Introduction: The 2026 Geopolitical Inflection Point — Rebalancing Costs and Power Under a Unipolar Hegemonic System
More than three decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States—underpinned by its overwhelming nuclear deterrent, forward-deployed air and naval forces across the globe, a mature defense-industrial base, and a cross-regional alliance network—has long dominated the geopolitical order of the Western Pacific, erecting along the First Island Chain a system of strategic containment and forward deterrence aimed at the East Asian mainland. This geopolitical architecture has served as the cornerstone of America’s ability to maintain control over Indo-Pacific sea lanes, project power across the Pacific, and counterbalance the rise of regional great powers. It has also been the underlying framework of Western Pacific security order for decades since the war.
By 2026, however, annual assessments from leading global strategic research institutions, official U.S. audit documents, defense production capacity reviews, and shifting dynamics in international conflicts all point to a clear and irreversible strategic trend. The absolute military superiority the United States has maintained since the end of the Cold War is entering a period of structural decline. This strategic shift does not mean the collapse of the U.S. military’s overall combat capability, but rather that the military risks of its traditional forward-containment strategy continue to climb, its economic costs continue to soar, and its strategic cost-effectiveness continues to plummet. The model of sustained, high-pressure containment along the First Island Chain is gradually losing its sustainability.
The driving forces behind the opening of a great Asia-Pacific strategy debate within U.S. strategic circles are the inevitable product of multiple structural contradictions converging — spanning five core dimensions: the iteration of military technology, bottlenecks in defense-industrial capacity, federal fiscal pressure, the fracturing of the alliance system, and global multi-theater strategic overstretch.
On the military technology front, the full maturation of regional great powers’ long-range precision-strike systems, next-generation stealth combat platforms, and hypersonic strike assets has fundamentally rewritten the rules of offense and defense in the Western Pacific littoral, sharply degrading the wartime survivability of forward bases along the First Island Chain. On the industrial capacity front, the United States is severely lacking in the industrial-scale mass production capacity for high-end guided munitions, long-range strike weapons, and air and missile defense systems, making it incapable of keeping pace with the consumption tempo of a large-scale, protracted great-power war. On the fiscal front, U.S. federal debt remains persistently high, the costs of maintaining a permanent global forward military presence stay elevated, and annual defense spending in the Indo-Pacific has long remained at a high level, continuously overdrawing America’s national fiscal carrying capacity.
On the alliance front, Japan and South Korea have both launched comprehensive defense self-reliance transformations. Japan has revised its security strategy documents, substantially raised its defense budget, and pursued long-range counterstrike capabilities, while South Korea is advancing its own indigenous weapons systems and independent strategic deterrent. The materialization of the AUKUS nuclear submarine program also indirectly confirms that the United States has acknowledged fundamental flaws in the traditional First Island Chain system and is attempting to build an alternative strategic anchor in the South Pacific. Yet the project has a lengthy timeline and extremely high costs, and cannot fill the strategic gap left by the First Island Chain in the near term. Regional allies’ reliance on U.S. security commitments is declining, trust is fragmenting, and the traditional one-way dependent alliance structure is thoroughly loosening.
On the global strategic overstretch front, the protracted Russia-Ukraine conflict and the ongoing confrontation in the Middle East and Red Sea are steadily draining U.S. defense-industrial capacity and munitions stockpiles, diverting substantial naval forces and strategic air power. U.S. global military forces and industrial capacity are a fixed total; with pressure bearing down simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific, the United States can no longer sustain unlimited force commitments and strategic investment in the Western Pacific.
It is against this complex and monumental geopolitical backdrop that Defense Priorities, a leading realist think tank in the United States, released its major strategic research report, The Second Island Chain Strategy for Asia, in September 2026. The report represents the most systematic and comprehensive Asia-Pacific strategic restructuring proposal to emerge from America’s strategic restraint school and neo-isolationist camp in recent years. It directly challenges the First Island Chain forward-basing strategy that the United States has pursued for more than seventy years since World War II, advocating a full contraction of forward forces, a restructuring of Asia-Pacific alliance obligations, and the abandonment of any commitment to military intervention in the Taiwan Strait — completing an overall strategic retreat and transformation of the U.S. posture in Asia.
This article will unfold its analysis through a complete academic structure of “argumentation and assessment + full original text + review of public discourse.” The opening section systematically dissects the multidimensional evidence and geopolitical logic of the structural decline of U.S. military power. The middle section will publish the complete official Chinese translation of The Second Island Chain Strategy for Asia — unabridged, unexcerpted, and unaltered — fully restoring the original policy recommendation text of the American think tank. The latter section will systematically sort through the full range of feedback, controversies, criticisms, and evaluations of the report from the U.S. government, Congress, mainstream think tanks, the military-industrial complex, and strategic studies communities around the world, forming a complete closed-loop study that runs from factual argumentation to close reading of the original text to multidimensional review of public discourse.
A core research premise must be clearly defined: The Second Island Chain Strategy for Asia is solely an academic policy recommendation from a private American think tank. It does not constitute official established national policy of the White House, the Department of Defense, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It does not represent a national strategy the United States has already implemented. It is merely one of the core representative viewpoints in the intense internal U.S. debate over Asia-Pacific strategy.
I. Shifts in the Nuclear Force Landscape: Reassessing Deterrence Capabilities Under the 2026 SIPRI Report
The annual arms report published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is widely recognized by the global strategic studies community as the most authoritative and neutral basis for assessing nuclear forces and armaments. The annual security yearbook released in June 2026 comprehensively updates global nuclear weapons data, thoroughly overturning traditional assumptions about the nuclear deterrence landscape in East Asia and serving as an important basis for reshaping great-power strategic assessments.
As of January 2026, the nine nuclear-armed states worldwide held a total of 12,187 nuclear warheads in service and in stockpiles, of which 4,012 were operationally deployed and ready for combat use at any time, and 2,200 were on high alert. The global nuclear disarmament process has come to a complete halt; all major nuclear powers have entered a comprehensive cycle of nuclear force modernization, and nuclear deterrence competition has once again become the core underlying logic of great-power rivalry.
