The United States walked away from being an Imperial Power after the Spanish-American War. Trying to run the Philippines turned out not to have any tangible benefits.

The US walked away from being a player in the East Asian theater after Vietnam. The public had no appetite for soldiers dying in far away jungles for abstract ideas about dominos or foreigner’s thoughts about American will to die in those jungles.

The United States is going to walk away from being the hegemonic enforcer of the world’s rules-based order in the western Pacific. America has no will to see its sons and daughters die trapped in the wreckage of carriers on the bottom of the Taiwan Straights. It will not fight for specks of land uninhabited except for flag-waving soldiers. It will not fight for the rights of the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia or Malaysia against China when those countries will not take the lead in defending their own interests.

Someday, and perhaps not that far away, a US President is going to re-draw our national strategic boundary. It’s going to have a huge carveout in the Western Pacific, bounded to the east by Hawaii, the north by Japan, and the south by Australia/New Zealand. And within that carveout, China will be the supreme power. And the US Navy will have to just accept that their time ruling the Pacific has ended.