标签： Asia

As the United States pushes forward with aggressive plans to build out a new deterrence architecture targeting China in the Indo-Pacific, growing systemic gaps between its grand strategic ambitions and its core industrial, logistical, and political capabilities threaten to leave this framework dangerously incomplete at the exact moment it is needed. This emerging rift has been laid bare by stark warnings from top US military leaders and independent defense analysts, who highlight cascading constraints that could undermine Washington’s regional posture before a crisis even unfolds.

Last month, The Washington Times brought public details of a closed-door 221-page assessment compiled in April 2026, in which the commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Sam Paparo, warned Congress that the risk of armed conflict with China is on the rise. Paparo urged Congress to allocate a minimum of $122 billion in fiscal 2027 funding to shore up deterrence across the Indo-Pacific region, framing the request around what he describes as accelerating Chinese military expansion, growing pressure on Taiwan, long-term territorial claims, and deepening strategic alignment between Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang. In his view, the $122 billion represents the bare minimum required to maintain a credible deterrent and secure victory if open conflict breaks out.

Breaking down the request, Paparo has earmarked $67.4 billion for expanded missile procurement, $18 billion for development of capabilities to disrupt Chinese command-and-control systems, $15 billion for space-based early warning and surveillance infrastructure, and $2.3 billion for the acquisition of drones and other autonomous weapons systems. The broader plan also calls for expanding both defensive and potential offensive missile capabilities on Guam, upgrading critical military infrastructure in Hawaii and smaller Pacific island nations, strengthening access to allied military bases and expanding joint exercises, and fielding a range of lower-cost advanced systems including the Blackbeard hypersonic missile, Quicksink anti-ship bomb, and next-generation advanced naval mines.

Paparo’s assessment explicitly notes that China is on track to complete preparations for a potential military operation targeting Taiwan by 2027, while continuing to leverage legal, economic, and information-based pressure that falls below the formal threshold of open war. The unclassified summary of his assessment, which is required under the existing Pacific Deterrence Initiative, is being released to shape congressional deliberations over the 2027 fiscal year defense appropriations bill. Beyond the public spending request, defense analysts note that Paparo’s appeal is less a routine procurement wish list and more a candid admission that the United States’ existing force posture in Asia is growing increasingly vulnerable to Chinese military advances.

The core challenge to US deterrence stems from China’s rapidly maturing anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) network, which is specifically designed to neutralize the traditional aircraft carrier strike groups that have long been the backbone of US power projection in the Pacific. As Jordan Spector outlined in a March 2026 article for the U.S. Naval Institute’s *Proceedings* journal, this system centers on advanced ballistic missiles that can saturate and disable large naval targets. It includes the already operational DF-21D “carrier killer,” a medium-range missile with a maneuverable warhead built to strike large naval vessels at extended ranges, alongside the DF-26B, which has a 3,862-kilometer range and is capable of targeting both regional US bases and deployed naval forces. Spector estimates that China currently deploys roughly 500 short-range ballistic missiles and 450 medium-range ballistic missiles, all supported by a robust, multi-layered surveillance network.

This integrated surveillance architecture combines naval and air reconnaissance assets, military satellites, coastal and sea-based over-the-horizon radars, and a large maritime militia made up of thousands of civilian vessels. This combination gives China the ability to detect, track, and target US military assets across nearly the entire breadth of the western Pacific, creating major risks for concentrated US force deployments.

To counter these vulnerabilities, US defense planners have developed a series of operational overhauls to reshape the country’s Pacific posture. The US Navy is shifting away from its reliance on large, high-value capital ships and fixed large bases toward a hybrid fleet model and far more dispersed operational deployments. Writing for the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) in February 2026, George Galdorisi laid out a proposal for a 500-ship future fleet that combines 350 crewed vessels with 150 large uncrewed maritime platforms. This model would add critical operational mass to the US fleet at a far lower per-unit cost than traditional crewed vessels. Under Galdorisi’s framework, large uncrewed surface vessels would act as modular mobile bases for smaller autonomous craft operating in heavily contested coastal waters. These uncrewed systems can carry out intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and mine-countermeasure missions in high-risk littoral zones, while keeping expensive crewed capital ships outside the most lethal range of China’s A2/AD envelope. Operating up to 926 kilometers from shore, this combined human-autonomy team can generate the operational mass needed to maintain presence while dramatically improving force survivability without putting additional US personnel at risk.