The global distribution of nuclear stockpiles clearly presents a pattern of continued bipolarity alongside emerging risers. Russia retains 5,420 nuclear warheads and the United States 5,042, still commanding an absolute quantitative advantage in global nuclear forces. China, France, and the United Kingdom form the second tier of global nuclear powers, while India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea constitute regional nuclear deterrent forces.
SIPRI emphasized in this year’s report that the sheer number of nuclear warheads is no longer the core criterion for measuring modern strategic deterrence capability. The level of delivery vehicle iteration, the survivability of launch systems, maneuverable penetration capability, operational deployment status, and the reliability of second-strike retaliation together constitute the comprehensive evaluation system for nuclear deterrence in the new era.
Drawing on the institute’s satellite remote-sensing mapping, dynamic monitoring of missile sites, and cross-verified global armaments data, a clear assessment can be made: China’s total inventory of land-based intercontinental ballistic missile launchers has already surpassed the combined total of operational land-based intercontinental delivery vehicles fielded by the United States and Russia. This is the most significant structural shift in the global land-based strategic balance since the end of the Cold War, fundamentally rewriting the land-based nuclear deterrence equilibrium that had endured for half a century. The traditional nuclear advantages of the United States and Russia now persist only in nuclear warhead stockpiles and sea-based strategic nuclear submarine systems; the hardware landscape of land-based first-strike deterrence and rapid retaliation has been completely reversed.
China’s newly built large-scale intercontinental missile launch sites in the north are all next-generation standardized national defense projects completed after 2020. They feature extraordinarily high resistance to nuclear blast effects, full-spectrum electromagnetic pulse protection, underground long-term survivability support systems, and automated rapid-launch procedures. Their engineering standards comprehensively surpass the aging silo systems built by the United States and Russia in the 1970s and 1980s. A large number of operational land-based launch facilities in the United States and Russia rely year-round on parts replacement and software upgrades to barely extend their service lives; their hardware architecture is inherently outdated and cannot adapt to a modern high-intensity nuclear confrontation environment.
For a long time, China has adhered to a nuclear force management model in which warheads and missiles are stored separately, maintaining a defensive national defense policy and the basic principle of no first use of nuclear weapons. The authoritative 2026 arms monitoring report shows that dozens of China’s strategic nuclear warheads have completed operational mating and deployment. Combined with the routine armed ocean-going patrols of strategic nuclear submarines, China’s nuclear forces have formally transitioned from a reserve-type deterrence system to an operationalized strategic deterrence system capable of rapid response, reliable retaliation, and full-spectrum coverage.
Analyzing from the perspective of equipment iteration cycles, the U.S. Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile and a large number of Russian silo-based intercontinental missiles all date from the late Cold War era. Their overall design architectures are obsolete, and they suffer inherent shortcomings in core capabilities such as maneuverable reentry, autonomous navigation, and intelligent penetration. The room for upgrade and modification is already approaching its limit. All of China’s operational intercontinental strategic delivery systems are entirely new equipment independently developed over the past fifteen years and inducted into service in batches over the past five years. The entire industrial chain is independently controllable, free of problems such as equipment aging, discontinued spare parts, and gaps in the maintenance system.
The modernization-driven iteration of nuclear force systems and the reversal of the balance have directly undermined the foundation of forward strategic deterrence that the United States built around the First Island Chain, sharply raising the wartime risk costs of large-scale forward U.S. troop deployments. This is the core underlying military driver behind the U.S. strategic community’s proactive reassessment of its Asia-Pacific containment strategy and its exploration of strategic retrenchment. Yet it must be objectively recognized that the U.S. sea-based nuclear deterrent system remains globally preeminent, and its second-strike nuclear retaliation capability still holds an absolute advantage. The current shift in the balance represents a transfer of relative advantage, not a complete strategic upheaval.
II. Bottlenecks in Conventional High-End Combat Power: The Technology-Capacity Mismatch in Hypersonic Weapons
Nuclear forces define the ultimate threshold of great-power conflict, while conventional high-end hypersonic weapons systems directly determine offensive and defensive initiative and the effectiveness of strategic deterrence in medium- to high-intensity regional conventional warfare. The next-generation hypersonic cruise missile project solicitation documents publicly released by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2026 have thoroughly exposed America’s strategic lag in the new generation of conventional high-end strike systems.
DARPA’s official project documents explicitly confirm that, as of 2026, the United States still has no air-breathing scramjet-powered hypersonic cruise missile that can be fielded at scale and operationally deployed. Existing U.S. hypersonic systems cannot effectively counter modern integrated air and missile defense architectures and do not possess equivalent long-range conventional hypersonic strike capability; overall, U.S. technological progress remains in a state of prolonged catch-up. Comparable advanced systems already fielded at scale by overseas defense establishments remain at the stage of concept demonstration and technology pre-research in the United States.
At present, the most mature U.S. hypersonic weapon is the Dark Eagle long-range glide missile, but this system follows the rocket-boosted glide technology path, which belongs to a completely different technical system from air-breathing scramjet hypersonic cruise missiles. Their operational effectiveness, penetration logic, and suitable employment scenarios are fundamentally different, and no equivalent substitution is possible.
Drawing on the dual official audit reports of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office and the U.S. Government Accountability Office in 2026, the Dark Eagle hypersonic missile suffers from three fatal shortcomings that cannot be overcome in the near term. First, production capacity is severely insufficient: the planned annual output target of twelve units has long failed to materialize, with actual annual production reaching only six to seven units — a classic small-batch trial-production system wholly incapable of sustaining the consumption demands of a high-intensity, protracted great-power war. Second, the cost is exorbitant: a single unit costs as much as sixty-seven million dollars, a sky-high price that completely forecloses the possibility of large-scale fielding. Third, tactical performance suffers from inherent limitations: the dual-cone glide vehicle has a relatively low lift-to-drag ratio, limited terminal maneuverability, and an insufficient payload, enabling it to strike only fixed high-value targets and making it unsuitable for theater-level strike requirements involving wide areas, multiple targets, and sustained operations.
