The outsize influence of America’s admiral in Asia

OF THE EIGHT conflicts that Donald Trump imagines he has ended, at first glance the short border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia last July presents the cleanest case. To hear America’s president tell it, Mr Trump called the leaders of the two countries and threatened astronomical tariffs unless their guns fell silent. Soon, it is claimed, they did.

But the conflict was only the latest episode in a century-old grudge between the neighbours, and it continually risked flaring up again. So Admiral Sam Paparo made multiple visits to Malaysia on his blue-and-white Air Force jet. There he met the Thai and Cambodian military chiefs to tell them to knock it off. The intervention by the top American officer in Asia was key to smothering the dispute until Mr Trump could fly to Malaysia in October to preside over the signing of a peace deal.

Admiral Paparo’s quiet diplomacy is one way he is trying to show his usefulness to Mr Trump. Keeping the confidence of the president and others in the MAGA world will be essential if the career fighter-pilot is to address one of America’s much bigger problems: trying to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan. In this, he has been a driving force behind the American armed forces’ efforts in recent years.

The chiefs of America’s Indo-Pacific Command, headquartered in Honolulu, are weighty figures in any administration. The admiral in charge (and it is always an admiral, reflecting the navy’s expansive role in this part of the world) is responsible for military operations across half the Earth’s surface and a dozen time zones—from Bollywood to Hollywood, as one of the admiral’s predecessors was fond of saying. Admiral Paparo has become unusually prominent and influential in Asia. That is partly due to the court politics around Mr Trump, which keep other top officials close to the president in Washington. Now the admiral must navigate three big challenges.

The first is to try to reassure worried friends in Asia that America will not abandon its commitments to allies, even as Mr Trump switches his focus to Venezuela and Greenland, contemplates a grand bargain with China and routinely expresses his contempt for many of his NATO allies in Europe. Admiral Paparo’s previous commands in the region mean that he has old friendships with many military chiefs. That counts all the more at a time when the White House is recalling and cutting short the tours of most ambassadors appointed by Joe Biden. He offers a rare instance of consistency.

The second challenge is to keep onside a wayward president and his advisers, especially the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth. Even in normal administrations the Indo-Pacific commander can find it hard, compared with America’s generals in Europe and the Middle East, to get the resources he wants. That risk was heightened after the Trump administration put the Americas ahead of Asia in its national defence strategy. The command’s resources risk being plundered for other contingencies. Its carriers and air-defence batteries often get dispatched to the Middle East; the focus on the western hemisphere makes the problem worse. But Admiral Paparo’s political nous has helped him limit the damage.

The biggest challenge the admiral faces is to make sure America’s war plans do not fall out of date as China’s armed forces rapidly modernise and technological changes cancel out some of America’s advantages. Admiral Paparo is unusually focused, compared with other American commanders, on making his command an AI-enabled one, experimenting with tools that speed up decision-making in a conflict and help ensure things like fuel and bullets quickly get to where they are needed. Other programmes focus on catching up with China on long-range missiles and autonomous weapons.

At a conference put on in January by the Pacific Forum, a think-tank in Honolulu, the admiral played host to several hundred officers, bureaucrats, defence eggheads, tech execs and representatives of allies. Over two days in windowless conference rooms just by Waikiki Beach, they held intensive discussions on how to win a war against “the adversary”, universally understood to mean China. The discussion was cerebral but no-nonsense. “He goes to sleep every night thinking about winning or losing the next great war,” says an admiring fellow admiral. “He has wargamed it more than anyone else.” With luck his wargames won’t be needed.■