President Barack Obama's recent travel put his "pivot to Asia" back into the news. But his trip redefined that wise strategic goal as merely increased trade and investment, bereft of its original security component. That switch is due to a renewed fixation on the Middle East. After promising to end our interventions in the region, Obama again is succumbing to pressure from the military, Congress and the media once more to send troops to Iraq and to arm a phantom "moderate army" in Syria—all in the name of fighting terrorism, although terror has never presented an existential threat to any state, still less one as powerful and wealthy as America. The existential threat we may face will come from another direction: Asia.

Our narrow focus results from a political class and media that regularly reanimate our 9-11 trauma, perpetuating a public addiction to the Middle East melodrama, a public arrested by horrors on television and ignorant of far greater dangers looming in the Pacific.

The Pacific Ocean, not the Persian Gulf, is where our geopolitical attention should be focused. And for that region, we need a “security industrial complex” far less than geopolitical vision and a meaningful naval presence in the eastern Pacific to buck up our terrified allies.

There is a disturbing gap between the American establishment's view of China and that of its Pacific neighbors. The former sees business opportunities, the latter are terrified by China's military buildup, its proliferating claims on their territories and a parade of alarming incursions.

In 2013, East Asia contributed more than 40 percent of the world's economic growth. Our National Intelligence Council reported a “continuing” and “unprecedented shift in relative wealth and economic power roughly from West to East.” That economic shift is well known; less well recognized is the shift in military power and geopolitical tensions to that region.

In February, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) reported that last year, Asia’s military spending rose while most Western countries cut theirs, accelerating a “shift in the global distribution of military power towards Asia. . . . In real terms, Asian defense spending in 2013 was 9.4 percent higher than it was in 2011.”

IISS also found that the growth in Chinese military spending eclipses that of its neighbors. In 2013, it accounted for 46 percent of the region’s combined military growth. Moreover, IHS Jane’s and other reputable military analysts say China’s actual military spending widely outstrips official figures.

As a consequence of this spending, and new Chinese territorial claims, Vietnam has nearly doubled its military spending, Japan is projecting its largest defense budget since World War II and the Philippines hastens to cobble together a viable navy. India and South Korea are now desperately engaged in military modernization. With China leading the way, Asian countries now account for about half of the world's arms imports.

But this is not an “arms race” anymore than an “arms race” preceded World War II. The allies tardily began to rearm after years of appeasing Germany. China’s neighbors are mustering belatedly and anxiously.

Armed to the teeth, Beijing brazenly presses territorial claims against its neighbors, from rocks, reefs and fisheries to islands and sea-lanes. In 2012, China provoked a dangerous dispute over islands administered by Japan in the East China Sea. A year ago, China stunned Japan, South Korea and the United States by suddenly declaring an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over parts of that sea. Beijing now claims 90 percent of the South China Sea in which the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan all have claims. Beijing rejects multilateral discussions with its Southeast Asian neighbors, preferring bilateral meetings with individual countries, an approach that allows China to apply greater pressure.

The stakes in these disputes include deposits of oil and natural gas and vital shipping lanes. Moreover, China’s new naval and air strength enables it to project power even into the western Pacific and Indian Oceans. Chinese mastery of Pacific and Indian Ocean shipping lanes would give it a stranglehold over a global economy increasingly centered in Asia.

There is popular enthusiasm in China for the assertiveness of its new leader Xi Jinping, whom China watchers told us would focus on mushrooming domestic inequities and widespread Communist corruption. Instead, Xi, even more than his predecessor, has sought to channel domestic discontent into external belligerence. As a prologue to Obama's visit, Chinese state-controlled media has been engaging in a drumbeat of anti-American conspiracy theories and demonization. All the while its spies were reading State Department emails, National Weather Service computers and the personal data of 800,000 U.S. Postal workers. Meanwhile, Obama was blithely, if properly, signing trade agreements and a greenhouse-gas pact in which smog-choked China is obliged to do nothing until 2030.