A comprehensive assessment by global defense monitoring institutions concludes that China’s new-generation land-based air-breathing hypersonic cruise missiles and sea-based shipborne hypersonic anti-ship missiles have already completed large-scale fielding. This series of systems employs advanced scramjet propulsion, eliminating the need to carry large quantities of oxidizer, and is capable of sustaining Mach 5 to 8 high-speed cruise within the atmosphere. Their ballistic trajectories are highly flexible and variable, enabling autonomous evasive maneuvering to circumvent traditional missile defense interception systems. They are compatible with multi-platform launch from sea and land, and comprehensively cover all military bases, ports, and mobile naval fleet targets across both the First and Second Island Chains.
Compared with U.S. systems, the greatest advantage of domestically produced hypersonic weapons lies not only in technological leadership, but also in a complete and mature industrialized mass-production system. In peacetime, baseline production capacity can be maintained on a regular basis; in wartime, expansion mechanisms can be rapidly activated, providing the industrial support capacity for large-scale saturation strikes and sustained high-intensity combat.
A comprehensive comparison yields a clear conclusion: the United States still maintains global leadership in the sheer volume of traditional conventional forces — no one can match its inventory of carrier strike groups, long-range bombers, and subsonic cruise missiles. But in the new-generation hypersonic strike systems that will determine the outcome of future Western Pacific warfare, the United States has already developed a clear technological generation gap and production capacity gap, and the structural shortcomings of its conventional high-end combat power continue to widen.
III. Reliability Shortcomings in Core Sea and Air Platforms: F-35 Stealth Coating Defects Versus New-Generation Shipborne Radar-Absorbing Materials
The F-35 series stealth fighter is the core pillar of the U.S. military’s fifth-generation fighter combat system, and the carrier-based version, the F-35C, is the centerpiece equipment for the U.S. carrier strike group’s open-ocean air superiority and anti-surface strike missions. Yet the aircraft’s long-standing deficiencies in adaptability to the marine environment have never been thoroughly resolved, becoming a major engineering shortcoming constraining sustained forward combat readiness of U.S. forces — one that has been continuously tracked and documented by the U.S. Joint Program Office and international defense media.
U.S. F-35 series fighters employ traditional exposed ferrite radar-absorbing coating technology, relying on iron-based magnetic fillers to absorb radar electromagnetic waves and achieve stealth and radar cross-section reduction. This technology meets specifications in static laboratory environments and is cost-controllable, but it is inherently unsuited to the extreme operational environment of high salt fog, high humidity, and severe corrosion at sea. Once fine scratches and fissures appear on the aircraft’s surface topcoat, chloride ions from seawater directly penetrate into the coating interior, corroding the core radar-absorbing filler and causing oxidative mottling and destruction of the electromagnetic structure.
Such failures are not corrosion of the airframe skin structure, but rather functional degradation of the stealth layer, which directly raises the aircraft’s radar cross-section, causing periodic degradation of stealth performance and sharply weakening the core combat advantage of a fifth-generation fighter. These failures are a recurring problem in carrier-based open-ocean environments: the longer the service life and the longer the open-ocean deployment, the more severe the stealth performance degradation.
According to official U.S. military reliability assessment data, the open-ocean carrier environment directly shortens the effective service life of F-35C stealth coatings by sixty percent. After several months of routine open-ocean duty, virtually all aircraft exhibit varying degrees of coating degradation, peeling, and mottling. More critically, such failures cannot be repaired on site in the carrier hangar bay; the aircraft must be transported to a dedicated land-based temperature-controlled maintenance facility to complete the full complex process of old-layer stripping, substrate treatment, re-spraying, and temperature-controlled curing. Repair man-hours are extremely long and maintenance costs extremely high, severely constraining the routine full combat readiness of forward-deployed U.S. aircraft.
In stark contrast to U.S. equipment, China’s new-generation carrier-based stealth fighter took the high-corrosion open-ocean carrier environment as a core design condition from the very beginning of development, completely abandoning the outdated exposed-ferrite technical approach. The new-generation composite stealth coating employs coated modified alloy radar-absorbing powder combined with carbon nanotube and graphene composite radar-absorbing materials, building a multi-spectrum stealth system that synergizes magnetic loss and dielectric loss. All core radar-absorbing particles are covered with an inert protective layer, thoroughly isolating them from salt fog and chloride ion attack, solving the problem of stealth coating aging in the marine environment at the root.
The entire coating system adopts a three-layer gradient structure design: the bottom layer strengthens adhesion and humid-heat resistance, the middle layer performs the core stealth radar-absorbing function, and the outer layer combines corrosion resistance, hydrophobicity, and infrared suppression. Compared with coatings currently in U.S. service, China’s new-generation stealth materials offer three core advantages: marine corrosion resistance is greatly improved, allowing long-term adaptation to carrier berthing environments; minor damage can be quickly repaired locally under shipboard conditions without returning to land for major overhaul, significantly improving combat readiness rates; and the radar-absorbing spectrum is broader, simultaneously compatible with radar stealth and infrared stealth, yielding comprehensive superiority in low observability.
The essential technological gap between the two generations of stealth coatings lies not in whether iron-group radar-absorbing materials are used, but in whether an inert protective structure is present. U.S. exposed coatings fail immediately once damaged, while domestically produced encapsulated coatings possess inherent environmental protection capability, adapting them to long-term, high-intensity open-ocean deployment.
Objectively speaking, the F-35C, as a mature fifth-generation carrier-based fighter, still boasts advanced tactical parameters on paper and remains a formidable system-level combat capability. But under the real battlefield conditions of routine forward deployment and prolonged open-ocean confrontation in the Western Pacific, U.S. aircraft suffer from unavoidable shortcomings in reliability, maintainability, and sustained combat readiness. This engineering-level generation gap continuously erodes the stability and reliability of the U.S. military’s First Island Chain forward air combat system. At the same time, it must be clearly understood that the performance advantage of a single piece of equipment cannot directly determine the outcome of war. Modern air combat relies on the complete coordination of early warning and reconnaissance, electronic warfare, command and communications, and munitions systems; the advantage in equipment materials is only one component of system-level confrontation.
