Donald Trump’s failing war against Iran is stretching the limits of U.S. aircraft carriers and leaving the western Pacific without one of the key American warships as China shows more signs of aggression.
The USS George Washington is departing the Pacific and expected to replace the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East amid growing concerns about mental health and supply issues aboard the long-deployed carrier. The Lincoln has had its time at sea extended from its original May return date to support operations against Iran.
The removal of the USS George Washington from the western Pacific is a strategic admission of Trump’s failure, his capitulation of American power in Asia, and an abdication of that dominant role to China.
At the same time Beijing is testing Japan, pressuring the Philippines, staging drills near contested waters, and cultivating regional partners such as Indonesia, Trump is pulling one of the most visible symbols of American deterrence out of the theater. The message to allies is unmistakable. Washington’s stated priority may be Asia, but Trump’s operational choices are telling a different story.
The lack of a U.S. carrier in the Pacific shows how the open-ended operations with Iran are running some American sailors ragged, analysts say, while the Trump administration further abandons the Asia-Pacific region to refocus on where Trump and his political benefactors can personally profit at the expense of American interests.
“The administration says that the Pacific is supposed to be the most important behind the Western Hemisphere,” said Greg Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Instead, the U.S. is “doing the exact opposite” of its previously expressed goal of pulling out of the Middle East.
American allies in the Pacific are unsettled over the unpredictability of the Republican administration, Poling said, while Beijing “is quite happy with U.S. distraction, with the frustration of U.S. allies and partners.”
CHINA MAY TAKE ADVANTAGE OF U.S. CARRIER’S ABSENCE
Beijing sees the U.S. military presence in the region as a threat to China’s rise and an obstacle to its ambition to seize Taiwan, the self-governing island it claims as its own. But the United States has argued that the Pacific region is too important economically to lose.
No one expects China to invade Taiwan because an American aircraft carrier has left the region. But the carrier’s absence gives the Chinese another opportunity to show its strength, said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner who is a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute.
“They’re using this as part of the narrative to demonstrate to the Philippines, to Japan, to Indonesia and others that the U.S. is not the big dog in the western Pacific anymore,” Clark said. “They would just prefer that countries in the region decide that China is the bigger power and the U.S. is not able to guarantee their security anymore.”
China conducted naval exercises with Indonesia and has shown signs of aggression toward Japan and the Philippines, two key U.S. allies that also have territorial disputes with Beijing.
China carried out military drills this month near the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. Both China and the Philippines have claims over the shoal. Last month, a Chinese guided-missile destroyer conducted a live-fire exercise off Japan’s southernmost island of Okinotori.
Evan Sankey, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute who focuses on U.S. policy toward China, said aircraft carriers provide psychological assurance to U.S. allies. The absence of carriers in the region, he said, “adds to the general sense that the U.S. is distracted by events in the Middle East.”
TRUMP HAS RELIED ON AIRCRAFT CARRIERS FOR MILITARY ACTIONS
Trump has relied heavily on aircraft carriers to support military operations during his second term. For example, the USS Gerald R. Ford returned home in mid-May after an 11-month deployment, the longest since the Vietnam War, during which it supported the U.S. fight against Iran and the capture of Venezuela’s then-leader, Nicolás Maduro.
The Ford had experienced a fire in a laundry space that forced the carrier to turn around and return to the Mediterranean Sea for repairs and left hundreds of sailors without places to sleep. Meanwhile, the Lincoln has spent a record uninterrupted time at sea of more than 240 days. Democratic lawmakers have been calling for investigations and greater visibility into conditions aboard the ship.
Warships and their crews can only handle so much, said Robert Farley, who teaches national security and diplomacy at the University of Kentucky and often writes about aircraft carriers.
“People don’t get enough rest. It’s psychologically exhausting. And R&R is part of keeping the crew healthy,” Farley said. “Sometimes it’s framed as, ‘These people haven’t had a vacation.’ But we are dealing with well-known limits on the capacity of a crew to operate at top efficiency over time. And that just declines.”
