I think it will just bump along where we're at. In other words, if you want to know what will happen if we don't do anything dramatic or significant or substantive, it will be like it has been. My warning here is that, historically, when the security situation in Asia has gone very badly wrong, when it has gone south.... I'm thinking of 1941, when the troops in Hong Kong were overwhelmed. I'm thinking of the Korean War, when all of a sudden within months we were fighting with desperation in the Korean peninsula. One could even say that 9/11 catapulted, with almost no warning, into a west Asia conflict.
We are a small player and probably always will be, but if we don't pay close attention and we don't have some substantive contribution to make in terms of hardware, attention and political effort, we'll find ourselves just dragged willy-nilly into situations where we'll be severely impacted and have little warning and little opportunity to shape the response.