Successive U.S. administrations have positioned the United States as a Pacific nation. In 1903, then-President Theodore Roosevelt set out that path by declaring , “The Pacific era, destined to be the greatest of all, is just at its dawn.” More than a century later, during a 2009 visit to Tokyo, Barack Obama described himself as “America’s first Pacific president,” referencing his birth in Hawaii as he foreshadowed the U.S. “pivot” to the Pacific. In 2022, President Joe Biden reaffirmed that