The United States is engaged in the longest war in its 234-year history in Afghanistan, one that will begin its eleventh calendar year in two weeks. Like the war that had been America's longest before now, that in Indochina, the current one is in the Asian continent.

With repeatedly extended projected withdrawal dates…the campaign in Afghanistan and over the past two years in neighboring Pakistan has marked Asia as the center of U.S. global military strategy and operations.

The Pentagon is building a $12.5 billion "super base" in Guam "in an attempt to contain China's military build-up."

The construction "will include a dock for a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, a missile defence system, live-fire training sites and the expansion of the island's airbase. It will be the largest investment in a military base in the western Pacific since the Second World War, and the biggest spend on naval infrastructure in decades."