Obama and Trump’s marine machismo in the Indo-Pacific
Journal: Manchester University Press eBooks
Year: 2020

This chapter explores the maritime approaches of Presidents Obama and Trump in the Indo-Pacific region, against the backdrop of the continual rise of China’s modernising navy. It is argued that from 2009 Obama made the US Navy the linchpin in his Asia Pacific strategy, a policy choice to which Trump from 2017 added more marine machismo. More than a foreign policy shift, Obama’s ‘Pivot’ to Asia from around 2011 represented a fundamental reorientation of the US Navy from the Atlantic to the Pacifi