Recently, the U.S.-ASEAN Summit was held in Washington. The US foreign affair magazine published an article by Bilahari Kausikkan, the former representative of Singapore to the United Nations, discussing the development history and prospects of the relationship between the United States and ASEAN. The article only represents the author's personal views, and some of the details of the narrative are not necessarily in line with objective reality. This article is published on the Observer Network only for the reader's understanding of external perspectives.
【Text/Bilahari Kausikhan Translation/Observer Network by Guan Qun】
During the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump, Southeast Asian countries have been undervalued. Now, the United States is once again seeking to strengthen ties with Southeast Asian countries. This week, as U.S. President Joe Biden adjusts his national policy to better engage in broad geopolitical competition with China, the U.S.-ASEAN holds a live summit in Washington.
The significance of this summit lies in the timing of its holding. It took place at a time when the war in Ukraine was in full swing, suggesting that the United States did not ignore the Indo-Pacific. Yet, while U.S. officials routinely repeat the importance and "centrality" of ASEAN, in reality the regional organization is not as important to the United States as many once thought.
Just before Trump stepped down in January 2021, his administration hastily declassified and released a secret Cabinet memorandum from 2018 called the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategic Framework. The memo outlines U.S. interests in the region and what means Washington intends to protect them. Similar documents released by the Biden administration in February overlap with those of its predecessors. The consistency of the statement's policies stands in stark contrast to the fact that, in practice, the Biden administration has so far treated the region very differently from the Trump administration.
Trump has never shown much interest in Southeast Asia, and in fact, when he condescends to regional meetings, he can barely hide his disdain for them. Trump's indifference stems not so much from improper strategy as from his capriciousness and freedom. The Biden administration has simply done what it is supposed to do, marking a welcome return to normalcy in the United States.
The U.S.-ASEAN Summit is held in the United States
Senior U.S. officials have met with Southeast Asian leaders and visited the region. Biden attended an online summit with ASEAN in October 2021, the first U.S.-ASEAN summit since 2016. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin visited Singapore, Vietnam, and the Philippines in July 2021, and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris visited Singapore and Vietnam in August 2021. U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visited Singapore and Malaysia in November, and U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited Malaysia and Indonesia in December 2021.
The series of visits and meetings is refreshing after the Trump administration's intermittent and extremely reluctant engagement with Southeast Asia. But like its predecessors, the Biden administration's approach to the region does not necessarily prioritize ASEAN, the only regional organization in Southeast Asia. Biden has focused on building a security partnership between Australia, India, Japan and the United States, the so-called "Quartet Mechanism," as well as announcing a strong new relationship with Australia and the United Kingdom within the framework of the U.S.-Britain-Australia Security Treaty.
In Southeast Asia, Biden's diplomatic focus is on building bilateral relationships that are as important, if not more important, than U.S.-ASEAN cooperation, leaving ASEAN unsure of how important it really is in the eyes of Americans. Biden's failure to bother nominating a U.S. ambassador to ASEAN adds to this insecurity. The position has gone unfilled since former President Barack Obama appointed the last ambassador left office in 2017.
More importantly, merely engaging in diplomatic activities as usual will not allow the United States to win many advantages in strategic competition with China. If the Biden administration really wants to open up diplomacy in Southeast Asia, it must accept two realities in the region. Washington has focused on U.S. maritime competition with China, while ignoring the importance of land. If Washington does not step up its involvement in the region, Beijing's dam on the upper Mekong could trap the five ASEAN members in the Mekong. If the Biden administration insists too much on competing with China in the ideological realm, U.S. relations with various governments in the region could be undermined.
The United States remains indispensable
When the dust settles on Biden's victory, many of America's Asian partners, including Southeast Asian countries, are worried about whether the new president will be reluctant to use hard power against China's ambitions, as Obama did in his second term. Their fears about the new U.S. administration have not materialized. In the face of China's claims and threats of sea power, U.S. warships have exercised the right to freedom of navigation in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. These actions taken by the Biden administration early in its presidency reassured Southeast Asian countries that they knew that the Biden administration would not repeat Mr. Obama's grave mistake of believing that generous rhetoric could replace a display of force.