Clark, of the Hudson Institute, said the squeeze on the nation’s aircraft carriers stems from the lack of preparation and planning for the Iran war.
“If we were going to mobilize to do this kind of conflict, and we anticipated it might go this long, we might have done some changes to the carrier schedule to make sure more would be available,” Clark said.
Clark said the Navy has 11 aircraft carriers and typically deploys two or three at a time. But it could soon deploy four if the USS Theodore Roosevelt leaves San Diego for the Middle East, allowing the Washington to return to the Pacific.
But the massive warships will need maintenance, likely causing a bottleneck at the nation’s only two carrier shipyards.
“We’ll end up with a maintenance debt that needs to be paid for the next few years,” Clark said. “We’ll probably have less carrier presence than we’ve had in the previous years because carriers will be lined up to get into the shipyard.”
THERE ARE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE USE OF AIRCRAFT CARRIERS IN MODERN WARFARE
Michael Swaine, a senior research fellow in the Quincy Institute’s East Asia Program, questions the future need for aircraft carriers as warfare rapidly changes.
Carriers can be more easily targeted with drones and missiles, particularly by an adversary such as China, Swaine said, while smaller ships and submarines can be as effective in striking targets as the fighter jets that launch off a carrier.
Top Navy officials have indicated a desire to move away from a heavy reliance on carriers. Admiral Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, said in February that he wants to convince commanders to use smaller, newer ships and other assets instead of consistently turning to huge platforms.
Aircraft carriers remain among the most powerful tools in the U.S. military, but their value is no longer defined only by the number of aircraft they carry or the reach of their strike groups.
China has spent years building what military planners call an area-denial network of long-range missiles, submarines, drones, cyber capabilities, satellites, over-the-horizon radar, and other surveillance systems designed to find, track, and threaten large U.S. ships before they can operate close to China’s coast.
Those measures do not make carriers obsolete, but substantially increase their vulnerability and effectiveness.
The strategic problem is that a carrier concentrates enormous combat power in one highly visible platform. In earlier decades, that concentration gave the United States flexibility and dominance.
But in order to project that power, those resources require more concentrated protection. Iran has shown the superior technology of the U.S. military, but also its Achilles’ heel. Those advanced weapons are expensive, require years to manufacture from a shrinking industrial base, and have left inventories catastrophically depleted.
Then on August 16, Trump ordered the Pentagon to scale back planned joint military exercises with South Korea after the Republican president said South Korea declined to help denuclearize Iran.
That retreat echoes his earlier willingness to treat allied readiness as a bargaining chip for personal diplomacy with Kim Jong Un. By draining American resources, Trump is giving China and Russia exactly what they want with a less reliable United States, more anxious allies, and a regional narrative where power – not law – sets the terms.
Trump said in a social media post that the exercises were costly and “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, which he said “has been unthreatening and respectful” while Trump has been in the White House.
“Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises!” Trump wrote.
The 11 days of exercises involving 18,000 South Korean soldiers were designed to beef up readiness against North Korean threats.
U.S. and South Korean forces were expected to practice joint operations in complex scenarios, including a live-fire exercise to test joint precision targeting and maneuver, a wet gap crossing, and distribution of prepositioned military equipment, according to the U.S. military.
A day earlier, Trump posted a photo of himself standing next to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, writing that the two leaders get along great “despite the unfriendly look on this particular picture.”
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry has called the U.S.-South Korean training “a rehearsal for an aggressive war” that is triggering a different level of instability in the region.
Trump met with the reclusive North Korean leader three times during his first term to discuss the country’s nuclear program, most recently in 2019. Since returning to office, Trump has expressed interest in continuing those discussions.
This is not the first time that Trump has sought to end the exercises. During his first term he also issued a surprise announcement that called the wargames “provocative.”
“We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should,” Trump told reporters after his 2018 meeting with Kim Jong Un in Singapore.
