MANILA, Philippines — In late July 2021, as Lloyd Austin arrived at Malacañan Palace, the grand presidential estate in the heart of Manila, his team feared a catastrophe.
America’s new defense secretary was here to see Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ combative president, famous for once swearing at Barack Obama. Duterte was threatening to end a deal that let the U.S. military access the country, a huge blow to the Pentagon’s effort to recompete with China.
“There was no sense that the secretary was walking into an engagement where there was hope,” said a member of his team, granted anonymity to describe the meeting.
Seated in a large hall that U.S. officials thought resembled a throne room, Duterte began with a lecture rattling off his many gripes about America: its fickleness, its ingratitude, its colonial history.
Austin listened. And when the time came to speak, he didn’t argue. The secretary thanked Duterte for what the Philippines did for America, and brought up his own father’s history fighting there during World War II. “I can’t imagine a world where the United States and the Philippines aren’t friends,” Austin said.
Duterte seemed surprised to avoid an argument, and pleased. The next day, he restored the agreement.
Over the next four years, Austin would make 11 more trips to the region, playing the Pentagon’s part in a competition with China that spanned the entire U.S. government. He would watch leaders change in all of America’s core allies in the Indo-Pacific and split his time supporting Ukraine and Israel. And the entire time, he would contend with a much more powerful and much more restive Chinese military.
In interviews with dozens of officials at the top of the U.S. government and its allies, it became clear this midsummer visit was the start of a much larger strategy to help America keep pace, one reliant on other countries also concerned about China’s rise. But that strategy was always meant to have two parts: countering China abroad while building American strength at home. Four years later, many of the Pentagon’s domestic goals — chief among them a fragile defense industry — remain unsolved.
The result is a steadier competition with China but one that leaves America unusually dependent on other countries. In Washington, Democrats and Republicans alike have supported the Pentagon’s recent work around Asia, but the return of Donald Trump, a president less personally committed to U.S. allies, will test its endurance.
I: ‘Alarm’
“The common theme I hear with regard to China’s actions under Xi Jinping’s leadership is alarm,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, at an Armed Services Committee hearing in March 2021.
He could have been speaking for much of Washington. By early that year, members of the U.S. government were growing more alert to China’s rapid military buildup, the largest in peacetime since World War II. And they were worried.
Donald Trump’s administration had warned of the problem. Thirty years after the Cold War, it argued, America had picked the wrong enemies — too much Baghdad, not enough Beijing.
The incoming Biden team agreed.
Now in March 2021, America’s top military officer in the region appeared before Sullivan’s committee with a fresh piece of intelligence. Xi wanted his military strong enough to invade Taiwan, which China considers an illegal, breakaway part of its own territory, by as early as 2027.
“The threat is manifest during this decade,” said Adm. Phil Davidson, the retiring head of Indo-Pacific Command. “In fact, in the next six years.”
Austin’s team would later consider this comment a sideshow, though it didn’t dispute what Davidson said. Still, few moments better describe the early concern that America was losing ground.
“In my mind, 2021 seems to be the year that the Joint Staff and others really started to go, ‘Oh my God,’” said retired Rear Adm. Mike Studeman, then head of intelligence for INDOPACOM, referring to the nation’s board of top military officers.
The concern wasn’t about Taiwan alone. Throughout that year, the Biden administration concluded that China was striving for much more: to push America from its leading place in the world, said Rush Doshi, a top China and Taiwan official on the National Security Council from 2021 to 2024. Beijing’s growing ambitions came from a sense that America was faltering amid the coronavirus pandemic, the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and, later, a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
From the White House, Doshi and his colleagues helped design a strategy across the government meant to help the U.S. compete. The plan was based on a frank assessment of the country’s relative power. China had spent the last 30 years designing a force that could exploit American weaknesses, a point Doshi had forcefully argued in his book, which became part of the government’s yearlong debate. Where the U.S. had large bases and aircraft carriers, China had scores of missiles, mines and submarines. Where America had advantages in precision, China had an edge in mass.
“The challenge was: ‘OK, what are the steps that you’re going to have to take to change that?’” said Ely Ratner, who helped shape the Pentagon’s role in this strategy as its head of policy for the Indo-Pacific.
The Biden team, which was made up largely of academics like Ratner, thought about this like a math problem. If China had solved many of the challenges America’s military once posed, they needed to change the equation.
Many of their priorities had been laid out in a separate report for Congress Ratner had published a year before. America needed to firm up its group of allies, spread its own forces more widely across the region, and develop new ways to fight, enabled in part by a more innovative and more reliable defense industry.
II: Backlash
In its fifth-floor Pentagon corridor, the staff of Indo-Pacific Security Affairs — the office Ratner leads, directing policy for the region — hosts a regular happy hour. Employees unwind and share cocktails, some with themed names like “Whiskey on the ROCs,” a pun on Taiwan’s formal name, the Republic of China.
