A final word on the US-Asean summit

May 20, 2022

Hello friends!

Have been catching up with my US-Asean summit reading this morning. This summit seems to have sparked fewer takes and reflections than previously, possibly because it is the ‘return to normal’ the US promised after the Trump years when the engagement was in the pits. And normal is good! But also kind of dull. 

Maybe it’s telling that there’s so much regional chatter at the moment but it is almost exclusively about the Southeast Asian Games currently being played in Hanoi.

I’ve picked three reads here offering different or specific views that I found really insightful. Might be time to prioritise the Milton Osborne Mekong read on my Kindle. 

The 25 percent of forEVER promo is still running for a couple more days, to advantage here:

See you next week for a look at the Bangkok gubernatorial election, to be held on Sunday. An enormous 31 candidates are running in the first vote in almost a decade and independent Chadchart Sittipunt is so far in the lead that it seems almost a done deal. But we’ll see.

‘The land is as important as the sea’ 

So writes Singaporean stalwart Bilahari Kausikan in his pre-Summit piece for Foreign Affairs. Hear, hear. Upstream damming of the river in China is strangling communities in Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia, threatening livelihood and food security all the way down. 

Now, I am certainly no Mekong expert but in the six years of doing this project, I’ve heard the alarm bells ring ever louder. It’s turned from a ‘fringe’ environmental and development issue to an emerging geopolitical flashpoint. The Americans saw this coming, Bilahari notes, with the Obama administration launching the Lower Mekong Initiative in 2009 as a counterbalance to China’s influence. Interest waned fairly quickly and for much of the time since, western interests have laid in the sexier South China Sea. 

There are moves on the go, Bilahari writes. Still, the issue deserves far more attention — and funding — than previous efforts have allocated:

This will require an adequate allocation of resources and consistent and high-level attention to succeed. Mekong River issues have not received such attention from any previous administrations. The Mekong should be approached strategically in the broader context of U.S. policy toward the Indo-Pacific, rather than piecemeal as a cluster of discrete technical or environmental issues, such as water management or climate change.

The piece links out to another Foreign Affairs piece from Sam Geall, which I missed in 2019, but is very illuminating giving context to the implications on local levels and beyond. Sticking that one on the reference list. 

Is this it?

A common, if not a majority opinion, post-US engaging in the region is: “great start, but is there more coming?” 

Sharon Seah and William Choong tackle the question for Fulcrum this week, acknowledging that the “meeting hit all the right notes” and the $150 million funding commitment is well-targeted. It’ll help support a string of mutual US-Asean interests in the region including: “maritime security, digital trade and economy, environmental protection, clean energy infrastructure and decarbonisation.” But China chucked $1.5 billion in the hat last year. 

The US’ regional interests lie elsewhere. The US’ beloved Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, announced last October at one of those Zoom summits no one but the really devoted egg heads logged on for (aka the East Asia Summit), is set to be negotiated finally next week. Singapore and the Philippines have expressed interest in joining, but it’s certainly not an Asean-centric concept. Many countries within the region won’t even be eligible to join given the clean governance requirements. 

This is important, the Fulcrum writers note, because when it comes to issues of security the US is well ahead, but in terms of formalised economic cooperation, China is out-lapping. And economic cooperation is both highly desired by the region and breeds stability. It doesn’t have to be this way. The US leads in investment in the region, they write, but that hasn’t translated into prominence the way Chinese investment has. 

Still:

That fuller IPEF details are expected to be unveiled at the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) meeting in Tokyo next week will accentuate regional concerns that Washington is using an extra-ASEAN entity to dictate terms to ASEAN, thus undermining its centrality. 

I like the kicker in this piece. To me, it sums up sharply the essence of this tug-of-war:

In short, the US should just use economic and investment levers to gain traction in ASEAN. Uncle Sam might talk a good game about engaging Southeast Asia, but the region has sufficient experience to know not to take Washington’s declarations of support at face value. For example, think the Afghanistan pullout in 2021, switching diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing in 1979, and Saigon in 1975. Southeast Asia is more acutely aware than ever that the US has its own interests and that regional partners will have to rely on themselves more and work together. If this sounds eerily similar to Mr Xi’s ‘Asia for Asians’ concept, it is not a matter of happenstance.

The elephant is not in the room

What did the Chinese press have to say? I had a bit of a poke around on What China Reads and was intrigued by this op-ed, originally published by China.com.cn. The piece takes obvious glee in reporting comments made by analysts to the wires which, like the Fulcrum piece above, are not exactly overwhelmed by the commitments made during the Summit. 

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian is quoted as saying that any and all commitments from around the world for strengthening “peaceful development” in the region are good. But anything that undermines sovereignty is no good. Ok, ok fair enough. The op-ed also takes a swipe about ‘only’ eight of the 10 member states attended which is not nice! Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte didn’t attend because of the election and sent a delegation instead (although, he didn’t seem too busy during it) and Myanmar, well! 

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