As for the trade agreements, China is exploiting its new riches, rooted in domestic wage slavery and American consumerism, to supplant the very international economic institutions that helped make Asia prosperous, the IMF and the World Bank, with an “Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank” and a “New Development Bank.” Those entities are not expected to follow the environmental, labor and procurement standards that have characterized traditional development banks. Furthermore, China is dangling financial and trade incentives to Central Asia and South Asia, to resurrect the old Silk Road trading route that once carried treasures between China and the Mediterranean. Pakistan and its neighbors becoming Chinese vassals may be the long-range fallout of our Afghan wars.

Many China watchers argue that it could take decades before Chinese military spending overtakes that of the United States. But it is the composition of that spending that will matter in the Pacific, where naval forces are key. According to congressional sources, in 2015 “for four months, the Navy will not have an aircraft carrier in the region.” Meanwhile, as the New York Times editorial board, not known for hawkish opinions, has pointed out, “China is investing in new systems, including submarines, surface ships and anti-ship ballistic missiles, that could be used to further intimidate neighbors or deny the United States access to Asian waters to defend its allies.”

And those allies are terrified. In February, the highly respected Philippine president Benigno S. Aquino III compared Western inattention to China’s oceanic claims to the West’s failure to oppose Hitler’s demands for Czech land in 1938. Like Czechoslovakia, said Aquino, the Philippines faces demands from a far more powerful country to surrender territory piecemeal.

Aquino’s appeal was only the most poignant Asian analogy to European wars. A month earlier, Japan's prime minister alarmed the annual Davos meeting by observing that Germany and Britain went to World War I, notwithstanding their close economic ties—like those between China and Japan today.

Indeed, World War I and World War II both offer disturbing analogies. Before World War I, a rising Imperial Germany built a navy to rival Britain's. Before World War II, a one-party, totalitarian state portrayed itself as a victim of history, modernized its economy, stirred up nationalist fervor, built up its military, made territorial claims against neighboring countries and enforced those claims with a blitzkrieg to the acclaim of its people.

Historical analogies can take us only so far. The Chinese leadership is usually far more nuanced in seeking “lebensraum” than Nazi Germany (though it can be clumsy to boot), and today's world is more willing to accommodate a rising China than it was the Kaiser's Germany. Yet these precedents are worth pondering as we stumble into a policy of appeasement preferred by investment banks and multinational corporations.

We cannot ignore the vested interests driving and distorting our geopolitical priorities. September 11 created a counterterrorist octopus, with a squishy head and many lucrative arms. These include more than three thousand government organizations and private companies in more than 10,000 locations across the country with as many as a million employees specializing, often redundantly, in homeland security, intelligence and counterterrorism. As the Washington Post's Dana Priest and the New York Times James Risen have reported, the octopus has studded the DC Beltway with some three-dozen complexes since September 2001, occupying the square footage of three Pentagon Cities. Its cephalopod arms coil around cable news, whose ratings soar with every image of beheaded Westerners or American soldiers mired in Middle East sectarian strife, images designed to provoke us once again into another futile intervention in a religious war likely to last for decades.

The octopus has conceived the squishy concept of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) without being able to distinguish enemies (Iran) from allies (Iran again), or to define our national interests in that war or the real, as opposed to the speculative, dangers it is supposedly averting. Boosting GWOT is a phalanx of pundits and congressional warriors with high-flying rhetoric and a dismal record on the ground. Meanwhile, the octopus has smothered the credibility of the agencies charged with protecting us, while diverting the administration into another quixotic Middle East intervention.

If that weren't sufficiently distracting, the administration plunged into foolish dispute with Russia over Ukraine—a country politically, ethnically and religiously split for a millennium. Instead of ensuring that Ukraine remain a bridge between Russia and the West, the democracy-everywhere-now zealots (another arm of the octopus) turned into a Cold War battlefield a country of paltry geopolitical consequence, ruled by corrupt oligarchs customarily thrown into prison after, or sometimes before, completing their terms in office.