Afghanistan may be the first domino to fall in a much broader restructuring of America’s military footprint across the broader Middle East and Central Asia.

While both of President Biden‘s predecessors fell short in their military “pivots” toward Asia and a rising China, some foreign policy analysts say the stars have now aligned for an overhaul that’s been nearly a decade in the making.

troops around the world, including the potential withdrawal of thousands of forces from bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq and elsewhere across a theater that’s consumed American foreign policy in the post-9/11 era.

Biden is poised to free up both manpower and materiel to focus on China and other 21st-century threats — though such a strategy will come with its own major foreign policy risks.

“I think there’s more of a commitment to minimizing or cutting bait on other commitments” in the Middle East, said Gil Barndollar, senior fellow at the think tank Defense Priorities and the Catholic University of America’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship.

military posture toward Asia but ultimately was sucked back into the Middle East by the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. .

But he also dispatched thousands of additional troops to Middle East bases as a check on an increasingly aggressive Iran, leaving America with a bigger presence in the theater than when he took office.

At the insistence of Congress, the Pentagon is moving to set up and fund a nearly $5 billion “Pacific Deterrence Initiative” designed to give focus to the military’s new concentration on the threat from China and the need to bolster allies in East Asia.

And those current Middle East deployments, some analysts argue, could be vital in a future without well-established bases of operation in Afghanistan.

To do that, long-term staging areas elsewhere in the Middle East will be necessary, especially given that the administration so far has not secured new deals to host military assets in countries bordering Afghanistan.

If the administration pulls troops or equipment from Kuwait, for example, “It’s not certain you’d ever get back in there,” said retired Army Lt.

“If you anticipate ever needing to do anything in Afghanistan ever again, if you ever want to do anything in the Middle East, … you’ve got to keep a place like Bahrain.

Spoehr and other specialists argue that a shift in focus from the Middle East to China is about much more than just numbers

A greater focus on China, analysts say, will involve the positioning of cutting-edge weapons systems and other assets in the Pacific, not just the shift of a few thousand ground forces from a base in the Middle East to one in Asia

So we are repositioning our resources and adapting our counterterrorism posture to meet the threats where they are now significantly higher: in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa,” the president said in a speech last week defending his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.