ABD, Hint-Pasifik Komutanlığını Pasifik Komutanlığı Olarak Yeniden Adlandırdı

Goodbye Indo-Pacific, hello first island chain!

On June 16, the Pentagon announced that U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) would revert to its 1947 name, U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM). U.S. officials called it a restoration of "deep historical roots" and insisted that the command's area of responsibility, stretching from the U.S. West Coast to India's western maritime boundary, would remain "exactly the same." Given that PACOM was the command’s name during the Cold War contestations with China and the Soviet Union, the reversion to the older name seems to be just another of those Trump 2.0 nostalgias: a feel-good invocation of America’s past glories. But there’s much more here than meets the eye. In practice, the renaming is yet another signal of a U.S. strategic reorientation in Asia that was articulated in the administration's November 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS). A major step in this direction was the demotion of the Quad grouping — which includes the U.S., India, Japan and Australia — from the principals’ level to the foreign ministers’ level. Another is the rapid waning of the use of “Indo-Pacific” in U.S. discourse. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for instance, entirely avoided the term during his speech at the Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore recently, using “Pacific” instead. Read together, these tell a consistent story: Washington has shifted its security strategy toward China from the Biden administration and the first Trump administration, which followed a coalition-based vision that spanned a broad geography of multi-dimensional partnerships in South and Southeast Asia. In its place, the United States is now focused on a narrower, militarized line of defense, specifically the First Island Chain, which runs from Japan to the Philippines. The NSS states plainly that the United States must "deter adversaries and protect the First Island Chain.” This is no longer a strategy that aims for the widest possible U.S.-aligned bloc, with plurilateral plays such as the Quad and the Biden-era Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. It is denial-based deterrence, organized around a concentrated and circumscribed geography. India and much of Southeast Asia fall outside this geography. Curiously, Taiwan, though located in the First Island Chain, too is being de-emphasized by Washington. It was entirely missing from Hegseth’s recent speech at the Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore. The flexibility on Taiwan — possibly the byproduct of a tentative attempt by U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to delineate spheres of influence — is compensated for by doubling down further on cooperation with and reliance on Japan, the Philippines, and to a significant degree, Australia. The NSS pairs this narrowing with explicit burden-shifting and the prioritization of access. Washington's "diplomatic efforts," the strategy states, will focus on "pressing our First Island Chain allies and partners to allow the U.S. military greater access to their ports and other facilities, to spend more on their own defense, and most importantly to invest in capabilities aimed at deterring aggression." Translated, this means Tokyo and Manila are no longer merely partners in an abstract "free and open" vision; they are now the forward-deployed infrastructure of U.S.-led deterrence. The placement of Typhon missile systems in Japan's Kagoshima and Yamaguchi Prefectures and the Philippines' Zambales province, and NMESIS anti-ship batteries on Okinawa, Batanes, and Luzon, is the physical manifestation of this doctrine. As the Quad falls from grace, the “Squad” is rising. The Squad — comprising the United States, Japan, Australia, and the Philippines — was formed in 2023. But over time, it is shaping up as a more potent successor. Unlike the Quad, all four Squad members are treaty allies, all are unambiguous about its role as a defense group, and all are better positioned around the geography that actually matters militarily. The USPACOM rename makes explicit what the Squad's rise had already signaled informally. As I have written previously, Manila is replacing New Delhi in Washington's security calculus. This is not because the Philippines can ever match India’s much greater size and industrial capacity, but rather because Manila is a deeply embedded U.S. ally, and, crucially, sits at the very heart of the First Island Chain. The clear casualty of this shift is the "Indo" in “Indo-Pacific,” i.e., India's place as a strategic centerpiece. Even as India’s role has diminished in U.S. priorities, Washington appears to be taking a larger, regional role in South Asia. The embrace of India as a core bulwark of the U.S. strategy toward China has deep roots, going back to the George W. Bush administration’s daring 2005 nuclear deal offer to New Delhi, which was consummated in 2008. With every presidency thereafter, this embrace only deepened. But it was Trump in his first term who took the full leap toward countering Beijing, with his 2017 National Security Strategy branding China as a “revisionist state,” his revival of the moribund Quad, and his signing of key military inter-operability agreements with New Delhi. The 2018 USINDOPACOM rebrand was meant to fuse the Indian and Pacific Oceans into a single contested space, with New Delhi cast as one the core pillars of a regional order that hemmed in China. There was always a tension there between India’s projection as a pillar of the security strategy and its own reluctance to go beyond the Indian Ocean. Threatened by a nasty nexus of the Chinese state and the Pakistani military on its northern and western land borders, India sees the South China and East China Seas as out-of-area theaters. The 2025 NSS, tellingly, devotes scant attention to South and Southeast Asia. Neither the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, AUKUS (a defense arrangement between the United States, Australia, and the U.K, announced in 2021) nor the Pacific Islands earn any mention in the document, even as it found space for an extended treatment of the First Island Chain. Dropping "Indo" from the command's name simply entrenches the new hierarchy of priorities. None of this means the broader "Indo-Pacific" concept will disappear entirely from the Asian theater. Japan, whose then-leader Shinzo Abe coined the concept in 2007, will keep championing it independently, with or without Washington. But the institutional center of gravity has moved. Where the Indo-Pacific rhetoric, with the Quad as its institutional expression, suffered from an identity crisis between its security and public goods aims and cast a wide net across the region, the First Island Chain doctrine is concentrated, transactional, and military-centric. Where the Quad tried, and largely failed, to deliver vaccines and infrastructure as a public-goods club, the new, Squad-infused architecture deals almost exclusively in access, missiles, basing rights, and burden-sharing logic. Thus, the resurrection of USPACOM is the symbolic capstone of the new U.S. security architecture. The First Island Chain, not the wider Indo-Pacific, is where American grand strategy in Asia now lives.