Beyond naval restructuring, the US is also moving away from its decades-long model of large, permanent regional garrisons in favor of a far more flexible, distributed operational posture. In a January 2026 report from the Asan Institute, analysts Peter Lee and Esther Dunay explain that new concepts including Agile Combat Employment (ACE) and Dynamic Force Employment call for dispersing aircraft and other critical assets across a network of temporary, austere airfields, secured through pre-negotiated access agreements with regional allies. Similarly, Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) calls for deploying small, highly mobile teams across a network of small “lily pad” forward outposts. This structure forces Chinese military planners to contend with far more potential targets, complicating their strike planning while supporting US sea control efforts and reducing the vulnerability of concentrated US force deployments.

Despite these ambitious strategic and operational overhauls, whether the US can actually address the gaps identified by Admiral Paparo remains an open question, given the significant practical and political barriers that stand in the way of implementation. A May 2026 report from Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) identified severe gaps in US wartime readiness, including three to four year production lead times for critical munitions, and severely depleted stockpiles left over from decades of conflict in the Middle East. Jones also noted that US logistics infrastructure is already under severe strain, with sustained operational demands causing significant structural wear on more than 40 percent of the Navy’s deployed surface vessels. He added that key forward bases in Japan, the Philippines, and Guam remain fully exposed to Chinese precision missiles and drone strikes, with most installations lacking sufficient hardened aircraft shelters and modern active defense systems to repel attacks. Most critically, consistent access to allied facilities and sustained military support from key regional partners including Japan and Australia is not always legally or operationally guaranteed, creating additional uncertainty for US deployments.

These military and industrial constraints are compounded by growing domestic political uncertainty in Washington. Following the May 2026 US-China summit, Anton Troianovski and David Sanger wrote in The New York Times that US President Donald Trump has moved away from the more confrontational approach to China that defined the Biden administration and Trump’s own first term in office. Trump has replaced tariff escalation and rhetoric of economic decoupling with diplomatic outreach, renewed business engagement, and public praise for Chinese President Xi Jinping. This policy shift suggests that the long-standing bipartisan consensus in Washington behind sustained strategic competition with China may be weakening, even as US military planners are calling for a larger, more urgent military buildup in the Indo-Pacific. Troianovski and Sanger note that while this shift toward accommodation may reduce immediate bilateral tensions, it also risks eroding the domestic political commitment needed to fund, deploy, and sustain the full deterrence architecture that military planners say is urgently required.

In the end, whether the US can turn Admiral Paparo’s warning into a fully operational, credible deterrent will depend far less on the headline $122 billion spending figure than on how quickly Washington can expand domestic munitions production, harden vulnerable regional bases, and secure consistent long-term access to allied infrastructure before a crisis erupts. If implementation of the plan stalls while political accommodation with China deepens, Chinese leadership could reasonably conclude that the growing gap between US strategic plans and its actual ability to execute them creates a narrowing, but increasingly attractive window for coercive action or open military force.

For decades, U.S. military engagements in the Middle East have followed a predictable, almost ritualistic pattern: intense military strikes, a public declaration of victory, a high-profile diplomatic agreement signed with much fanfare, and only weeks later, the sobering realization that a signed document cannot erase the deep-rooted conflicts it was meant to resolve. This year alone, Iran and the United States have cycled through this exact sequence twice, with Washington’s foreign policy establishment once again confusing a temporary lull in fighting for a permanent end to hostilities.

Recent contradictory statements from former President Donald Trump underscore the deeper chaos at the heart of U.S. policy toward Iran. First, Trump declared an agreed ceasefire “over,” then just 24 hours later insisted the U.S. had no intention of launching long-term military action. This is no mere contradiction—it is a visible symptom of a 20-year-long pattern of U.S. policy that swings wildly between maximalist rhetoric and tactical restraint, never once settling on a clear, achievable endgame for Washington’s engagement with Iran.

