NYT diplomatic correspondent Edward Wong observes that “Asian allies are beginning to wonder whether the United States would or could defend them in a war.”

It was the worst clash in years between China and the Philippines at a long-simmering flashpoint in the South China Sea.

For decades, the Philippines has claimed a small reef in disputed waters and signaled its control of the territory by rotating troops to a World War II-era ship grounded there. An international tribunal ruling a decade ago supports the Philippines’ claim.

But last month, a Chinese Coast Guard vessel began circling the ship, which is named the Sierra Madre. It was the latest in a long series of encounters between the two governments at the site, which is called the Second Thomas Shoal.

At one point, the Chinese Coast Guard used small boats to move in on Filipino service members and beat one of the men with a wooden baton, inflicting head injuries, according to Philippine and U.S. officials. China blamed the Philippines for provoking the clash.

The American ambassador expressed outrage and declared that the United States stood with the Philippines, the oldest U.S. treaty ally in Southeast Asia.

Yet no one expects China to curb its expansionist activities in the region anytime soon. And there are growing doubts among Asian nations over what the United States would be willing to do to deter China, given the enormous distraction and resource drain of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.

The 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty suggests that “an armed attack on the metropolitan territory of either of the Parties, or on the island territories under its jurisdiction in the Pacific or on its armed forces, public vessels or aircraft in the Pacific” would trigger action. But, as with the more famous Article 5 of the NATO Charter (“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all . . .”), a military response is not explicitly required.

China has been pushing the limits in disputed territories for years now, across many U.S. presidential administrations. None have done much about it, understandably not wanting to trigger escalation.

Meanwhile, China has engaged in a massive military buildup that we’ve been admiring without much response for the better part of a quarter century. And, of course, exhausting ourselves with wars over tertiary interests.

The United States is running low on critical weapons, including air defense interceptors. Iran’s missile and drone attacks have forced U.S. troops to leave bases in the Middle East and destroyed the sites, an indication of what the Chinese military — which is much more powerful than Iran’s — could do in a conflict in Asia.

While we’ve been talking about a potential war with China since at least the Obama administration’s 2011 “Pivot to Asia,” the response has been mostly rhetorical. We’ve lamented the demise of our defense industrial base for years and have only just begun to do something about it. We’ve known for a long time that we don’t have enough air defense interceptors and other exquisite missiles to last more than a few days in a fight with the PRC.

Mr. Trump’s second term “has been a colossal failure for U.S. interests in the Asia region,” Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement.

“This strategy, if you can call it one, is a gift to China that is undermining U.S. credibility and harming our national security,” he added.

Trump appointees say the administration is not ceding ground in Asia. In a speech in Manila on Aug. 10, Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, said the Trump administration aimed to “maintain a posture of deterrence by denial along the first island chain” — meaning it was willing to commit military resources to dissuade China from invading or attacking islands that include Taiwan and ones in the Philippines and Japan.

But Mr. Colby also said allies needed to spend more on defense and should try to integrate their militaries with that of the United States — and “not vainly and futilely seek to exclude or supplant us.”

Colby is a China hawk, who has long advocated getting out of the Middle East and demanding our NATO allies shoulder the lion’s share of the burden in defending Europe against Russian aggression so that we can posture and equip our forces to stop Chinese aggression. In particular, he believes preventing or repelling a PRC invasion of Taiwan should be our pacing challenge.

While the 2026 National Defense Strategy reduces China to the number two priority, behind defense of the Americas, and uses much more conciliatory language about the PRC than recent versions, very much including the Trump 45 administration’s, it does declare that,

[T]he Indo-Pacific will soon make up more than half of the global economy. The American people’s security, freedom, and prosperity are therefore directly linked to our ability to trade and engage from a position of strength in the Indo-Pacific. Were China—or anyone else, for that matter—to dominate this broad and crucial region, it would be able to effectively veto Americans’ access to the world’s economic center of gravity, with enduring implications for our nation’s economic prospects, including our ability to reindustrialize. That is why the NSS directs DoW to maintain a favorable balance of military power in the Indo-Pacific. Not for purposes of dominating, humiliating, or strangling China. To the contrary, our goal is far more scoped and reasonable than that: It is simply to ensure that neither China nor anyone else can dominate us or our allies. This does not require regime change or some other existential struggle. Rather, a decent peace, on terms favorable to Americans but that China can also accept and live under, is possible.

Later, it declares

[I]t is our essential responsibility at DoW to ensure that President Trump is always able to negotiate from a position of strength in order to sustain peace in the Indo-Pacific. To that end, as the NSS directs, we will build, posture, and sustain a strong denial defense along the FIC. We will also work closely with our allies and partners in the region to incentivize and enable them to do more for our collective defense, especially in ways that are relevant to an effective denial defense. Through these efforts, we will make clear that any attempt at aggression against U.S. interests will fail and is therefore not worth attempting in the first place. That is the essence of deterrence by denial. In this manner, DoW will provide the military strength for President Trump’s visionary and realistic diplomacy, thereby setting conditions for a balance of power in the Indo-Pacific that allows all of us—the United States, China, and others in the region—to enjoy a decent peace. At the same time, in the process of erecting a strong denial defense along the FIC, DoW will ensure that the Joint Force always has the ability to conduct devastating strikes and operations against targets anywhere in the world, including directly from the U.S. Homeland, thereby providing the President with second-to-none operational flexibility and agility.