They call it the “Nine-Dash Lounge.”
The name is a nod to a U-shaped line China’s government claims as a map of its rightful territory. The graph juts off the coast and covers nearly all of the South China Sea, through which almost a third of the world’s maritime trade passes.
By the 2010s, it became clear these weren’t only claims. China had seized disputed reefs in the waterway, dredged up land and then used them to build military outposts. And by 2021 China was pressing further, surrounding more sites — all despite a 2016 ruling from the United Nations declaring the actions illegal.
The behavior infuriated countries in the region, one key reason Duterte listened when Austin visited in the summer. Beijing’s aggression in the South China Sea had become a pattern seen elsewhere in border skirmishes with India and arbitrary tariffs on Australia.
“Were China not acting the way it does, then there would be less of an alliance to speak of” with the U.S., said Gilberto Teodoro, now the Philippines secretary of national defense. “There would be less of a need.”
For decades, America has maintained a set of one-on-one alliances with countries in the region, like friends at a party who know the host but not each other. Their militaries would struggle to work together if a war broke out, and because they could often rely on U.S. protection, many have spent relatively little on defense.
Washington now saw a chance to help change that. In a pattern that would repeat itself for the next four years, it began inviting its allies and partners — what the government calls friendly countries not bound by a treaty — to meet and plan together. Soon after Austin returned from Asia over the summer, the leaders of India, Japan, Australia and America, collectively known as “The Quad,” gathered for the first time.
“It was trying to network our alliances together so that the sum of them was more than the individual parts,” said Siddharth Mohandas, the Pentagon’s head of East Asia policy from 2021 to 2023.
These ad-hoc groupings would later widen and mature. Even historic rivals like Japan and South Korea now regularly meet alongside the U.S. And America’s most powerful allies in the region — Japan and Australia — are hosting more drills together and allow each other’s military to access their land.
“The only way that we are going to remain competitive with the Chinese is to bring our allies and partners into it,” said a former senior U.S. defense official.
III: Promises
In August 2021, around 50 officials from the U.S., Britain and Australia gathered in the Pentagon library for multiple days of meetings. Through masks and over cheap lunches, they discussed a proposal that, earlier that year, had been so secret that only several members of the U.S. government knew it existed.
The question was whether to share the technology that propelled nuclear submarines, something so sensitive the U.S. had only ever given it to Britain before.
By the summer meetings, the plan had advanced enough that the three governments wanted to announce something. But they didn’t know how far to go. As an idea, it made sense. Australia was one of America’s closest allies. Nuclear-powered submarines were one of America’s most powerful weapons. Providing them could help grow a clear U.S. advantage over China, but the U.S., and the Pentagon in particular, was wary of overpromising.
“A lot of folks didn’t want to commit us too early in case we couldn’t deliver,” said Doshi, who was heavily involved in the talks and later an 18-month review meant to address these concerns.
The negotiations eventually led to AUKUS, a deal named after the three countries involved, who pledged to share the submarines and develop advanced technology together.
“There were skeptics, certainly, within the [Defense] Department at first,” said the former defense official. The secretary, though, made clear that once the pact was announced there was no going back.
“We cannot fail. If we fail, China will win,” the official remembers Austin saying.
Through a spokesperson, the secretary declined an interview. His staff confirmed the descriptions of private conversations included in this story.
AUKUS marked a change in how Washington was approaching its allies in the region. It wasn’t enough to have other countries meeting more often together, or even for their militaries to train more often. The U.S. needed to share weapons that were once off limits — a pattern put on trial when Japan asked for Tomahawk cruise missiles before embarking on a massive defense expansion the next year.
“They could have done what previous administrations have done, which is to say that we’re not going to stand in the way but we’re also not going to support you,” said Chris Johnstone, a former Pentagon and National Security Council official for East Asia, of the build-up.
Instead, Washington followed Tokyo. The U.S. agreed to sell the missiles and later to restructure its own forces in the country so that, for the first time, they could fight as true military partners.
“The Japan part of this is part of a larger story, but it’s one of the U.S. deciding we need more capable allies,” Johnstone said. “The United States can’t do it alone.”
IV: Posture
In February 2023, Lloyd Austin was back in Manila, this time to meet with a new leader in Malacañan. The year before, Duterte had been replaced with Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of a former president once forced out during pro-democracy protests.
The key “deliverable,” as Washington calls the major announcements it makes on these trips, was a huge expansion in the sites America’s military could access — three in the north, facing Taiwan, and one on an island beside the South China Sea.
“It’s a really big deal,” Austin said at a press conference, announcing the agreement.