IV. Ammunition Stockpile Pressure and Defense-Industrial Capacity Constraints: The Logistical Ceiling of Forward Deployment
Sustained armed conflicts across multiple regions in 2026 have thoroughly exposed the inventory crisis and production bottlenecks afflicting U.S. high-end guided munitions and air and missile defense systems. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has long tracked the dynamics of U.S. military ammunition reserves, and together with in-depth reporting by leading global media, this clearly confirms that the consumption rate of U.S. high-end munitions has long outstripped the pace of industrial replenishment, leaving wartime sustained combat capability facing a severe test.
Drawing on authoritative think tank model estimates, the U.S. military’s total pre-war inventory of Patriot air defense interceptors stood at 2,330 rounds. After sustained consumption across multiple regional conflicts, the currently available operational inventory has fallen to only 700 to 800 rounds. The pre-war inventory of THAAD high-altitude area defense interceptors was 452 rounds, and the current available inventory is less than 280. Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles and various types of precision-guided munitions have likewise seen large-scale inventory drawdowns. The strategic reserve of high-end munitions accumulated over decades of the Cold War has entered a phase of rapid depletion.
U.S. media have revealed in depth that the Vice President of the United States bypassed the Department of Defense’s常规 reporting chain and directly engaged frontline commanders across global theaters, demanding that they set aside officially sanitized reports and truthfully report actual ammunition reserves and wartime sustainment capability. Multiple frontline theater commanders explicitly reported that existing ammunition stockpiles can support only short-term, low-intensity local conflicts and are wholly incapable of sustaining a large-scale, protracted, high-intensity great-power total war. Ammunition shortages have become a major strategic vulnerability in the U.S. military’s global posture.
The tight ammunition situation is not caused by the Indo-Pacific alone, but is the inevitable result of three-theater global strategic overstretch. The protracted Russia-Ukraine conflict continuously diverts the entire NATO system’s production capacity for 155mm standard ammunition and short- to medium-range air defense munitions, while the ongoing confrontation in the Middle East and Red Sea steadily drains U.S. cruise missile and shipborne munitions stockpiles. U.S. defense production lines, ammunition stockpiles, and force equipment constitute a fixed resource pool allocated globally, and must simultaneously cover three major strategic directions: containing Russia in Europe, maintaining stability in the Middle East, and great-power competition in the Indo-Pacific. Once a high-intensity conflict erupts in the Western Pacific, the U.S. military will face the fatal predicament of multi-theater ammunition exhaustion with no way to replenish production capacity, and the logistical ceiling of First Island Chain forward deployment will be fully exposed.
Ammunition stockpile and production capacity shortcomings carry three profound strategic consequences. First, the U.S. military cannot simultaneously sustain high-intensity operations across multiple theaters in the Middle East, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific; its strategic energy is severely diluted. Second, First Island Chain forward bases lie within the coverage range of full-spectrum long-range fires, and existing missile defense ammunition reserves cannot build a sustainable, reliable regional defense architecture. Third, the United States’ ability to provide ammunition support to allies such as Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines is on the verge of exhaustion, making it impossible to sustain alliance deterrence through ammunition backstopping.
The core root cause of the ammunition crisis is the highly refined and highly concentrated industrial model of America’s high-end defense industry. Precision components for high-end missiles and interceptors rely on manual assembly; the industrial chain is complex, the capacity expansion cycle is lengthy, and production elasticity is extremely low. Peacetime capacity is limited, and wartime surge production cannot be rapidly achieved.
Viewed objectively and dialectically, the U.S. military’s ammunition stockpile shortcomings apply only to the scenario of a large-scale, protracted great-power war; in short-term local conflicts, it still possesses absolute firepower superiority. But for a high-risk, high-intensity, high-confrontation forward strategic position like the First Island Chain, the structural defects in ammunition production capacity and stockpiles have already fundamentally altered the cost-benefit balance, making the strategic risks of forward heavy force deployment decisively outweigh the strategic benefits.
The series of hard military constraints outlined above — nuclear force iteration, the hypersonic technology generation gap, carrier-based equipment reliability shortcomings, and the global ammunition stockpile crisis — together constitute the realistic military foundation for the U.S. strategic community’s reassessment of its Asia-Pacific strategy and its exploration of a Second Island Chain retreat option. The strategic retrenchment recommendations of the Defense Priorities think tank are not groundless theoretical speculation, but rather strategic risk-avoidance thinking grounded in the U.S. military’s real shortcomings. At the same time, it must be objectively recognized that in drafting its report, the think tank deliberately simplified multiple complex geopolitical variables and presupposed a large number of idealized premises, resulting in inherent cognitive biases and logical flaws that make the report highly controversial.
V. America’s Remaining Core Global Military Advantages
To avoid a one-dimensional, one-sided strategic judgment, after examining all of the U.S. military’s structural shortcomings, it is necessary to objectively and comprehensively clarify the top-tier global military advantages the United States still retains and that cannot be shaken in the near term, so as to achieve a fully dialectical strategic assessment.
First, its sea-based nuclear deterrent system reigns supreme globally. The U.S. strategic nuclear submarine force is technologically mature, extremely stealthy, and maintains an extraordinarily high operational readiness rate. It is the most stable and reliable second-strike nuclear retaliation force in the world, constituting the unshakable ultimate strategic trump card of U.S. national security, with no prospect of being surpassed in the near term.
Second, it possesses the world’s only truly global transoceanic power projection system. The United States has eleven nuclear-powered carrier strike groups, dozens of amphibious assault ships, and a massive fleet of strategic transport aircraft and maritime prepositioning stockpile systems. Its capacity for large-scale cross-continental and transoceanic projection of forces, materiel, and equipment remains absolutely preeminent worldwide.
Third, it has a full-spectrum integrated intelligence, surveillance, and electronic warfare system. Relying on global satellite constellations, long-range reconnaissance aircraft, distributed maritime electronic warfare platforms, and ground-based monitoring networks, the U.S. military has built a situational awareness architecture covering the globe, monitoring around the clock, and perceiving across multiple dimensions. Its decades of battle-tested experience in electronic countermeasures and system-level suppression is irreplaceable.
