Whither the Whole of Government? The Trump Administration, National Security, and the Indo-Pacific Strategy

Abstract

The Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy promised to make America more competitive, to challenge China’s revisionist global agenda, and to push back against the new ‘gray zone’ conflicts of great power competition. Fundamentally, the strategy required the government to exercise a Whole of Government (WoG) approach to bring to bear all elements of national power. Despite wide-ranging calls for WoG, the administration eschewed basic reforms, destroyed interdepartmental trust networks, and over time expelled the conduits of national security, pushing WoG more thoroughly into the military. While departmental emphasis on Indo-Pacific issues took place in the Trump administration, this occurred largely in isolation of grand strategic goals.