The U.S. defense chief indicated earlier this week that America still maintains its strategy to be able to simultaneously win two major wars in different regions amid continuing security challenges in East Asia and the Middle East.

As experts argued that the “two Major Regional Conflicts” concept was no longer feasible for the debt-ridden U.S., Washington was thought to have abandoned it and adopted a new approach, which some analysts say seeks to win one regional war while deterring another.

“We’ve got to be able to defeat more than one enemy at a time,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Monday during a town hall meeting with American troops in Japan at Yakota Airbase.

“If we have to confront a war in North Korea, we’ve got to be able to deal with an enemy that may close the straits of Hormuz. The U.S. has to be strong enough to be able to confront more than one enemy at a time.”

The former CIA chief also stressed the Asia-Pacific region’s strategic value.

“We have got to focus our force in those areas that we … in which we face the biggest threat. So that’s why we’re rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific because we confront real threats here from North Korea,” he said.

“This is an important region in terms of our economy, in terms of diplomacy, in terms of trade, in terms of our future. And that’s why we’re focused on this area.”

Panetta is on a tour of Japan, China and New Zealand. Part of his mission is to defuse escalating tension between Tokyo and Beijing over disputed islands in the East China Sea, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.

With the Iranian nuclear conundrum and growing anti-American sentiment across the Muslim community, aggravated by an anti-Islam video that went viral through YouTube, concerns have risen that the U.S.’s security commitment in East Asia could diminish.

In January, the Pentagon unveiled its new U.S. defense guidance, which contains the new strategy, which experts dubbed a “One Plus Strategy,” while arguing that the MRC concept was scrapped.

The guidance was in line with the U.S. government’s efforts to reduce its snowballing deficit. Washington seeks to slash $487 billion in its defense spending over the next decade.

Despite analysts’ interpretations, the Defense Department appears to remain strategically ambiguous over the war strategy.

Unveiled in January, the new strategic guidance on “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership” said, “Even when U.S. forces are fully committed to a large-scale operation in one region, they will be capable of ‘denying’ the objectives of ― or imposing an unacceptable cost on ― an opportunistic aggressor in a second region.”

Given this, some experts say that rather than abandoning the “two-war” strategy, the U.S. may maintain capabilities to manage two wars, but use limited ground forces in one of them.

Stephen Bosworth, a former U.S. envoy on North Korea policy, said that the unstable situation could affect America’s policy on East Asia. But he stressed that America’s refocusing on the Asia Pacific would continue.

“Clearly changes in the regional and global context, the context in the broader sense of the world have implications for things like the Korean Peninsula. That has been true always. On the Korean Peninsula, the context changed when the Soviet Union collapsed, changed dramatically,” he said in a meeting with reporters in Seoul on Tuesday.

“I think Asia has been the priority for a long, long time. I think that is going to continue and I think that is a very healthy thing.”

By Song Sang-ho (sshluck@heraldcorp.com)