Fourth, it has a mature and comprehensive global alliance network. Through decades of cultivation, the United States has built a dense web of bilateral and multilateral security alliances around the world, firmly binding core allies Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia in the Western Pacific, and possessing the foundational conditions to coordinate regional forces in joint operations, share strategic costs, and construct geopolitical encirclement.
A comprehensive assessment shows that all U.S. military shortcomings are manifestations of relative advantage erosion, deteriorating cost-effectiveness, and rising forward risk — not an overall collapse of combat power or the failure of global hegemony. The United States remains the world’s number-one superpower in comprehensive military strength; it is simply that the old model of high-pressure containment along the traditional First Island Chain no longer fits the great-power balance of the new era.
VI. The Inherent Shortcomings and Limitations of the Second Island Chain Strategic Option
The Second Island Chain strategic retreat proposal put forward by the Defense Priorities think tank accurately captures the risk crisis of U.S. forward deployment and possesses strong practical relevance. Yet it simultaneously suffers from unavoidable internal defects and strategic loopholes; it is not a perfect alternative.
First, the Second Island Chain does not possess absolute security. Core nodes of the Second Island Chain — Guam, Tinian, bases in northern Australia — still lie within the coverage range of full-spectrum long-range precision-strike systems. Retreating forces can only lengthen strike distances, increase warning time, and reduce the risk of first-round annihilation; it cannot achieve absolute safe haven or thoroughly avoid wartime strikes.
Second, strategic retreat substantially weakens the U.S. military’s battlefield response efficiency. Operating from the depth of the Second Island Chain, combat forces face greatly increased transit distances and significantly prolonged maneuver times to reach hotspot areas in the Western Pacific. Their capacity for rapid intervention, rapid response, and rapid engagement drops markedly. More tankers, supply ships, and logistical support resources must be committed to maintain regional presence. Overall operating costs are not truly reduced — it is cost transfer, not cost elimination.
Third, the political cost of alliance system collapse is immeasurable. A full U.S. retreat from the First Island Chain, abandonment of military intervention in the Taiwan Strait, and contraction of alliance security commitments would thoroughly shatter the psychological security baseline of allies such as Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, directly trigger an East Asian arms race, and even push allies to seek independent nuclear deterrent capabilities, sparking regional nuclear proliferation risks and fundamentally upending the post-war East Asian security order.
Fourth, domestic political resistance in the United States is unprecedentedly massive. The U.S. military-industrial complex, congressional defense hawks, traditional establishment think tanks, and overseas interest groups are deeply bound to the First Island Chain basing system. Forward force contraction would directly lead to reduced defense orders, declining geopolitical influence, and damaged political interests, encountering all-out forceful resistance.
Taken together, the Second Island Chain strategy is in essence a risk-transfer, cost-hedging, passive-defense strategic adjustment. It is not an optimal solution capable of thoroughly resolving America’s Asia-Pacific predicament, but merely a fallback stop-loss option for the U.S. strategic community in response to relative national power decline and continuously rising risks.
Having comprehensively laid out all the preceding assessments, real-world shortcomings, and strategic pros and cons, the following section will publish the complete Chinese translation of the 2026 Second Island Chain Strategy for Asia — unabridged, unexcerpted, and unaltered — fully restoring the original policy text of the American think tank.
VII. Full English Translation of The Second Island Chain Strategy for Asia
(Publisher: Defense Priorities think tank | Author: Jennifer Kavanagh | Publication date: September 10, 2026)
(Solemn note: The following is a complete translation of the full report, with no deletions or excerpts whatsoever. The content corresponds entirely to the official English original and has been rendered only in accordance with standardized Chinese academic style.)
A new strategy that shifts U.S. military forces and security commitments wholesale from the fragile forward edge of the First Island Chain to the more survivable depths of the Second Island Chain can effectively reduce America’s overseas military burden, sharply cut the fatal risk of the United States being dragged into a large-scale war with China, and fully preserve America’s core national security interests in the Asia-Pacific.
This paper formally proposes a new U.S. Asia-Pacific Second Island Chain strategy. The strategy advocates concentrating all core U.S. sea and air combat power and forward-deployed assets in the Second Island Chain region, farther from the Asian mainland, with core deployment areas spanning Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and various depth military outposts in the U.S. Western Pacific. This new strategic layout completely overturns the First Island Chain forward containment strategy the United States has pursued for more than seventy years since World War II, built around the Japanese archipelago, the Taiwan region, and the Philippine archipelago.
The United States has only two core national security interests in the Asia-Pacific: ensuring the absolute security of the U.S. homeland and preventing any direct external military threat, and preserving the freedom and openness of the global international high seas and sea lanes, safeguarding the stability and security of America’s global trading system and commercial corridors.
For a long time, the United States has maintained a large-scale forward military presence in East Asia and extended unconditional, unlimited security commitments to regional allies. These do not constitute irreplaceable core U.S. national interests. The current First Island Chain forward heavy-force deployment model places U.S. military power highly forward and highly exposed, making the United States extremely vulnerable to being held hostage by regional disputes and allies’ unilateral actions, and forced into an all-out U.S.-China war whose costs are incalculable and whose losses are unbearable.
The new Second Island Chain strategy will systematically contract America’s excessive defense obligations in East Asia. On the Taiwan Strait question, the United States should completely abandon its strategic ambiguity policy and publicly establish a clear position of no military intervention whatsoever. The United States should renegotiate, revise, or even terminate its unconditional mutual defense alliance treaties with South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Japan, and build a new type of security cooperation mechanism that is narrower in scope, more flexible in constraints, and more controllable in obligations.
At the force deployment level, the U.S. military will fully withdraw all常态化 ground garrisons from the First Island Chain and redeploy all main sea and air combat assets to depth bases in the Second Island Chain. It will systematically reduce ground combat forces stationed in South Korea and the Philippines and streamline forward standing forces. The United States needs to proactively accept the corresponding costs of strategic adjustment, candidly accept the reality of a phased decline in U.S. regional political influence in East Asia, and at the same time face squarely the trend of some East Asian allies seeking independent nuclear deterrent capabilities to safeguard their own security.