Biden has aggressively corrected the 20-year mistake the United States has made in Afghanistan. While the botched withdrawal is reminiscent of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and has revived concerns about the reliability of U.S. commitments, the U.S. can once again focus on the more strategically important Indo-Pacific region, which Southeast Asian countries generally welcome. Despite the imminent summit, U.S. policymakers remain primarily concerned about Ukraine. This is understandable because when war burns elsewhere, the relatively peaceful and stable southeast Asia always seems irrelevant to Washington.
Still, the war in Ukraine underscored the importance of regional balance and the key role the United States plays in maintaining that balance. Singapore came to this conclusion decades ago. Other Southeast Asian countries now understand this better, and they have no choice but to rely on the United States to maintain regional balance. China's behavior in the South China Sea and other parts of the Indo-Pacific region underscores the irreplaceable role of strategic balance played by the United States in the wider region. The indispensability of the United States makes it unnecessary for other countries to worry about whether the United States is reliable.
Vietnam has been careful to build defense ties with the United States. Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, despite his anti-American slogans, renewed the Visiting Forces Agreement with the United States in 2021. The agreement provides the legal basis for the U.S. military presence in the Philippines. Duterte has also sought to strengthen ties with Australia and Japan, the United States' main allies in the region. Diplomats in Indonesia and Malaysia may be critical of the U.S.-Britain-Australia Trilateral Security Partnership and wary of the Quartet, but their defense agencies have privately held different views. In 2021, both countries held high-profile joint military exercises with the United States.
Singapore's Yusov Issa Institute for Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) has published a Survey of Southeast Asian Countries 2022, a survey of elite opinions from ten ASEAN member countries, which showed that 63 percent of respondents welcomed U.S. regional, political, and strategic influence, and 52 percent believed the U.S. would do the right thing to contribute to global peace, security, prosperity, and governance. Only 19 percent have the same view of China. Among Southeast Asian respondents, the United States is the second most trusted power, after Japan. The European Union ranks third. As in previous surveys, China remains the least trusted major country, with 58 percent distrusting it.
That doesn't mean the U.S. can rest on its laurels. Southeast Asians also recognize China's importance to the region's future. In 2022, nearly 77 percent of respondents to the ISEAS survey identified China as the most influential economic power in Southeast Asia, compared with only 10 percent who thought the United States was the most influential. However, about 76 percent are concerned about China's political and strategic influence. When asked which one ASEAN would choose if it were forced to ally with China or the United States, 57 percent of respondents chose the United States and 43 percent chose China. If the Biden administration wants to, it clearly has a chance to improve America's position in Southeast Asia.
Trade is strategy
The most obvious shortcoming of U.S. Indo-Pacific policy is the economy. Despite China's growing economic influence in Southeast Asia, the United States remains an important trading partner for most ASEAN members, a preferred source of high-quality non-infrastructure investment, and more importantly, the United States is located further up the technology value chain. Washington needs a more active and coordinated approach to public-private partnerships to take advantage of this advantage and promote U.S. trade and investment, rather than allowing private companies or market forces to play a temporary role.
What the United States is missing now is a multilateral economic plan. This year, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), an ASEAN initiative to optimize existing free trade agreements between ASEAN and countries such as Australia, China, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand, came into force. Since the United States does not have a free trade agreement with ASEAN, it is not eligible to join the RCEP. Trump's withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2017 proved a huge mistake, a move that made the United States an outsider in a "trade-as-strategy" region.
There is little hope that the United States will join the successor to the TPP, the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Recognizing this political reality, the Biden administration proposed the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. But this framework is now merely a figment of the word – its content remains to be filled.
Currently, the framework is a haphazard list of backlogs – promoting trade, improving supply chain resilience, developing clean energy, investing in infrastructure, and setting standards for the technology, labor, and digital economy – but these plans also need to be integrated into actual policies. Still, the framework acknowledges at least one missing economic shortcoming that needs to be filled. But even with more detailed policies, these plans are no substitute for U.S. participation in a multilateral trade agreement the size of the CPTPP.
ASEAN countries understand that the political game of trade in the United States is complex. But the Biden administration should not completely cut off the possibility of the United States eventually joining the CPTPP. China has applied to accede to the agreement. Not all ASEAN members are currently eager to accept China, and those with reservations will find it easier to delay or obstruct China's accession to the pact if the U.S. is likely to return to the pact – they can argue that China and the U.S. should be admitted together. The Biden administration should try to systematically reshape the CPTPP from a strategic level, not just an economic perspective, to turn the consensus of the U.S. government and opposition on competing with China into an advantage.