To this day, core questions about U.S. objectives remain unanswered. Is Washington seeking regime change in Tehran? Full denuclearization of the Iranian state? Guaranteed unimpeded freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz? Every new U.S. strike appears designed to address a different unspoken goal, a clear indication that no consensus on ultimate objectives exists among U.S. policymakers.

This lack of direction demands closer examination, particularly given the origins of the most recent round of conflict. Earlier this year, U.S. decapitation strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader and much of the country’s top leadership were marketed as a move to break the Islamic Republic’s ability to carry out destabilizing actions across the region. Instead, the strikes achieved the exact opposite outcome: they hardened the security-focused authoritarian governance that decapitation strikes are supposed to dismantle. Rather than being intimidated into surrender, Iran’s hardline factions used the public humiliation of losing their leadership to justify the asymmetric harassment of commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz—the very activity that now serves as the pretext for renewed U.S. military strikes.

This pattern is familiar to any observer of post-9/11 U.S. wars in the region: the application of large-scale military force against a sovereign state does not produce the intended surrender, but instead scatters the threat into more diffuse, harder-to-deter forms that make further escalation all but inevitable.

Crucially, the costs of this dangerous brinkmanship are not borne primarily by Washington. They fall on Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet and now endures repeated air-raid sirens that disrupt daily life. They fall on Kuwait and Qatar, which have been dragged into a conflict over a critical waterway they did nothing to start. They fall on the global economy, which continues to grapple with the worst oil market disruption in modern history, months after a ceasefire was supposed to resolve the crisis.

Gulf Arab states, which the U.S. has spent decades cultivating as regional partners, are now learning a bitter lesson that neighbors of Iraq learned in 2003 and Lebanese stakeholders learned more recently: proximity to U.S. military power in the Middle East does not equal protection from the risks that come with it.

Another critical question is almost never raised openly in Washington: what is the de facto Israeli veto over U.S. Iran policy actually costing the United States? This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered public criticism of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from the stage of a NATO summit designed to showcase Western unity, while also lobbying against the sale of F-35 fighter jets to a fellow NATO ally. These actions are a stark reminder that Israel’s regional priorities do not always align with Washington’s goal of maintaining a unified NATO alliance structure — and that U.S. presidents have consistently refused to separate the two countries’ agendas, even when U.S. strategic interests clearly diverge from Israel’s. A U.S. foreign policy genuinely centered on American national interests, rather than prioritizing a permanent security guarantee for a single regional partner, would ask far tougher questions about this arrangement than either U.S. political party currently seems willing to pose.

None of this is to argue that Iran’s actions in the Strait of Hormuz — attacking commercial tankers and threatening one of the global economy’s most critical trade arteries — are justified. They clearly are not, and a regime willing to damage neighboring economies to assert control over the waterway has earned the international pushback it now faces. But acknowledging that Tehran’s behavior is provocative does not mean Washington’s response is wise: a war with no clear objectives, waged in a region where two decades of U.S. military intervention have shown that force alone rarely produces durable peace settlements.

The core strategic question U.S. policymakers should be asking is not just how to respond to the most recent Iranian attack, but what five more years of this cycle will look like, and whether the U.S. can afford that cost. Based on current policy, no one in Washington has paused long enough to find an answer.

When Ali al-Zaidi secured his nomination as Iraq’s new Prime Minister back in April, a senior Iraqi diplomat speaking privately to Middle East Eye expressed open relief, placing a congratulatory call to the newly tapped leader immediately. “This was Trump’s pick. He is an Iraqi Trump, a businessman,” the official remarked at the time. “Now, the funds will flow again.”

That prediction has quickly come to fruition. Last Thursday, Baghdad confirmed that the United States has restarted air shipments of Iraqi oil revenues held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a move timed perfectly for Zaidi’s high-stakes, landmark visit to the White House next week. A second senior Iraqi official, speaking to MEE on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the entire trip will center on commercial and energy agreements, with multiple deals ready for signing during Zaidi’s meeting with former President Donald Trump.

