in the Indo-Pacific region by senior administration officials. A previous study published in The Diplomat found that the time spent in Asia by the president and senior officials increased significantly from the first term of the George W. Bush administration to the second term, and increased further in the first term of the Obama administration.

This article compares the travel of the president, secretary of state, and secretary of defense from the Clinton administration through the Trump administration to see whether rhetorical commitment has been matched by resource commitments. If their claims are fulfilled, senior officials in the Obama and Trump administrations should spend more time in the Indo-Pacific than their Clinton administration counterparts (the baseline case) and Bush administration officials, who focused heavily on the Middle East in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

We count senior leader travel to Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, and Oceania as Indo-Pacific travel; we exclude travel solely to Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is likely related to the war in Afghanistan. We focus on days in the region because the opportunity cost for overseas meetings is much higher than for Washington meetings, where no travel is required and other business can be conducted.

Attendance at regional meetings is an important symbol of the commitment the United States places on the Indo-Pacific region. However, such meetings have value beyond the specific agenda by providing a venue for U.S. regional messaging and policy initiatives, allowing senior U.S. officials to meet counterparts bilaterally on the margins of multilateral meetings, and providing opportunities to visit other countries as part of the trip. A major meeting requires the staff to prepare a variety of intelligence estimates, policy proposals, talking points, and speeches and forces the principal to spend considerable time focusing on regional issues. Multilateral meetings can also act as force multipliers, providing opportunities for senior leaders to engage multiple foreign counterparts without separate bilateral trips.

Time on Target

Both Obama and Trump have followed through on pledges to commit more time to the Indo-Pacific. Figure 1 shows that Obama spent more time in the region than his predecessors, and that Trump has spent more time in the Indo-Pacific in three years than Obama did in his first four. Although first term travel is the best comparison (presidents typically travel oversea more in the second term), Asian leaders will likely judge Trump against the 40 days that Obama spent in the region in his second term. Trump has currently spent 28 days in the Indo-Pacific and if travel continued at the same pace he would be projected to spend 36 days total during his first term. The coronavirus pandemic suggests he will fall well short of that projection.