Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said the just-concluded RIMPAC naval exercises demonstrate that U.S. military cooperation with allies remains strong and is deepening, even as President Trump has repeatedly criticized allied nations over defense spending and burden-sharing.
“Huge naval drills show that, despite President Trump’s criticisms of allies, the U.S. military is working more closely with partners,” Cornyn wrote on X, linking a Wall Street Journal report on the exercises.
RIMPAC, the Rim of the Pacific exercise, is the world’s largest international maritime exercise, hosted biennially by the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The 2026 iteration, its 30th, ran from June 24 to July 31 in and around the Hawaiian Islands. Thirty nations participated, along with more than 30 surface ships, five submarines, 15 national land forces, more than 206 aircraft and roughly 30,000 personnel, according to the Pacific Fleet’s official announcement of the exercise. This year’s theme was “Partners: Integrated and Prepared.”
The exercise’s multinational leadership structure reflected the scale of allied participation, with only a minority of the most senior roles held by Americans. Chilean Navy Commodore Andrés Howard served as Deputy Commander of the Combined Task Force, Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force Rear Adm. Takuo Kobayashi served as Vice Commander, and Republic of Korea Navy Rear Adm. In-Ho Kim became the first officer from an Asian nation to serve as Combined Forces Maritime Component Commander. “If you have 30, 50 or 100 friends, it’ll be better than just one or two formal alliances,” Kobayashi told the Journal.
The Journal’s reporting noted that RIMPAC and similar exercises have grown in scale even as Trump has questioned U.S. commitments to formal alliance structures like NATO and pressed allies to increase defense spending and contributions to host American troops. Jeff Jablon, deputy commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and RIMPAC’s top overseer, said the exercise carries deterrent value regardless of political tensions. “I’m sure there’s some deterrent effect when they see 30 like-minded nations working together,” Jablon said, declining to characterize how China or North Korea might specifically perceive the drills.
Other multilateral exercises in the region have similarly expanded. Talisman Sabre in Australia featured the first live-fire test of the mobile, ground-launched Typhon missile system outside the continental United States, with full-participant nations roughly tripling in recent years. Cobra Gold in Thailand included U.S. Space Force participation for the first time this year, and the Balikatan exercise in the Philippines doubled in size from four years earlier, involving seven countries and more than 17,000 personnel.
Not all allies view the growing exercises as fully resolving doubts about U.S. reliability. Jessica Taylor, a former Defense Department official now a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Indo-Pacific Security Initiative, told the Journal that shifting American military resources toward conflicts in Europe and the Middle East has raised concerns among Pacific partners about U.S. overstretch. “Why do we risk antagonizing China if we don’t know if Trump and the U.S. will be there tomorrow?” Taylor said.
Some allies said they were nonetheless prepared to meet the administration’s demands for greater burden-sharing. Philippine Navy Capt. Ryan Bakabak, aboard his country’s new guided-missile frigate, told the Journal, “I agree with what Washington is saying that allies need to do more.” The Philippines has increased its military spending and sent its coast guard to RIMPAC for the first time, the only non-U.S. nation to do so, as it faces continued territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea.
The exercise also exposed ongoing interoperability challenges. Unlike NATO’s more unified command structure, the Asia-Pacific region relies on a patchwork of largely bilateral U.S. agreements, resulting in inconsistent communications systems, radar and logistics standards among partners, down to differences in how allied nations store blood for medical use during a conflict, according to the Journal’s reporting.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt, the aircraft carrier used in filming 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” served as the exercise’s centerpiece, capable of hosting roughly 5,000 personnel and 70 aircraft. “There’s not many places we can’t go,” said Capt. Adam Bean, who oversees the carrier’s air squadrons. “We have the ability to project power, presence.”
Cornyn, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary and Finance committees, has generally supported robust U.S. military engagement abroad throughout his tenure in the Senate.
Neither the White House nor the Pentagon has issued a direct public response to Cornyn’s characterization of the exercises as evidence of deepening alliance cooperation.