The US reached the Pacific at the end of the 19th Century. Until we began to focus on Europe in the Wilsonian Age we understood that the Pacific and the rimlands of the Pacific were our remaining frontier. WWI and the Nazi and Soviet threats distracted us from that. Let us turn away from Europe and the ME. These are not our natural focus. The Europeans can take care of themselves now. The Soviets are gone.. israel should live or die on its own merits. We should watch the Islamic World for existential threats to the US. If they arise, then, then crush them. Study Chinese.

As I wrote in The Next Front: Southeast Asia and the Road to Global Peace with Islam, the United States continues to ignore Southeast Asia at its own peril. Not only is this region key economically – ASEAN is already ranked as our fifth largest trading partner – Southeast Asia is key strategically and to our own long-term security.

While President Obama’s recent steps to reengage with Southeast Asia is the most progress made in decades, much more is needed to ensure the United States is not left sitting on the sidelines. Maintaining a strong military and diplomatic presence to assure that none of our “friends” seek to expand their influence by force are necessary moves, as I’ve heard directly from Asian leaders.

Serving on CSIS’s U.S.-ASEAN Strategy Commission, we recently released a report outlining a number of policy recommendations to help reestablish the United States’ leadership in the region. It is not too late to invest, trade and engage in the most dynamic region in the world, but if we fail to act we might as well just throw in the towel on how far American influence will get you in Southeast Asia.

I like Kevin Baron’s question, phrased like an old Stars and Stripes pro. I especially relish his use of the verb “to pivot.” It packs a bunch of insight into a single word.

Yes, the Defense World is pivoting — because the Defense World is paradigmatically dependent on seeking and finding an accommodating, codependent adversary. America’s modern “military-industrial complex” is a majestic enterprise, existentially Borg-morphed into necessary mind-meld with a cohabiting “enemy.”

Call this our emotional-lien — from the Latin ligare, to bind — or elsewise the ligature, the binding thread, of our own military’s contemporary identity.

Bottomline: We need an enemy — not to fight, but to make us whole in who we are and in what we have come to expect for our lifestyle.

And lifestyle needs a lifeline: Hence after a decade of maundering sleepwalking in the 1990s we found our electric-rapier métier the day after 9-11. How well I remember the lost Clinton decade: “Saving” Muslim Bosnian and Kosovar communities with petit-airpower demonstration while lamenting, sackcloth and ashes, to Congress that “The world is still a dangerous place.” Half-a-trillion-dangerous?

Hence 9-11 was an unexpected gift. We were back in the Big Time, and this time in true American civilization-redeeming mode. We would — Not my words, but those of general officers and an American President — “Drain the Swamp” and “Transform the Middle East.”

Sure we would.

So after our unacknowledged debacle in an Iliadic 9-11 War, we now are poised to yet again repackage yet another new adversary-lover.

So Kevin quietly nailed the paradigm of our Defense World, going on 70 years now.

With this necessary preamble, what should be said about Montgolfier airbag that is the ChiCom threat?

China is, as my colleague Jim Holmes archly identifies, pursuing exactly the same prudent and limited sea-strategy that the US cemented in the later 1890s. For New American Seapower back then this meant excluding meddling Euro-powers from our Mediterranean: The Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico — and Euros were meddling all through the 19th century. For a navy new to the world scene this was a big objective.

So it is today with China. Their Mediterranean is the South China Sea, and they will make it their Caribbean. So we want to stop them? We might want to take a cue from late Victorian Britain. Britain had no problem leaving behind their stake in the American Mediterranean, when we became the local naval honcho: Instead they came to us and signed an arbitration treaty. They had bigger herring to pickle in the North Sea.

Yet the US Navy seems intent on chasing an atavistic vision of another upstart Asian navy in the Western Pacific — as though daily reruns of Midway and the Solomons and Leyte Gulf on the Military and the Hitler Channels were not enough.

China may well be a Seapower problem for a while. Yet it is in the “scheme of things” the US Navy might still make of it a manageable problem — if it can change its World War II ways.

Right now the USN wants to put unmanned bombers — the super-duper X-47 UCAS — on the decks of its CVNs, so that carrier striking power can deter the PLAN of the near-future from achieving its nefarious ends — like reabsorbing Taiwan (a part of China). Yet this vision hearkens to a bluewater 12 O’Clock High.

The Navy soon must acknowledge that the long reign of the CVN is ending — and that sustaining its rule imposes incredible cost and crippling distortion on the Navy as a fighting institution and working society. The CVN today is the exact equivalent of the Battleship in the later 1930s — all primed and ready to be sunk by new weapons that battleship admirals believe are somehow less-than-lethal.

If the US wants to counterbalance China — and use the US Navy to help make this happen — it should seek out some creative Seapower alternatives:

1. Build Virginia class SSNs and SSGNs forever at a rate of 2 per year. The Chinese will fear a United States Navy with 60 of the best killer subs in the world; on the other, with our current SSN trajectory: They will fear less, less.