This Asia-Pacific strategic system restructuring will adopt a phased, steadily implemented approach, with an overall adjustment period of three to eight years. The vast majority of force deployment adjustments and alliance mechanism restructuring will be basically completed before 2030, and the entire strategic system reform will be fully wrapped up before 2035.
(1) The Fatal Flaws of the Current First Island Chain Strategy
The entire foundation of America’s current Indo-Pacific security strategy rests on forward heavy-force deployment along the First Island Chain. The First Island Chain geopolitical chain runs through the Japanese archipelago, the Taiwan region, and the Philippine archipelago, and constitutes the core defense line by which the United States blockades East Asia, provides forward deterrence, and controls the Western Pacific. The United States has long stationed nearly 90,000 standing troops there, relying on a dense network of forward bases to build long-term forward deterrence against China.
As regional great powers’ long-range strike systems, sea and air combat systems, and full-spectrum perception systems have fully matured, all U.S. forward bases, military ports, field airfields, and garrison facilities along the First Island Chain now lie entirely within the coverage range of full-spectrum fires. Once military friction erupts in the region, all forward U.S. assets along the First Island Chain will face devastating saturation strikes in the opening phase of war, and forward garrisons will essentially lack wartime survivability.
The forward high-density garrison model simultaneously magnifies infinitely the risks of crisis miscalculation and conflict escalation. With normalized sea and air confrontations and densely interwoven forces along the First Island Chain, any minor maritime friction, airspace confrontation, or border incident carries a massive risk of directly igniting an all-out U.S.-China war. The United States directly binds the fate of its homeland national security to the regional decisions of East Asian allies, completely forfeiting war initiative and strategic autonomy.
Traditional strategy supporters have long argued that a forward heavy-force presence can create effective strategic deterrence and deter war. But modern deterrence rests on two core preconditions: first, the adversary is convinced the United States has the will to intervene; second, forward forces possess wartime survivability. At present, the First Island Chain base system is extremely fragile and has essentially lost wartime survivability, so the traditional deterrence logic has completely failed.
To maintain baseline deterrence capability along the First Island Chain, the United States must continuously invest enormous funds in base hardening, missile defense system construction, air defense system upgrades, and facility strike-resistance modifications. It pours in massive financial resources continuously, only to purchase steadily declining battlefield survivability. Strategic inputs and security outputs are severely imbalanced, and strategic cost-effectiveness continues to collapse.
At the same time, East Asian allies’ security perceptions are undergoing a fundamental shift. Some allies have over-relied on the U.S. security umbrella, long underinvested in defense, and lacked autonomous defense capabilities. Meanwhile, a growing number of allies are beginning to question the stability and reliability of U.S. security commitments and are no longer willing to fully subordinate themselves to America’s Asia-Pacific strategic layout. The cohesion and unity of the alliance system continue to weaken.
(2) The Core Operating Logic of the Second Island Chain Strategy
The core transformative logic of the Second Island Chain strategy is to strip away all non-core, non-essential U.S. overseas defense obligations, focus on the two core interests of homeland security and global sea lanes, and achieve burden reduction, stop-loss, and focus in America’s Asia-Pacific strategy.
The U.S. military completely abandons the high-risk, high-exposure, low-survivability First Island Chain forward dense deployment and retreats core combat power to the Second Island Chain depth base cluster — farther away, more resistant to strikes, and with a higher strategic margin for error. Under the new strategic layout, the United States retains wartime strategic intervention capability but completely escapes the fatal risks of forward garrisons being destroyed in a first strike and being dragged into war by allies, eliminating the strategic predicament of passive involvement in a large-scale regional war.
This strategic adjustment is by no means a comprehensive U.S. abandonment of Western Pacific influence. The United States will continue to retain all non-military influence tools in the Western Pacific, including maritime freedom of navigation operations, full-spectrum intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, multilateral diplomatic engagement, and regional economic cooperation. The sole core adjustment is the strategic retreat of military forces and the complete elimination of unconditional, indiscriminate collective defense obligations along the First Island Chain.
At the crisis management level, force withdrawal can sharply reduce the frequency of close-range U.S.-China sea and air confrontations, reduce daily friction points and conflict flashpoints, and fundamentally lower the war risk of miscalculation-driven escalation and accidental discharge, achieving stabilization and de-escalation of the regional situation.
On the Taiwan Strait question, the United States should publicly, clearly, and firmly declare a strategic position of no military intervention, thoroughly ending the strategic ambiguity policy that has lasted for decades. The strategic ambiguity policy has long produced dual risks: it easily leads the Taiwan region to misjudge America’s will to intervene and take risky provocative actions, and it also leads the mainland to continuously strengthen military preparations and increase countermeasures. It is an important root cause of persistent tension in the Taiwan Strait. A clear, public non-intervention position can minimize the risk of war in the Taiwan Strait and prevent direct great-power confrontation.
(3) Phased Implementation Plan
Phase One is short-term adjustment, with a cycle of one to two years. The United States formally announces its strategic adjustment intentions to all Asia-Pacific allies and completes internal policy assessment and strategic consensus building. It simultaneously launches Second Island Chain base hardening, logistics expansion, and air and missile defense system upgrade projects, and preliminarily reduces the standing scale of forward fighters, missiles, and surface vessels along the First Island Chain.
Phase Two is medium-term implementation, with a cycle of three to five years. It fully withdraws standing ground garrisons from South Korea and the Philippines and massively compresses forward combat units of U.S. forces in Japan. Main fighter aircraft, strategic bombers, and large surface vessel combat clusters are fully transferred to depth bases in Guam and northern Australia. It launches renegotiation of the U.S.-Japan, U.S.-Philippines, and U.S.-South Korea alliance treaties, systematically contracting unconditional security commitments.
Phase Three is long-term wrap-up, running through 2035. It fully completes the Asia-Pacific military system restructuring, thoroughly forming a distributed, high-survivability, low-risk defense architecture with the Second Island Chain as its absolute core. It terminates full-coverage collective defense treaties, establishes a selective, partner-based, adjustable new security cooperation mechanism, and thoroughly ends the First Island Chain forward containment strategy.
(4) Systematic Response to Mainstream Objections
This report anticipates and systematically responds to four categories of core objections to the strategic withdrawal proposal.
