As Washington reels from last week’s shooting of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk in Utah and signals a possible retreat to the Western Hemisphere, America’s Indo-Pacific allies face an uncomfortable reality: The region’s two largest democracies, Japan and India, can either step up to keep the U.S. engaged or watch China methodically fill the vacuum (which it is already doing gleefully).
But here’s the strategic jujitsu: Rather than begging Washington to stay, Tokyo and New Delhi hold the cards to make U.S. engagement irresistible.
The math is brutal. Neither Japan nor India possesses the military heft to counter China independently. Europe, despite recent overtures, lacks the naval assets to project power past the Suez. As Ashley Tellis noted in Foreign Affairs, there’s simply no substitute for American carrier strike groups in the Indo-Pacific. Yet passive dependence on U.S. goodwill is a losing strategy, especially as domestic crises compete for Washington’s attention.
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