The peril for the United States lies in trying to mirror this approach. Evan Feigenbaum, who worked in the State Department under George W. Bush, pointed out recently that "the US would do a hell of a lot better by leveraging addition and multiplication instead of subtraction and division". When Washington walked away from the Iran nuclear deal, it set up a zero-sum confrontation with Tehran that US allies were reluctant to support; Dr Feigenbaum warns against "trying to write China out of Asia's story as rhetoric or policy". Ash Carter, a defence secretary under Barack Obama, told The Washington Post that "we don't have a China policy, we have an Asia policy ... to give up the network approach would be to cede the battlefield to China". Yet the White House has been doing precisely that since it walked away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and only last week rattled key allies by again pondering tariffs on cars and car parts in the name of national security.

The United States struggled to pivot towards Asia long before Trump came to office. But to do so from an America First posture may prove even more difficult. By the same token, Asia-Pacific nations who are asked to choose between one giant or the other, in some modern reprise of the Judgement of Paris, may surprise or embarrass Washington, as Canberra did when it ignored US objections to Australia joining the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank under Tony Abbott.

The passage of the BUILD Act in Washington and Canberra's announcement of an Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility suggest that we might be engaged in an investment scramble for Asia and the Pacific, with all the potential for corruption and misplacement of funds seen in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet unless Western powers can do far more to genuinely persuade the nations of the region that they have a collective and multilateral conception of their interests, from climate change to trade to development, the People's Republic will continue to exploit its geographic position and the widening fissures in the international community to advance its own agenda.