ABSTRACT
The United States’ Asia-Pacific security posture is being currently shaped by two countervailing factors. The importance of the United States as a regional security actor is enhanced by the unwillingness or inability of Asian states to trust each other sufficiently to forge a new regional balance of power on their own. This invests Washington, by default, with the status of ‘honest broker’ for Asian security issues. Its ability to fulfil that role, however, is impeded by domestic budgetary constraints. These will lead to substantial reductions in US defence forces by the end of this century unless a new global or regional adversary emerges to take the place of the now defunct Soviet military threat. As recently noted by one respected American security analyst, US force planning in the Asia-Pacific is shifting away from ‘threat driven’ calculations for military deployments to ‘uncertainty-based models’. 1 These new criteria are being employed to rationalize cuts in US force deployments throughout the region, it is hoped without ceding regional strategic predominance in the process.