As part of the upcoming agreements, the Iraqi prime minister will finalize expansion of a preliminary deal that allows US energy giant Chevron to develop a major oil field in the southern province of Basra. Another US energy firm will also scale up its operational footprint at the Akkas gas field in western Anbar province, according to the official. A third major pact will see Washington and Baghdad partner on the rehabilitation of the 50-year-old Kirkuk Baniyas pipeline, which historically linked Iraq’s northern oil fields to Syria’s Mediterranean coastline.

Tom Barrack, Trump’s appointed ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria and Iraq, has spent weeks pushing to lock in these preliminary agreements ahead of Zaidi’s visit, as part of a broader US strategy to reduce Iran’s regional influence and leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. “Trump and Zaidi come from a business background. Iraq is coming to the US with deals,” the senior Iraqi official noted.

For Zaidi, the focus on advancing economic and energy ties with Washington is also a calculated strategic move to buy time for his top domestic priority: disarming Iranian-aligned militias that joined Tehran in attacking US forces and Gulf Arab allies during the recent US-Israeli military campaign against Iran.

Renad Mansour, director of the Iraq Initiative at London-based think tank Chatham House, told MEE that Zaidi is closely studying the playbook of other regional leaders who have built productive working relationships with Trump, particularly Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa. “He knows the key is to establish a personal rapport,” Mansour explained.

The saga of Iraq’s frozen oil revenues underscores just how critical this visit is for Baghdad, which remains heavily dependent on Washington even years after the formal US military withdrawal. The US pulled all remaining combat troops from Iraq’s federal territory at the start of this year, leaving roughly 2,000 troops deployed only in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region. But more than two decades after the 2003 US invasion, Washington still retains outsized leverage over the Iraqi government through its control of the country’s key oil income held in US financial institutions.

The Trump administration froze access to these funds back in April, with the official justification being retaliation for attacks on US assets in Iraq and neighboring countries. But behind the scenes, the freeze was also part of an aggressive lobbying campaign to push Iraqi political factions to select a prime minister aligned with US interests. Earlier this year, Trump publicly took the unprecedented step of tweeting his opposition to the nomination of Nouri al-Maliki, a two-time former prime minister with long-standing close ties to Tehran who oversaw the formation of Shia militias to combat the Islamic State a decade earlier.

“Zaidi enjoys obvious support in Washington,” Abbas Kadhim, director of the Iraq program at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, told MEE. “His nomination was unprecedented in US-Iraq relations. He was endorsed by the US before there was even a vote to confirm the cabinet. The US always tried to negotiate behind closed doors on the PM’s selection. This was the most overt a president has ever been. There was no camouflage.”

Diplomats and analysts describe Zaidi as a carefully crafted compromise candidate. His acceptability to Washington was brokered by Faiq Zaidan, the powerful head of Iraq’s influential Judicial Council. Once a close ally of Iran and a disciple of Qassem Soleimani, the late commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Zaidan has shifted his alignment sharply toward the US in recent years, clearing the path for Zaidi’s nomination.

Even so, Zaidi ultimately relied on support from the Coordination Framework, an alliance of Shia political parties dominated by factions close to Tehran, which acts as the de facto kingmaker in Iraqi politics. Under Iraq’s unwritten power-sharing agreement, the prime minister’s post is reserved for a Shia politician, the presidency goes to a Kurd, and the speaker of parliament is selected from the Sunni community.

A wealthy self-made businessman with holdings spanning real estate, banking, and logistics, Zaidi’s own financial history underscores the delicate balancing act he must maintain: his Al Janoob Islamic Bank was sanctioned by the US in 2024 over allegations of ties to Iranian-backed militias.

Zaidi’s rise to power highlights the constant tightrope walk that Iraq’s ruling elite must navigate between two competing powers: the United States, which controls Baghdad’s financial lifeline through its hold on oil revenues, and neighboring Iran, which backs dozens of armed militias that wield massive political and military influence across the country.

The Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), a mostly Shia coalition of militias formed to fight the Islamic State more than a decade ago, has since become deeply embedded in Iraq’s state institutions. Today, the PMF fields more than 150,000 fighters, maintains sprawling patronage networks, and is partially integrated into Iraq’s official security apparatus, with the Iraqi government covering the salaries of its fighters. The group has repeatedly been accused of kidnappings, targeted assassinations, and violent suppression of peaceful anti-government protests.

Successive US administrations have pressured Baghdad to disband the militias, but multiple previous Iraqi prime ministers have avoided direct confrontation out of fear of the PMF’s military strength and deep infiltration of state institutions. The Trump administration has already pressed Zaidi’s government to cut off salary payments to PMF factions aligned with Iran.

Shortly after taking office, Zaidi launched a high-profile anti-corruption crackdown last month that targeted political figures from both Shia and Sunni backgrounds, including allies of his predecessor Mohammed Shia Sudani. Several senior officials with close ties to the PMF were among those targeted in the raids. He also set a firm September 30 deadline for all militias to surrender their heavy weapons to the state and disband. While a small number of smaller factions have announced they will comply with the order, the most powerful Iranian-aligned groups, including Kataib Hezbollah, have flatly refused to disarm.

“The US wants Iranian-linked armed groups reined in, and economic links to Iran reduced. It also wants attacks to stop against the US’s interests and partners, particularly the Gulf states,” Sarhang Hamasaeed, an independent Iraqi analyst based in Baghdad, told MEE.

Unlike Lebanese Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi movement, most of Iraq’s Iran-aligned militias avoided open participation in the Gaza war that followed the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel. A brief flare-up of clashes in late 2024 led to retaliatory US airstrikes, but after the US-Israeli military attack on Iran in February of this year, Iraqi militias openly joined the fighting.

US forces based in Iraqi Kurdistan came under repeated attack from multiple militia factions, but most of the attacks were directed at Gulf Arab states including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, according to senior Arab Gulf and US officials who spoke to MEE. Analysts note that Baghdad’s relations with Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have been severely damaged by the Iraqi government’s failure to prevent these attacks.

Regional experts warn that the recent regional conflict has made Zaidi’s goal of disarming the militias far more difficult to achieve. “It is difficult to take the September 30 deadline very seriously at this stage. There are no indications that the hardline, Iran-aligned militias, such as Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba, are willing to relinquish their heavy weapons, nor is there any sign that Tehran is prepared to accept such a move,” Harith Hasan, an Iraq expert at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told MEE. “So far, the measures taken have been largely cosmetic and implemented by groups that have not been deeply involved in attacks,” he added.

Despite heavy US and Israeli military strikes against Iranian targets across the region, Iran is widely viewed as having emerged from the conflict with increased regional influence and greater confidence. Tehran has moved aggressively to assert its control over the Strait of Hormuz, and rallied public and military support to Hezbollah in Lebanon, refusing to accept a US-brokered ceasefire extension until Israel agreed to halt attacks on its ally.

“The armed groups [in Iraq] came out in a more direct way in solidarity with Iran during the war. That makes Baghdad’s ability to manoeuvre harder,” Hamasaeed said. “These groups now feel stronger. They have fought directly with Iran, and Iran has shown it supports its allies.”

Mansour, from Chatham House, added: “The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is doubling down on the militias. So they are getting significant support and direction from the IRGC. The Iranians aren’t going to stand down.”

For Iraq, which is facing deep economic crisis, Zaidi is betting that a focus on lucrative energy and business deals will appease the Trump administration and keep the flow of Iraqi oil revenues moving. Iraq relies on oil exports for roughly 90 percent of its total government budget, and unlike some Iranian-aligned actors, Iraqi oil shipments receive no preferential treatment in the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has recently resumed attacking commercial vessels. Iraq also depends on the strait for nearly all of its critical imports of food and industrial goods.

“Unlike after 7 October [2023], when Iraq managed to insulate itself from regional conflict. This war has put Iraq in the crossfire,” Kadhim noted.