Regarding the objection that withdrawal will completely collapse U.S. deterrence and cause a regional power imbalance, the report responds that false forward deterrence lacking survivability is strategically meaningless. Proactive withdrawal to preserve core living forces and build a high-survivability depth deterrence system can, on the contrary, sustain regional strategic balance over the long term and avoid the fatal risk of one-time strategic collapse.
Regarding the objection that allies will tilt toward adversaries and the United States will lose influence in East Asia, the report responds that regional countries’ core demands are economic development and regional stability, and their diplomatic orientations are rooted in core national interests and will not undergo fundamental reversal because of U.S. force adjustments. Moderate contraction of influence is a necessary cost of avoiding great-power war and constitutes an acceptable strategic trade-off.
Regarding the objection that strategic contraction will trigger regional nuclear proliferation and allies’ independent nuclear armament, the report responds that regional countries’ nuclear arms development is an autonomous strategic choice of sovereign states. The United States should not be forced to bear the fatal risk of involvement in an all-out great-power war in order to prevent regional nuclear proliferation; strategic stop-loss takes priority over regional order management.
Regarding the objection that U.S. global strategic credibility will collapse and trust among allies in other regions will decline, the report responds that the core of great-power strategy is measured trade-offs and focus on essentials. The United States must distinguish core survival interests from secondary regional interests, refrain from overdrawing national destiny and draining national strength for subordinate geopolitical interests, and rationally contract excessive commitments — this is the key to rebuilding a sustainable global strategy.
VIII. An Independent Critical Review of the Underlying Premises of The Second Island Chain Strategy for Asia
A complete reading of the think tank’s full text makes it clear that all of the report’s core conclusions rest on multiple idealized, one-sided, and subjective premises. It suffers from serious logical flaws and cognitive biases, which are also the central reason the report has sparked enormous controversy within the U.S. strategic community.
The report is overly optimistic in its assessment of East Asian allies’ capacity for autonomous balancing, unilaterally asserting that after a U.S. withdrawal, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and others will spontaneously form a balanced regional defense system without triggering disorderly arms races or regional confrontation. It completely ignores the geopolitical reality of complex historical grievances, territorial disputes, and security conflicts among East Asian states. Autonomous military expansion would only exacerbate regional division and confrontation; it cannot produce automatic equilibrium.
The report severely underestimates the global chain-reaction effects of a collapse in U.S. strategic credibility, narrowly framing that credibility as a matter of homeland security alone. It overlooks the fact that America’s global alliance system is an integrated, interconnected organic whole. A loss of credibility in the Asia-Pacific would transmit directly to NATO in Europe, Middle Eastern allies, and every security partner worldwide, triggering a trust crisis across the entire U.S. global alliance system and inflicting irreparable damage to hegemonic credibility.
The report deliberately simplifies the global spillover risks of a Taiwan Strait conflict, naively assuming that if the United States does not militarily intervene, the conflict will remain confined to the Taiwan Strait. It ignores the Taiwan Strait’s strategic position as the core of the global semiconductor industry and the heart of Western Pacific energy shipping. Any conflict there would violently convulse global industrial chains, supply chains, and energy chains, producing a worldwide economic and geopolitical crisis whose spillover risks cannot be avoided.
The report wrongly concludes that strategic withdrawal can reduce defense costs, ignoring the enormous long-term costs of Second Island Chain base expansion, distributed deployment, long-range logistics resupply, and routine long-distance maneuver. Force withdrawal is merely cost transfer, not cost reduction; long-term fiscal pressure remains immense.
The report completely disregards America’s four-year political cycle and the polarized two-party landscape, presupposing that a long-term strategic reform can be steadily implemented between 2030 and 2035. It ignores the disruptive impact of party alternation, regime change, and political contestation on national strategy. Cross-cycle stable implementation of strategy essentially lacks any realistic political foundation.
In sum, the report is a classic case of a policy recommendation in which school-of-thought positioning takes precedence and value judgments outweigh factual judgments. It represents the ideological demands of America’s neo-isolationist and strategic restraint camp, not an objective, neutral, comprehensive, and balanced geopolitical assessment document.
IX. Comprehensive Feedback and Public Discourse Review: U.S. Officials, Congress, Mainstream Think Tanks, and Global Media on the Report
(1) Attitudes of U.S. Officials and Congress
The White House, the Department of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued no official positive statements on the report, adopting an overall official tone of cold-shouldering, non-endorsement, and non-adoption. This represents a complete rejection of the radical retrenchment proposal by the U.S. executive and military authority structure.
Congressional defense hawks, traditional Republican establishment figures, and Democratic global interventionists formed a cross-party unified opposition, publicly criticizing the report as a defeatist, surrender-style strategy that abandons America’s global leadership, actively squanders seventy years of Asia-Pacific geopolitical gains, and appeases the rise of a regional hegemon. Congressional defense committees made clear they would not support any policy adjustment involving a large-scale withdrawal from the First Island Chain, abandonment of Taiwan Strait deterrence, or dismantling of the Asia-Pacific alliance system.
A minority of neo-isolationist and strategic restraint lawmakers within Congress endorsed the report’s ideas, arguing that moderate contraction of overseas obligations and a focus on domestic development serve America’s long-term national interests, forming a minority supportive force.
(2) Collective Criticism from America’s Top Mainstream Think Tanks
RAND Corporation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Center for a New American Security, and other top U.S. establishment think tanks simultaneously released targeted assessment reports collectively rebutting Defense Priorities’ strategic withdrawal proposal. Mainstream think tanks concurred that the proposal overmagnifies short-term military risks and severely underestimates the long-term fatal costs of strategic credibility loss, alliance collapse, and regional loss of control, making it a one-sided, radical, and short-sighted strategic recommendation.
The core consensus among mainstream think tanks is that the First Island Chain remains the core strategic asset by which the United States controls the Western Pacific, counterbalances regional great powers, and binds East Asian allies. Abandoning forward deployment would directly terminate America’s Asia-Pacific hegemonic order, and the strategic costs would far outweigh the strategic benefits.