The FIC is the First Island Chain, a term dating back to the early Cold War for the string of archipelagoes from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines. It has long been considered the boundary for containment. Taiwan is literally at the center of the FIC and considered crucial.

Still, the United States has long maintained a policy of “strategic ambiguity” as to whether we would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack. As I’ve frequently discussed with my students over the years, we’re a long way from the days of the Kennedy-Nixon debates, where the candidates spent four minutes debating the defense of Quemoy and Matsu, assuming the public knew what the hell they were talking about. It would be difficult, indeed, to convince today’s Americans that it would be worth the bloodbath of a fight with a peer competitor to defend an island of 23 million people they barely know exists.

Mr. Trump’s global trade war, whose targets have included Southeast Asian nations, has also revealed to allies and partners that the United States can be a commercial antagonist.

The U.S. government has lacked an economic vision for Southeast Asia for years, as Democratic and Republican politicians retreated from a Pacific Rim trade pact that President Barack Obama promoted.

That has left countries in Southeast Asia wondering what happened to the U.S. drive to ensure that it remains a presence that balances against China.

Failing to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a huge own-goal. But it’s worth noting that Hillary Clinton also disowned the agreement, despite having helped negotiate it. The political tide in America, and indeed the West writ large, has turned against liberal internationalism, seeing it as to blame for the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs and the decline of the middle class.

While Southeast Asian countries do not want to be trapped in a great-power clash between the United States and China, “they still want to feel the United States is a healthy counterweight to the P.R.C.,” said Mira Rapp-Hooper, who served on the National Security Council during the Biden administration and is now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. She was using the initials for the formal name for China, the People’s Republic of China.

“So the perception that the United States is drifting as an alternative has also left a real impression on many of these partners,” she added.

It’s not an unreasonable concern.

While Mr. Trump has talked about China as an economic rival, he also embraced the superpower after it successfully retaliated during his tariff war last year.

During a summit in Beijing in May, Mr. Trump expressed admiration for President Xi Jinping of China, and he is preparing to host Mr. Xi at a state visit in Washington in late September.

Mr. Trump’s move to build what he calls a “G2” — Group of Two — relationship with China has upended a growing bipartisan push in Washington in the last decade to confront China as a hostile rival.

This, not surprisingly, fuels the angst that the Trump administration’s stated strategy is not actually its policy. Or that it has no strategy at all and operates on the fleeting whims of the President.

Still, most of the evidence Wong presents is less than convincing.

As the Trump-Xi bonhomie grows, some Asian countries are feeling left out, yet are also opting to stay on China’s friendly side.

That is especially true when China remains the largest trading partner for many of the countries, and the United States is not working on presenting economic alternatives.

“We’re in a very difficult position because you know we want to have that maximal relationship with both sides,” said Richard Heydarian, a political scientist from the Philippines. “And then for countries like the Philippines, it’s even more impossible because the U.S. is a military ally. We need the U.S. when it comes to the China threat, but the U.S. is not giving us much love on anything beyond the military aspect.”

The ASEAN members have been hedging for decades, intentionally avoiding being too much in either the US or PRC’s camp. Two decades ago, Evelyn Goh coined the term “omni-enmeshment” to describe a strategy of entangling the major powers in a cooperative web of diplomatic, economic, and institutional networks to maintain regional stability.

It’s certainly true that the Trump administration is less active on the economic front than its predecessor. Still, it has at least publicly emphasized its security commitment.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in Manila last month during an annual forum of Southeast Asian nations that the U.S. military was determined to push back against China’s expansionist efforts.

“We’re never going to accept that international waterways are somehow under the control of other countries,” he said. “We’ll continue to sail through international waterways and freedom of navigation efforts of that kind, and we’ll continue to live up to our commitments — for example, with the Philippines and other countries — in terms of the treaty commitments that we have.”

That’s quite unambiguous. Whether they believe this rhetoric would be followed by action should it come to that, I can’t say. But there is also this:

The military cooperation has continued under Mr. Trump, despite the resource drain of the Iran war. In May, the U.S. and Philippine militaries tested a Typhon missile launcher at one of the islands, a public show with a weapon that could be deployed against Chinese troops if they tried to invade Taiwan.

The Philippines invited Japan to take part in multination military exercises in June, the first time since World War II that Japanese troops had been active on Philippine soil.

The move is both a continuation of the coalition overseen by the Biden administration and a hedge by the Philippines to broaden its partnerships beyond the United States.

That should be reasonably reassuring.