Kelley Grieco and Jennifer Kavanagh connect Biden’s snub of the ASEAN summit this week to the larger errors that the administration is making when it engages with Southeast Asian countries:
The Biden administration insists its approach “is not about forcing countries to choose” between Washington and Beijing, but as we learned through interviews with former senior government officials and security experts in Southeast Asia, its actions often do not match its rhetoric. And the ASEAN countries — Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam — are noticing.
According to our interviews, Washington has publicly and privately pressured ASEAN members to turn down China’s global infrastructure projects, known as the Belt and Road Initiative, reduce their economic and technological dependence on Beijing and cancel their military partnerships with the People’s Liberation Army.
The administration contends that it isn’t neglecting Southeast Asia and that Biden’s absence from the ASEAN summit is just a matter of scheduling, but blowing off the summit and sending Harris in Biden’s place show that they do not consider it to be a priority. The U.S. will have someone at the meeting, but the fact that Biden was already going to be in the region later this week and couldn’t be bothered to attend signals how unimportant the administration thinks the meeting is. If an administration wants to show that it considers a region to be important to the U.S., it doesn’t keep sending the vice president to show the flag. The vice president is usually sent to attend events that the president considers beneath him or not worth his time. Southeast Asian nations will get the message and remember it the next time that Washington wants something from them.
The snub is particularly embarrassing for the hosting Indonesian government, since they moved the summit up by three months to make it more convenient for him and others from the G20 meeting to be able to attend. It seems that they needn’t have made the effort. While U.S. officials recite talking points about “ASEAN centrality,” the administration often doesn’t act as if it believes its own rhetoric.
Grieco and Kavanagh say that Biden is getting it wrong by prioritizing Vietnam over the ASEAN summit, but what makes the snub even harder to understand is that the two don’t conflict. It would be one thing if they were scheduled to happen at the same time and missing one was unavoidable, but that isn’t the case. Biden could have attended the ASEAN summit first, then gone to the G20 meeting and then on to Vietnam as planned. It doesn’t sound like the most thrilling way to spend a week, I grant you, but it’s part of the job Biden was elected to do.
The more serious problem for the U.S. is that it isn’t prepared to grant Southeast Asian nations the improved trade and economic cooperation that they seek, so it has relatively little to offer these countries. Washington wants these states to prefer the U.S. side in a rivalry with China, but even if they were inclined to pick sides it is giving them remarkably few incentives to do so. The U.S. pressures them to reduce cooperation with China, offers them little of what they want, and then seems surprised when they aren’t all jumping at the chance to draw closer to Washington. There seems to be an assumption in D.C. that China’s neighbors will just automatically start flocking to the U.S. side on their own because of the Chinese government’s behavior, but despite ongoing territorial disputes between China and its neighbors that isn’t what has been happening.
The snub won’t matter that much by itself, but it is part of a pattern of neglecting Southeast Asia that long predated Biden and seems set to resume. The Biden administration made an early effort to engage with the region more consistently, but that seems to be waning. One would think that the region that sits at the heart of what the U.S. chooses to call the “Indo-Pacific” would receive more attention than this, but it seems that Biden would prefer cobbling together an anti-China coalition over doing the work of building up stronger relations with rising powers like Indonesia. The “military first” approach to Asia keeps winning out over other forms of engagement.