A U.S. Navy strike group's flagship aircraft carrier left its Japanese home port on Thursday, wrapping up nearly nine years of deployment in the Indo-Pacific, where it served a key role in the U.S. effort to bolster defense ties with Japan and other partners in the region.
The departure of USS Ronald Reagan — one of America’s largest warships and a nuclear-powered Nimitz-class aircraft carrier — comes at a time of growing tension in the face of increasingly assertive China in the Indo-Pacific.