For decades, U.S. forces in the region have been packed into a few bases, mostly in Japan, South Korea and Guam. As Austin visited in 2023, that posture was quickly becoming obsolete. For one, these sites were still far from the two places most likely to lead to a conflict: Taiwan and the South China Sea. And China had also built weapons to counter them: hundreds of missiles that could reach American bases, a number that almost doubled from 2022 to 2023, according to Pentagon figures.
“I’m very confident that they can wipe out all the U.S. bases with one strike,” said Tom Shugart, a former Navy officer and Chinese military analyst, who has studied the vulnerability of American bases in the region.
To protect its forces, the U.S. would need to spread them farther apart. But to do that, other countries had to agree, which was no easy task when those same missiles might then target their land.
The careful touch required in these negotiations was on display during Austin’s trip to Manila that February. Other parts of the U.S. government — such as the State Department and National Security Council — would lay the groundwork, at times visiting themselves to negotiate in person. And when Austin would arrive he would use a gentle tone: addressing local concerns, often asking what he could do for his counterparts rather than the other way around.
“The important thing is that the Biden administration and Lloyd Austin have engaged on a basis of equality amongst partners, not [by] stating the relative disparity between power and size,” said Teodoro.
Over the course of 2023, the U.S. negotiated the use of military sites in the Philippines, northern Australia, Papua New Guinea and Japan, where it upgraded a much more powerful and mobile Marine regiment. It’s now discussing another access agreement with Fiji and Japan on its southwestern islands, critical territory in a conflict over Taiwan.
“We finished the promise of the Asia pivot. We really did move along the force structure to the Indo-Pacific in what was envisioned under [Barack Obama’s presidency],” said Ike Harris, a former Navy officer and China adviser in Ratner’s office.
V: Supply and Demand
Thousands of soldiers were pouring into the Philippines in April 2024 ahead of Balikatan, the country’s largest annual military drill. And like many of these exercises in recent years, this one has added more countries and grown far more complex.
But what became the story of the exercise that year wasn’t only what arrived in the Philippines. It’s also what the U.S. left behind. During the drill, it brought a new missile launcher known as Typhon, with a range of 300 miles. It’s the first deployment in what the U.S. hopes will be a series across the region. The next up is Japan, though Tokyo has yet to give its consent, a U.S. official said.
China noticed. Top officials in Beijing have likened the launcher’s deployment to the Cuban Missile Crisis, a claim American officials find rich given the number of similar missiles China has already.
One American missile system compared to hundreds of similar missiles in Chinese stocks — it’s the kind of gap leaving so many officials in Washington still fretting over its military balance. The administration entered office arguing America’s supply of key weapons, such as missiles, ships and drones, needed to expand. It has, but slowly.
In early 2023, a think tank report found that during a war with China the U.S. would likely expend all of its long-range missiles within a week. That wasn’t even a year into the war in Ukraine, much less the war in Gaza — both of which the U.S. has helped support and which have sapped American inventories.
Pentagon officials counter that they’ve spent tens of billions on the U.S. defense industry alone in their last four years in office and that Congress hasn’t passed its defense bills on time. They’ve signed longer-term contracts for six munitions important for a fight against China, and they’ve begun joint ventures with other countries to spread the load.
“We’ve been focused on growing production capacity and maximizing procurement of everything that you could imagine that would be relevant to an Indo-Pacific fight,” said Kathleen Hicks, the deputy secretary of defense, who listed out a host of long-range missiles.
Part of her answer to the problem has been to buy far more drones, the kind of more affordable weapon America could leverage against China’s advantage in numbers. In 2023, Hicks launched Replicator — an initiative named after a gun in Star Trek that can zap anything into existence. Its goal was to send thousands of these drones to American forces in the Pacific within two years, while also teaching the Pentagon to buy such equipment faster.
The program is moving on track, multiple officials said, and it represents the kind of creative approach the U.S. needs to restore a clear military edge.
Others, including some who served in the Biden administration, were far more critical. Replicator aims to deliver 2,500 to 3,000 such systems, over half of which would be a relatively short-range kamikaze drone called the Switchblade 600, according to a senior Republican congressional aide. The program was never meant to be all the Pentagon was buying in this area, but those numbers would barely matter in Ukraine.
In comparison, over the last four years, China has added hundreds of nuclear warheads and missiles to its arsenal, and reached a shipbuilding industry that’s more than 200 times that of America’s. The U.S. supply of the exact same weapons has been hamstrung by runaway prices and long delays. Multiple other congressional aides referenced this split-screen while raising a familiar critique of the Biden Pentagon: It hasn’t budgeted enough money to buy weapons, build military infrastructure in the region or even train partners, especially Taiwan.
“The U.S. military industrial base, to quote that famous philosopher my father, is fercockt,” said America’s ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, using a Yiddish word that sounds like what it means.
