In 2011, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that “the United States stands at a pivot point” in its geostrategic and geoeconomic position in world affairs. Her comment in an article published in Foreign Policy came at a time when the US was winding down its wars on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan and when Europe seemed largely quiescent as it entered the third decade of the post-Soviet era. The pivot, Clinton argued, should shift American energy, interest, and focus to Asia, a region of growing population, economic dynamism, environmental impact, and a rising China.

In their new book, Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power, Robert D. Blackwill and Richard Fontaine offer a sobering analysis of the decade that followed Clinton’s pronouncement. In their well-balanced and carefully researched account, buttressed with 168 pages of notes, the authors describe a period marked by missteps, miscues, and a failure of strategy and policy that continue to hamstring US efforts in the Indo-Pacific region to this day.

Blackwill and Fontaine are uniquely well-qualified to offer this analysis. Blackwill served as deputy national security advisor for strategic planning in the George W. Bush administration, as a presidential envoy to Iraq, and as the US Ambassador to India. Fontaine was a member of the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain, and worked for several years at the State Department and the National Security Council. He currently serves as the CEO of the Center for a New American Security.

Though it sometimes reads like a textbook, Lost Decade is a solid work that offers well-grounded assessments, analysis, and insights gleaned from interviews with former and current policymakers. The book explores a time when the United States lost ground—economically, politically, and militarily—in Asia and, in so doing, ceded much of its influence in the region to a rising China.

Hedging, Engaging

Though “every aspect of this geopolitical and geoeconomic shift was controversial, including its very name,” the authors argue that, from the start, the pivot to Asia was always ill-defined and bereft of stated and measurable goals. Among US allies and partners, it generated “fears of abandonment in Europe and the Middle East,” as they regarded a continued US presence in their regions as essential to peace, stability, and economic progress. This led, in turn, to a series of fits and starts among policymakers who were torn between maintaining the American presence in Europe and the Middle East and engaging with China and Asia.

In Blackwill and Fontaine’s accounting, this resulted from a fundamental failure to properly apply American statecraft and power. A central theme in Lost Decade is that US influence “primarily hinges on performance rather than presence.” How Washington employs economic assistance, trading relations, diplomacy, and military support, and not these means in and of themselves, is what reassures allies and convinces adversaries of US commitment. That perception of commitment, they argue, then becomes a geopolitical reality. For example, the high-level American diplomacy that fostered the Abraham Accords is far more tangible evidence of Washington’s engagement than the continued presence of the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.

The idea of engaging with China had its roots not in the lost decade of the 2010s, but in the later half of the 1990s when policymakers were beholden to the widely held but naïve conviction that “a globally integrated, wealthier and liberalizing China would anchor Asian peace and stability,” and would be “good for Americans and for prosperity on both sides of the Pacific.” The Clinton administration wholly supported China’s bid to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) and pressed Congress to enact permanent Most Favored Nation (MFN) trading status for China. None of the bright hopes of engagement with China were ever realized. Instead, the authors note, it was “Washington’s continuation of this engagement, long after its lofty ambitions had failed, that required a pivot to Asia, one that would slow Beijing’s steady advances at America’s expense.”

Declining United States, Rising China

Throughout the 2010s, “China worked successfully … to fundamentally alter the balance of power in Asia and beyond at the expense of the United States.” This took place, the authors argue, because of Washington’s policy missteps. Awarding China WTO and MFN status proved ill-advised—especially considering Beijing’s subsequent “industrial policies, unfair market access, and intellectual property theft.” What is more, the United States “lost credibility by remaining passive in response to the PRC’s militarization of features in the South China Sea.” While the United States tried to reap a “peace dividend” at the end of the Cold War and stinted on Foreign Military Funding for Indo-Pacific nations, Beijing’s defense spending grew by 800 percent from 1993 to 2018—expenditures “roughly equal to that of all other countries in the region.”

Then too, Beijing realized that no substantive “US Pivot to Asia from Europe and the Middle East was actually underway.” The authors explain how, despite the announcement, “the US government did not sustain a significant increase in economic aid, trade agreements, military presence or diplomatic engagement” in Asia. Blackwill and Fontaine’s research, illustrated in a series of comparative charts, reveals the static and sometimes declining nature of Washington’s application of its military, economic, and diplomatic means in crafting its influence in the Indo-Pacific. In one telling example, the authors show the nearly flat line number of diplomatic visits to the region contra the marked increase in high-level visits to Europe in the 2010s.

While the authors are critical of Washington’s larger failures to address the rise of China and the challenges in the Indo-Pacific, their most withering criticism is leveled at the demise of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is discussed in probing detail. “The TPP promised to strengthen key American allies and partners, increasing their economic performance and tying them more closely to the United States and one another.” It would have provided, the authors claim, a signal of broad and sustained US leadership and presence in Asia. The TPP fell victim to US domestic politics and opened the door for Beijing’s leadership of a trading bloc, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, that is now larger than the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement or the EU.

A Way Ahead

In many ways, Lost Decade is an accounting of huge expectations and unrealized efforts to check China and align the United States more closely with the interests of the nations of the Indo-Pacific. Blackwill and Fontaine are clear-eyed in making their assessment of why the Pivot to Asia failed: Washington underestimated the China challenge; crises got in the way; policymakers disagreed about strategy, policy, and objectives; there was no domestic political benefit equal to the heavy foreign policy lift; and no visceral event (a Pearl Harbor or 9/11) to force the shift in grand strategy. If those were not reasons enough, the authors claim the simplest reason there was no Pivot to Asia is because it was “too hard, in the event, to get done.”

If that grim assessment was the last word in Lost Decade, then Blackwill and Fontaine would still have made a valuable contribution to the corpus of works on American grand strategy. The authors, however, move beyond their postmortem to make constructive recommendations of sound strategic principles and overarching policy adjustments needed for a workable Indo-Pacific strategy.

The Pivot to Asia failed because it was more of an idea, even slogan, than the essence of a thoughtful and deliberate strategy backed by policies that signaled determination and resolve. Blackwill and Fontaine suggest a renewed pivot ought to be guided, first, by a clearly articulated vision for the whole of the Indo-Pacific rooted in regional and global order and commitment to the international rule of law. This is a sound first step and essential to secure the cooperation and participation of Asian partners and allies. The authors’ call for policymakers to make deliberate calculations of the trade-offs of moving resources to Asia—and especially so at a time of increased great power competition—is a far more daunting task. So too are their calls for major increases in the US defense budget and “significant” and “substantial” shifts in US armed forces from Europe and the Middle East to Asia.

Blackwill and Fontaine also recommend the US adopt policies that de-risk economic ties with China, intensify bi-lateral diplomacy between Washington and Beijing, and engage Europe as a partner to oppose China’s coercive economic influences and enforce international trade rules and conventions. These are recommendations that fall well within the range of the art of the possible. If adopted and pursued with vigor and resolve, these policies could well represent the leading efforts of a successful Pivot to Asia that leaves the failures of the past behind.

The time is right, the authors reassure us, to look past a lost decade and ahead to a “decisive decade,” in the contest with China.