Dams and democracy
In its second year in office, the Biden administration should keep two points in mind when formulating its Southeast Asia policy. First, land is as important as the sea. The dams that China has built and will continue to build upstream of the Mekong River, which flows through five ASEAN members, will not only trigger severe natural disasters, but these dams, along with the railways and highways that run north and south, could strengthen ASEAN countries' dependence on China, which will reshape the strategic geography of Southeast Asia and potentially turn the border between China's southwestern region and Southeast Asia into a dotted line that exists only on the map.
China builds dams over the Lancang River
In 2009, the Obama administration launched the Lower Mekong Initiative, which promised that the United States would re-emphasize the Mekong region to balance China's influence in the region. In Obama's second term, however, the Obama administration seemed to have lost interest in its initiative, perhaps because it did not understand its strategic significance. The initiative has had little effect. It remains on paper, but has been compared to China's Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Initiative (the upper reaches of the Mekong River, within China). It wasn't until late 2020 that the Trump administration tried to revive the initiative, renaming it the U.S.-Mekong Partnership.
The Biden administration is reportedly working out its own Mekong strategy. The Biden administration can only ensure its success if it adequately allocates resources and pays sustained attention to this strategy. None of the previous U.S. administrations have paid as much attention to the Mekong issue as they do now. The Mekong issue should be addressed strategically in the context of U.S. Indo-Pacific policy, rather than as a fragmented set of technical or environmental issues, such as water management or climate change.
Second, Washington should avoid assuming that Southeast Asian countries fully understand America's decentralized democracy. In the United States, popular distrust of the country is deeply rooted. In Southeast Asia, centralized government is the norm, and having a strong regime is the expectation of the people – although in reality it does not always appear. Biden's democratic summit last December was ideological, potentially alienating the United States from its Southeast Asian partners. The event, defined as a so-called "democratic" and "authoritarian" universal battle (both words with variable meanings), would limit, rather than expand, the support Washington has gained in the region. Malaysia is one of only three invited ASEAN members, but it has refused to attend because it wants to continue to maneuver between the United States and China.
Overall, Southeast Asians find all American values attractive or repulsive in all aspects of the Chinese system. Some governments do not see the world in this absolute and simplistic binary view and do not want to be forcibly labeled, and the implementation of U.S. policies that provoke democratic-authoritarian conflicts will only alienate themselves. It would be unwise for the Biden administration to pursue such ideological plans further in Southeast Asia.
From center to edge
Since the end of the Vietnam War, the United States has successfully played the role of an extraterritorial balancing force in Southeast Asia, maintaining stability in the region and preventing it from falling into any sphere of influence. But times have changed. Although China is a formidable competitor, it does not pose an existential threat to the United States as it did during the Cold War. As a result, americans have no reason to assume any responsibility or pay any price to maintain order.
ASEAN needs to understand that, unlike in the past, the United States is now prioritizing domestic issues. As a result, Washington expects its partners and allies to take more responsibility for maintaining order. ASEAN doesn't need to do all the things the Biden administration might ask it to do, but ASEAN urgently needs to discuss what it is prepared to do (and, just as importantly, what it is not prepared to do) to meet The China challenge with the United States.
In this uncertain future, the Biden administration will still politely call ASEAN "the center" and participate in its meetings, but Washington will actually place more emphasis on developing other partnerships, such as the Quadrilateral Mechanism and bilateral relations with certain countries in Southeast Asia. If the United States does not prioritize developing relations with ASEAN, the value of the existence of regional institutions will decline, which may make China think that ASEAN is irrelevant, and ASEAN will lose its influence over the two big powers.
ASEAN and its member states must better understand that building a strong relationship with the United States is not intended to replace a close relationship with China, but is actually a necessary condition for building a close ASEAN-China relationship. ASEAN sees itself at the center of Southeast Asia's geopolitical race, but it is likely to find itself on the margins, no longer able to play its own stage.
(The Observer Network is translated by Guan Qun from the US "Foreign Affairs" magazine)
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