America's overlapping strategic hierarchies trap it in europe and west asia

The U.S. has failed to execute any of its three declared pivots since 2011, and now faces China from a position of weakness after deepening commitments in two other theaters.

The moment the pivot broke

In November 2011, Hillary Clinton stood before an audience in Honolulu and announced that the United States was "pivoting to Asia." The speech was precise about the problem: after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, America needed to shift its military and economic weight toward the Pacific. China was rising. The math was simple.

Fourteen years later, the U.S. has more troops in Europe than it did in 2011. It has bombed Iran. It has spent $175 billion on Ukraine. And in April 2026, when Donald Trump flew to Beijing to negotiate tariffs, he went with a weaker hand than any American president has held since Nixon.

What broke the pivot was not Chinese resistance. It was the assumption that strategic priorities could be sequenced — that Washington could choose one theater, deprioritize another, and manage the consequences. That assumption no longer holds.

The problem of overlapping hierarchies

The analyst known as Lihuohuo recently described the current moment as one where "the old hierarchy is not disappearing; it is being replaced by overlapping strategic hierarchies operating in parallel." This is not academic jargon. It describes something concrete about how threats now interact.

Consider the sequence. In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. The U.S. response was measured — sanctions, not troops. But by 2022, the political cost of inaction had risen. The Biden administration chose to arm Ukraine heavily. By 2024, the U.S. had committed over $100 billion in military aid. The war in Ukraine had become, in effect, a NATO proxy campaign against Russia.

But Russia was not isolated. It deepened energy sales to China, opened new trade routes, and coordinated diplomatic positions at the UN. The result was a strategic defeat that looked nothing like the one Washington had imagined: instead of crippling Russia and drawing it toward the West, the war pushed Moscow into Beijing's arms. Stanly Johny put it bluntly: "The race to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia after the Ukraine war has pushed the country deeper into China's hands."

The same pattern repeated in West Asia. In 2025, the U.S. bombed Iran. The operation was framed as a response to Iranian proxies attacking American bases. But the effect was to tie down U.S. air power and naval assets in the Persian Gulf at precisely the moment they were needed for contingency planning in the Taiwan Strait.

The U.S. is now fighting in two theaters it did not want to fight in, while trying to compete in a third it cannot afford to lose. The hierarchies are overlapping because the great powers are now linked by trade, energy, and alliance networks in ways that Cold War containment never accounted for.

The domestic politics of foreign policy shifts

There is a reason presidents keep saying they will pivot and keep failing. The domestic constituencies that benefit from European and West Asian commitments are organized and vocal. The constituencies that would benefit from an Asia pivot are diffuse.

Consider the defense industrial base. Major defense contractors — Lockheed Martin, RTX, General Dynamics — derive roughly 40% of their revenue from foreign military sales. A significant portion of those sales goes to NATO allies and Gulf states. A pivot to Asia would mean shifting procurement toward naval vessels, long-range strike systems, and Pacific basing infrastructure. That shift would take a decade and would face fierce resistance from members of Congress whose districts host tank factories in Ohio and artillery plants in Pennsylvania.

The same logic applies to intelligence sharing. The U.S. has spent 75 years building signals intelligence stations in Germany, radar sites in Turkey, and listening posts in Cyprus. Shrinking those commitments to free up resources for Asia would require renegotiating basing agreements, relocating personnel, and accepting gaps in coverage. No administration has been willing to pay that political price.

Trump tried to break the pattern in 2025 by threatening to withdraw from NATO. The backlash was immediate. Republican senators, including some of his strongest allies, publicly opposed the move. European allies threatened to retaliate by reducing intelligence cooperation. The threat was withdrawn within weeks.

The opportunity cost of overcommitment

The numbers tell a clear story. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Defense allocated roughly $9 billion to the Pacific Deterrence Initiative. It allocated $6 billion to the European Deterrence Initiative and an estimated $15 billion to operations in West Asia. By 2025, those ratios had shifted further toward Europe and West Asia, not away from them.

The opportunity cost is not abstract. Every billion dollars spent on maintaining tank brigades in Poland is a billion not spent on submarine maintenance in Guam. Every Tomahawk missile fired at Houthi positions in Yemen is a missile that cannot be used in a Taiwan contingency. And every diplomatic hour spent managing NATO cohesion is an hour not spent coordinating with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines on semiconductor supply chains.

Steve Hsu, a physicist who follows strategic issues closely, put it this way in 2024: "The best thing the US can do is improve its internal strength and not waste resources on $trillion forever wars." He also predicted that the Ukraine strategy and the push to isolate Russia would be seen "in retrospect as a mistake as big as the Iraq War."

That prediction is aging well.

What sequencing would require

A genuine pivot to Asia would require three things the U.S. has not yet done. First, it would need a negotiated settlement in Ukraine that accepts Russian territorial gains in exchange for a ceasefire and a reduction in NATO force posture in Eastern Europe. Second, it would need a diplomatic off-ramp with Iran that trades sanctions relief for a halt to nuclear enrichment and proxy attacks. Third, it would need to accept that China's economic integration with Southeast Asia — the ASEAN-China trade relationship now exceeds $1 trillion annually — cannot be reversed.

None of these are politically easy. A Ukraine settlement that leaves Russia in control of 18% of Ukrainian territory would be called appeasement. A deal with Iran would face opposition from Israel and Saudi Arabia. Accepting Chinese economic dominance in Southeast Asia would be framed as surrender.

But the alternative is what the U.S. has now: commitments in three theaters, a military stretched thin, and a negotiating position that gets weaker with each new crisis.

The multipolar bipolar trap

Johny described the current system as "the multipolar world with bipolar characteristics." What he means is that power is distributed among many actors — the U.S., China, Russia, India, the EU — but the central dynamic remains the U.S.-China competition. The trap is that the minor poles can drag the major ones into conflicts they do not want.

Russia has done this in Ukraine. Iran has done this in West Asia. North Korea has done this with its nuclear program. In each case, the U.S. has responded by escalating its commitment, and in each case, the commitment has come at the expense of the Asia pivot.

The only way out is to stop treating every crisis as a test of credibility. That requires a theory of victory — a clear sense of which theaters matter most, what acceptable outcomes look like, and how to sequence withdrawals without triggering cascading losses. That theory does not exist today. Until it does, the U.S. will keep pivoting toward Asia and finding itself pulled back toward Europe and West Asia, every time.