By Liu Chang

In joint military exercises with Asia-Pacific allies including Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Philippines this year, the US military has increasingly sought to align its activities with the current US administration's strategic adjustments in the Asia-Pacific, particularly its attempt to achieve a so-called balance of power in the region by reinforcing the "First Island Chain." Ahead of the 2026 US-ROK Ulchi Freedom Shield joint military exercise, the US military even explicitly invoked the concept of the "First Island Chain" for the first time in relevant statements, directly linking the exercise to "rapidly projecting combat power and seizing key terrain within the First Island Chain."

In the early years after World War II, the US, leveraging its military strength, established the "First Island Chain," stretching from the Aleutian Islands through the Kuril Islands, the Japanese archipelago and the island of Taiwan to the Philippine archipelago. Together with the "Second Island Chain" and "Third Island Chain" that extended from it, the "First Island Chain" formed a major geopolitical framework used by the US during the Cold War to contain Soviet naval forces and block their access to the Pacific from the Bering Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. The aim was to constrain the Soviet Union's international influence and restrict its access to the open ocean.

During the Cold War, the US deployed hundreds of military bases along the "First Island Chain" and controlled numerous strategic chokepoints, continuously reinforcing the island chain as one of the geopolitical pillars of US global hegemony. After the Cold War, the US retained substantial military and strategic assets along the "First Island Chain" and continued to regard it as a vital foundation of its Asia-Pacific policy. Under this mindset, the fate of the "First Island Chain" has come to be seen as closely tied to the rise and fall of US hegemony in the Pacific. Today, America's relative decline and the looming crisis of its hegemony have left Washington trapped in habitual thinking and path dependence, making it increasingly intent on defending such so-called "bottom lines."

Yet the US has to confront the reality that the strategic conditions necessary for an island-chain blockade disappeared long ago. Whether as a strategic concept or a geopolitical reality, the "First Island Chain" has become a relic of the past. With the rapid development of missile, space and drone technologies, the role of US carrier strike forces as the primary military pillar of the island-chain blockade is being severely weakened. Without aircraft carriers to link them together, the numerous US military assets deployed along the "First Island Chain" may gradually lose the functions Washington expects them to perform.

Against this backdrop, the US has chosen to make its long-standing underlying geopolitical narrative explicit through formal policy statements, bringing the "First Island Chain" openly into public discourse. This is clearly an instinctive return to old patterns of behavior in response to new problems—an attempt to extract the last remaining value from the concept before it fades from relevance altogether.

International views on Washington's intentions can broadly be summarized in three points. First, it seeks to implement "deterrence by denial." The US is building a flexible and mobile firepower network along the "First Island Chain" and vigorously advancing the forward deployment of systems such as the Typhon Mid-Range Capability (MRC) System and the Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) in the Philippines, Japan and elsewhere, in an attempt to retain "forward deterrence capabilities" in the Asia-Pacific. Second, it seeks to shift defense costs. In Washington's calculation, most of the cost of maintaining the "First Island Chain" should be borne by US allies along the chain. Third, it seeks to reassure anxious allies. Against the backdrop of conflicts in the Middle East, US allies in the Asia-Pacific have become increasingly doubtful about Washington's security commitments. By prominently reaffirming the "First Island Chain," the US government is using the concept as a political tool to reassure its allies and prevent them from wavering strategically.

These calculations and moves by the US are unlikely to achieve their intended goals. Instead, they send a signal that the "First Island Chain" is approaching the end of its relevance, underscoring the historical inevitability of this outdated concept eventually fading away.

The so-called "deterrence by denial" is itself facing formidable difficulties in the US. The "ammunition crisis" the US has encountered amid conflicts in the Middle East has, to some extent, exposed the state of its war reserves, making the prospect of sustaining "deterrence by denial" along the "First Island Chain" in the Asia-Pacific increasingly untenable.

The series of US moves surrounding the "First Island Chain" essentially amount to an attempt to run a new 21st-century system on old Cold War-era code, while ignoring the profound changes that have already taken place in the underlying hardware, including military capabilities and the defense industrial base. The eventual decline of the "First Island Chain" will not be the result of the US voluntarily relinquishing its hegemony, but of Washington having depleted its strategic capabilities and reserves across the industrial, military and economic spheres, leaving it unable to sustain the growing strategic burden and military costs associated with the "First Island Chain" over the long term.

Even setting other factors aside, once US allies cease to believe in Washington's security commitments, the "First Island Chain" has, in effect, already been breached. The US government's tendency to cling to old approaches in its foreign policy will not revive the "First Island Chain"; instead, it is accelerating changes in the Asia-Pacific geopolitical landscape.

(The author is Deputy Director of the Department for Asia-Pacific Studies at the China Institute of International Studies)

Editor's Note: Originally published on huanqiu.com, this article is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.