Really?
Barely four months into his tenure, Defense Secretary Mark Esper is making his second trek across the Pacific. And yet it is the Middle East - most recently a near-war with Iran and an actual war in Syria - that in Washington commands more attention and demands more American troops.
I have a lot of respect for Robert Burns, but American military deployments of 65,000 in Europe, 133,000 in the Asia-Pacific, and 13,000 in the Middle East (plus about 15,000 in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan) do not indicate that American power is being sucked back to the Middle East instead of going to INDOPACOM.
Really, this is just another example of the inability of America to pivot away from the Middle East that began under Obama.
Although to be clear, the pivot to Asia began at the end of the Cold War when the Soviet threat evaporated.
NOTE: I added our troops in combat theaters of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I had just scanned the list and checked the bottom line. But later that number seemed too low and I noticed why.
