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The first Marines to be deployed to Australia under a deal that will boost the American military’s presence in China’s strategic backyard arrived in the northern city of Darwin late Tuesday night, a sign of the growing importance Washington is placing on the Pacific region.

The group of about 180 Marines, which will engage in training exercises with the Australian Defense Force during their six-month rotation, is the first contingent of 2,500 American troops to be deployed here by 2017 under an agreement signed in November by President Obama and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

The decision to deploy the Marines to Australia, which had prompted Beijing to accuse Mr. Obama of escalating military tensions in the region, is part of the president’s publicly stated strategy of shifting the American military’s long-term focus toward the Pacific and an increasingly assertive China.

Australian Defense Minister Stephen Smith, who greeted the Hawaii-based Marines during a ceremony on Wednesday morning in Darwin, touched on the changing regional dynamics during an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“We see this very much as responding and reflecting the fact that the world is moving into our part of the world, the world is moving to the Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean. We need to respond to that,” Mr. Smith told the ABC before the ceremony.

“The world needs to essentially come to grips with the rise of China, the rise of India, the move of strategic and political and economic influence to our part of the world.”

The United States has had military bases in the North Pacific since the end of World War II, but its presence in Southeast Asia was greatly diminished in the early 1990s. Strengthened ties with Australia, one of Washington’s foremost allies, will restore a substantial American footprint near the South China Sea, a major commercial shipping route that has been increasingly the focus of Chinese territorial disputes.

There has been speculation here in recent weeks about what form any further regional military cooperation between the two long-time allies would take. Ms. Gillard last week confirmed that discussions with Washington were under way about the possibility of flying long-range American surveillance drones from the remote Cocos Islands — an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean — but said no substantial progress had been made on the issue.

A spokesman for Mr. Smith, the defense minister, told The Australian newspaper that the top three priorities to come out of last years’ bilateral agreement were the deployment of the Marines, the greater use of Australian Air Force bases for American aircraft and, in the longer term, the prospect of increased ship and submarine visits to the Indian Ocean through a naval base outside of Perth on the country’s west coast.

Jeffrey Bleich, the American ambassador to Australia, was quick to dismiss what seemed to be a growing media consensus here that the increased military presence in the region was aimed primarily at containing China.

“There’s this kind of sexy, fun narrative that you hear from pundits and others trying to suggest this is about China, but it’s not,” he said in an interview with Sky TV over the weekend.

“If you just look at the Darwin decision, for example, we’ve had our Marines stationed in Central Asia, in Iraq and Afghanistan and they are mostly an amphibious force so they need to start training and doing amphibious maneuvers again and we’re looking for the best place to do it and the best partners to do it with and Darwin is an ideal spot for it.”

But Michael Fullilove, director of the Global Issues Program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that addressing China’s recent assertiveness is definitely one of the major aspects of the policy. Australia views the presence of American forces in the region as a counterbalance to what it sees as Beijing’s sometimes erratic foreign policy, he said.

“Given that we know that rising powers can disrupt the system, it makes sense to balance against the risk of future Chinese recklessness by keeping the U.S. engaged in the region,” he said. “The more that power can be diffused so that it is spread across different capitals, the less likely you are to have unreasonable actions where one power ignores the other’s needs.”

Josh wrote:A whole hundred and eighty? Isn't that a bit of overkill?