(3) Feedback from the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex and Defense Industry
The U.S. defense industry, defense contractors, and national defense supply chain enterprises are comprehensively and resolutely opposed to the report’s proposal. First Island Chain forward garrisons, base construction, routine combat readiness, and alliance arms sales are a stable and enormous revenue source for the U.S. defense industry. Force withdrawal, base streamlining, alliance contraction, and deterrence downgrading would directly lead to declining arms sales orders, shrinking infrastructure projects, industrial scale contraction, and job losses, severely damaging core U.S. military-industrial interests. Industry groups have formed absolute resistance to the proposal.
(4) Assessment by Russian Strategic Studies Circles
Mainstream Russian strategic research institutions and official media generally view the report as a landmark text signaling the overextension, cost blowout, and eroding advantage of U.S. unipolar hegemony, fully demonstrating that the United States is no longer capable of sustaining a borderless global hegemony over the long term. The Russian side assesses that U.S. strategic contraction is an irresistible trend that will continue to accelerate the formation of a multipolar global order and broaden the space for China-Russia strategic coordination. At the same time, Russia objectively points out that the proposal faces enormous obstacles to implementation and that America’s hegemonic retreat will be a long, tug-of-war, repeatedly contested process.
(5) Overall Reactions of East Asian Regional Countries
Japanese and South Korean defense research institutions are generally highly anxious, unanimously holding that once the report is implemented, it would thoroughly upend the post-war East Asian security order, forcing Japan and South Korea to completely restructure their national defense strategies, substantially increase military spending, and seek autonomous strategic deterrence, with regional security uncertainty intensifying to unprecedented levels.
The Philippines and Australia hold contradictory and complex attitudes, concerned about the regional instability brought by U.S. contraction while also hoping to reduce the war risk of being held hostage by great-power rivalry, leaving them strategically wavering overall.
(6) Mainstream Views in Chinese Strategic Studies Circles
Domestic strategic studies circles generally judge that the report is merely an expression of an internal U.S. ideological current and lacks the political foundation and practical conditions for short-term implementation. The powerful resistance from the U.S. establishment, military-industrial groups, and the alliance system will thoroughly lock down the possibility of radical strategic contraction. The report’s core value is that it marks the U.S. strategic community’s formal acknowledgment that the First Island Chain containment strategy has failed and that the traditional hegemonic model is unsustainable — an important public opinion signal of the reversal in great-power balance.
Academic circles simultaneously emphasize that even if the United States begins gradual strategic contraction, long-term great-power competition in technology, trade, rules, and geopolitics will not end. The form of rivalry will shift from forward military confrontation to a more diverse, more protracted, and more covert system-level contest.
(7) Hedging Positions of ASEAN and Global South Countries
Core ASEAN research institutions maintain an overall neutral and prudent stance, neither supporting continued U.S. reinforcement of high-pressure confrontation along the First Island Chain nor endorsing a radical, destabilizing full U.S. withdrawal. ASEAN countries’ core demands are to maintain regional neutrality, preserve great-power balance, avoid escalation of confrontation, and safeguard trade stability. They oppose any extreme strategic adjustment that upends the existing regional order.
The broader Global South generally focuses on economic development and sea lane security, maintaining a neutral wait-and-see attitude toward adjustments in U.S. alliance strategy, refusing to take sides in great-power rivalry, and prioritizing the protection of their own core development interests.
X. Final Chapter: Twilight of an Empire — Strategic Rebalancing in a Multipolar World
Drawing together authoritative global nuclear force assessments, the hypersonic technology generation gap, carrier-based equipment engineering shortcomings, the global ammunition production crisis, cross-regional strategic overstretch, national fiscal cost constraints, the fracturing of the alliance system, and the great global strategic debate ignited by The Second Island Chain Strategy for Asia, a final dialectical strategic conclusion can be reached.
The unipolar containment system in the Western Pacific that the United States built around the First Island Chain is entering an irreversible twilight cycle. This is not an instantaneous military collapse, but a long-term structural shift in which the operating costs of a decades-old hegemonic system continue to rise, relative advantages continue to erode, and strategic cost-effectiveness continues to deteriorate.
Defense Priorities’ strategic retrenchment report is a systematic stop-loss reflection on America’s hegemonic predicament by realist factions, restraint currents, and neo-isolationist forces within the United States. It accurately captures the core contradictions of current U.S. Asia-Pacific strategy and possesses extraordinarily high representativeness as an ideological current and historical landmark significance.
At the same time, it must be clearly recognized that the report contains numerous idealized premises and structural logical flaws. It faces comprehensive resistance from U.S. officials, Congress, establishment think tanks, the defense industry, and the alliance system, and the probability of its full implementation is extremely low. It is not national policy about to be executed, but an important ideological signal and strategic rehearsal of the U.S. hegemony entering a decline cycle.
The future geopolitical landscape of the Western Pacific will enter a long period of dynamic restructuring. The United States will not completely withdraw from the Asia-Pacific, nor can it continue to maintain absolute hegemonic advantage. The old model of high-pressure forward confrontation along the First Island Chain is gradually failing. Strategic contraction, force withdrawal, obligation streamlining, and risk controllability will become the implicit long-term trend of U.S. strategic adjustment.
The so-called twilight of an empire refers to the slow curtain fall of the unipolar hegemonic order, the end of the era of absolute advantage, and the steady rise of a new multipolar global order. The great Asia-Pacific strategic debate ignited by an American think tank report in 2026 formally marks the beginning of a new historical iteration in the century-old geopolitical order of the Western Pacific.
References
[1] SIPRI. SIPRI Yearbook 2026: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security
[2] CBO. Long-Term Defense Budget Projections, 2026
[3] IISS. The Military Balance 2026
[4] U.S. GAO. F-35 Sustainment and Weapon Production Capacity Assessment, 2026
[5] Defense Priorities. A Second-Island-Chain Strategy for Asia, 2026 (original English edition of the report)
[6] RAND Corporation. First Island Chain Base Survivability Wargame Analysis
[7] RSIS. Southeast Asia and the Great Power Competition, 2026
[8] Congressional Research Service. U.S. Indo-Pacific Security Policy Background Report