“We have allowed failure to be a business model, and we reward it,” Emanuel said.
VI: Intercepts
Early in the summer of 2024, Austin walked outside his hotel, past the pool and into an ornate room often used as a wedding venue. He was in Singapore for Asia’s largest annual defense summit, and for the first time in almost 18 months, he would meet with a counterpart from China.
Adm. Dong Jun was the third person to hold his role in as many years, due to an anti-corruption purge throughout the Chinese military. This was the first — and only — time he and Austin would meet in person.
In the summer of 2022, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi became the highest-ranking U.S. official in 30 years to visit Taiwan. China was furious, scrambling its military around the island and creating a new normal that continues today. Beijing later cut off all military talks with the U.S., most notably refusing a call from Austin when the military shot down a spy balloon that drifted across the country in 2023.
Before a meeting between Xi and Biden in 2023, Chinese ships and jets had been buzzing dangerously close to American and allied forces — including a fighter that flew within 10 feet of a U.S. bomber.
Now in Singapore, Austin and Dong read their prepared statements, which on the Chinese side are highly scripted. Dong brought up a U.S. ship that transited the Taiwan Strait, patrols America conducts as a reminder that it may come to the island’s defense. He continued with a talking point: The U.S. was either insincere or “its front-line forces were out of control.”
Austin cut in. The comment suggested he couldn’t command his own forces.
“Are you insulting me — the leader of the most powerful military in the world?” Austin asked, per multiple people in the room.
“It was a lot of scrambling to get the meeting back on the rails,” said one U.S. official who was present. Dong’s staffers explained they didn’t mean any offense and soon returned to talking points.
And Austin, who was concerned that China’s aggressive behavior could spark an accidental war, confronted Dong about its intercepts of U.S. allies, especially Australia.
“You say you don’t want a war, but you’ve got to act like it,” Austin said.
Just weeks later, Chinese coast guard ships blocked a mission to resupply a Philippine outpost in the South China Sea, seizing vessels and cutting off a Filipino sailor’s thumb. The incident came close to what Marcos said in Singapore would be an act of war, potentially drawing the U.S. into a conflict.
In November, when Austin and Dong attended another conference in Laos, the Chinese admiral refused to meet.
VII: Slideshow
Richard Marles, the deputy prime minister and defense minister of Australia, is an amateur historian — an admirer of Abraham Lincoln and a student of the U.S. Civil War. He speaks of the two countries’ alliance with similar gravitas. Australia and the U.S. bonded during World War II, he said, when Washington had to divide resources between the European and Pacific theaters.
“That underpins what has been a historic anxiety from the perspective of Australia: Are we getting enough U.S. attention?” Marles said in an interview.
In his opinion, over the last four years that focus has been “excellent.” But Marles, who has become a close friend of Austin’s, has seen it change before. And many of America’s allies in the region worry it won’t last.
Marles last saw the secretary at a meeting with their Japanese counterpart last November. Shortly before, Donald Trump had won reelection and nominated Pete Hegseth, a former Army officer and Fox News host, to replace Austin. Local reporters at almost every stop on the four-country trip asked how the U.S. could reassure its partners it was here to stay.
To this question, officials in the Pentagon and allied governments argue that America has no reason to change its policy, since both parties now urge tough measures on China. Others in the administration note how the first Trump term laid the groundwork for much of Biden’s China strategy.
“I’m optimistic it will endure since some of it builds on past Trump policy,” said Doshi, the National Security Council official. “That said, it could come crashing down if the incoming team takes aim at American allies in Asia.”
The main difference comes down to the leader in charge. In his first term, Trump argued U.S. partners were free-riding on its military bills and threatened to end its defense commitments. He’s now threatening massive tariffs on American allies and adversaries alike.
“Both sides are going to have to start from zero again,” said Chad Sbragia, a top China official in Trump’s Pentagon, of Washington and Beijing. “How do we reach a stable relationship?”
Last December, Austin stopped in Tokyo during his 13th and final trip to the Indo-Pacific. At one point, Japanese officials played him a slideshow with highlights from their alliance over the last four years. It showed Austin with his three previous counterparts, set to “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” the Aerosmith song from the 1998 movie Armageddon in which the U.S. destroys an asteroid threatening to end all human life.
Ratner, present for this last trip, argued that the administration had also accomplished its mission: recovering in a race America once appeared to be falling behind. Since Davidson warned of the chance of war by 2027, China’s economy and corruption problems have both worsened. The Pentagon now assesses Beijing may not meet its military goals by then.
This is little comfort to Ratner. Keeping America’s edge will take more attention and money, he said, increasing a pace this team helped reach.
“That’s the challenge for the next administration,” Ratner said.
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