2. Make much of Marines in Australia. This is exactly the right signal to send to a flexing China: You think you can target Guam soon with your ballistic missiles? Well we are here, and just to remind, if you throw a tantrum, we can also be in Cam Rahn Bay and Manila again tomorrow.

3. Get our wonderful Australian and Canadian allies Virginia class SSNs. Make them an offer they can’t refuse. That will plus-up our signal to China big time. 60 US plus 12 Commonwealth would really up the subtle strategic pressure.

4. Retire one CVN each nuclear refueling cycle. Use the money saved to build a smaller aviation ship. The UK Queen Elizabeth class carrier is no less capable than a CVN, at one-third the personnel cost — as long as you are not obsessed with futile Eurasian bombing. The US Navy should build up to 20 large (65,000 tons) and 20 small (30,000 tons) aviation ships — which is totally doable if the Navy slowly discards CVNs and its antique (18th century) amphibious ships. Forty aviation ships could do the big work we need on the surface, from landing Marines, to 24/7 situational awareness, to sea control, to ASW, to strategic mining, and more. But there is one thing they won’t do — attack Chinese ballistic missiles in the mountain fastnesses of Jiangxi and Hubei and Fujian.

5. Reopen a Navy shipyard, like the one in Portsmouth New Hampshire. Lease it to a gung-ho Korean shipbuilder, and let them build Navy warships — by American workers — in the US of A. They — we — will build them in half the time for half the cost for double the quality than the fatally-corrupt likes of “Lockheed-Grumman.” This alone — think of it as strategic-teaming with the ROK — would do more to put an antsy-aggressive China on notice, than any Yellow Sea US-ROK naval exercise. Most critically, the Chinese would now know for sure that in the event of a bad scene with the United States, we would once again (thanks to Korea) be able to bury them with shipbuilding prowess a lá World War II.

Finally, let’s not fool ourselves as we follow in the sacred footsteps of the Prophet Mahan. Chinese military-at-sea (their Navy’s very name — the PLAN — is reminiscent of old Cromwellian title of General-at-Sea!) leaders know just what they need to do, and they are doing it. And there is not very much we can do to stop them. These suggested US alternatives might at least give them pause, and maybe even stop them in their tracks.

But I don’t think so. Then again, does it really matter? The Defense World, meaning a breathlessly eager US Navy and Air Force, a lá AirSea Battle, are rolling hosannas as the prospect of a new sacred battle rises.

Yet they may be sorely disappointed in the next two decades, as China falls prey to waiting ills. It is not so hard to make a list:

· Fished-out protein in dead seas.

· Blackened-life pollution.

· Desperately old society.

· Unrelenting desertification.

· Winnowing Himalayan water.

· Crash car-rush for liquid fuel.

· Food, we need food!

· Too many men by half.

· Local corruption roosting.

· Financial panic and collapse.

· Engineer-commissars failing.

· Seeing, and watching, a wider world.

We can expect at most 10-20 years of another Pacific Seapower competition. Yet the US Navy and Air Force want the next adversary to promise a lasting live-in relationship that will stay with them through the next two or three program cycles … 40 or 50 years and change.

This is just not going to happen. In The Sand Pebbles, machinist’s Mate First Class Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) reports to his officers about a worn bearing in the gunboat’s triple-expansion engine, a problem neglected until he came aboard. They respond: “It has never given us any problem before.”

As he replied, so eloquently:

“I’m just telling you.”

My views are solely my own.

Language is the first victim of muddled thinking. So it is with the Obama administration’s groping for shibboleths to lend gravitas to its floundering foreign policy. First there was “leading from behind;’ then fight, talk, build in Afghanistan. Now Hillary Clinton is ‘pivoting’ toward China and the Pacific. A fresh demonstration of what she has proclaimed since her confirmation hearings as “smart power” – in contradistinction to ‘stupid’ power like voting for the Iraq war resolution without having read the report supposedly justifying it?

A smart strategy would never have pivoted away from the rising power that is China and the rising region that is Asia. A smart strategy can keep its mind on China even when Uncle Sam up to his neck in the godforsaken wastes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia. Smart strategy does not skim along the surface of the world’s seas on a Cook’s tour of continents visited in turn. Smart strategy thinks integrally over multiple time frames; it sees the intersection of security, economics, demographics. Smart strategy does not confuse incessant travel with meaningful action.

As to the deployment of marines in Darwin, Australia (Camp Croc?), it is a small symbolic gesture. America reminds Beijing and its neighbors that the United States not abandoning Asia and Australasia to Chinese designs – whatever they might be. We may be sending CIA operatives along with squadrons of drones to chase banditos south of the border, but we are still a Pacific power. Nothing new or earthshaking about that. The military significance of the move? Zero. Unless the move is designed to forestall an assault by Imperial Japanese forces from Western New Guinea to relieve pressure on Eastern New Guinea exerted by MacArthur’s offensive. We have enough marines left over for a landing at Tampico or to come to the rescue of the Ethiopians whom we’re sending back into Mogadishu.

Smart power requires above all some reflective intelligence – obviously in short supply in austerity crimped Washington.