https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion-features/bye-bye-pivot-asia
Bye, bye, pivot to Asia?
As the chances of US military intervention in the Middle East grow, the focus on the Indo-Pacific region is being challenged
By Leon Hadar
WHEN former US president Bill Clinton hosted the Leaders’ Summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum in Seattle in 1993, the Middle East started to feel like old news.
Resisting pressure to oust Saddam Hussein and launch new military campaigns in the Middle East, Clinton promoted a trade liberalisation agenda in East Asia and tried to transform Apec from a “talking shop” into a pillar of an Asia-centric foreign policy.
America did embrace that outlook that was front and centre in the Clinton years, which included, among other things, an active policy of diplomatic and military engagement with China, before 9/11 pulled the focus of American diplomacy and national security back to the broader Middle East
The US war on global terrorism necessitated a new set of priorities. Washington invaded Afghanistan, and Iraq and tried to bring democracy to the Middle East.
Indeed, East Asian officials and pundits criticised George W Bush throughout his presidency for changing the course set in Seattle in 1993, investing so much time and resources on the Middle East-centred war on terrorism while treating the dramatic geopolitical and economic changes in Asia as a global sideshow.
Hence, Asian diplomats were furious when former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice skipped the 2007 Asean Regional Forum in Manila, and instead travelled to the Middle East for discussions in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and visits to Israel and the West Bank
ir much less expansive defence budgets, were devoting their resources to strengthening their economy.
But when Barack Obama hosted the Apec leaders’ forum in Honolulu, Hawaii in November 2011, close to two decades after the Seattle Summit, it felt like a diplomatic Groundhog Day, with US officials insisting once again that the time had come to shift American global priorities from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region, proclaiming the Obama administration’s vision of “America’s Pacific Century”.
That Obama – born and raised in Hawaii, and America’s self-described “first Pacific president” – was hosting the Apec leaders’ meeting in one of America’s territorial possessions in the Pacific was meant to symbolise these changing US priorities.
“The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the centre of the action,” then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton wrote in Foreign Policy magazine in October 2011. She stressed that America’s diplomatic and economic frontiers this century lay not in the Middle East or Europe but in Asia.
America was pivoting now from Europe and the Middle East into the Indo-Pacific region.
Americans were exhausted from the costly military intervention in the Middle East, leading to Obama’s decision to withdraw US troops from Iraq and reach a nuclear deal with Iran. He recognised that a diminishing economic base was constraining America’s ability to maintain its hegemony in South-west Asia.
Thus, the Obama administration had a new opportunity to reorient US geostrategic priorities, which it did to some extent, increasing US economic and military cooperation with South Korea, India, Australia and Asean countries that had called for the US to expand its presence in the region as a counterweight to a more assertive China.
But the 2008 global financial crisis ended up creating a political backlash against globalisation and free trade. At the same time, politicians in Washington were focusing on China as a new global threat to US global interests, pressing to change the engagement policy towards China to a more confrontational approach.
All of which spelt bad news for Obama’s plans to speed up negotiations on the establishment of another free trade deal – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which was supposed to ensure that the US assumed a leading position in this new regional free trade system.
Under Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, the US pulled out completely from the TPP.
But like his predecessor, Trump continued to refrain from launching new US military interventions in the Middle East and pursued an approach of gradual disengagement from the region, while focusing US geostrategic attention on the Indo-Pacific region, where containing China became his administration’s central foreign policy priority.
In a way, President Joe Biden seemed to embrace Trump’s agenda when it came to continuing to shift US economic and military resources from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific, signing new security deals with India and the Philippines, expanding military exercises in Asia, and trying to retard China’s technological development.
At the same time, Biden was hoping that the normalisation of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel could lead to the formation of an Arab-Israeli military and economic axis that could contain Iran without requiring direct US military intervention.
But the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct 7, and the ensuing war in Gaza, seemed to pull the US once again into the Middle East quagmire, requiring the deployment of US military forces into the region, where war with Iran appears now to be more of a concern than a war with China over Taiwan.
So when Biden hosts the Apec summit of world leaders this week, the other 20 member economies gathering in San Francisco to talk about how to better spur trade and economic growth across the Pacific region may be wondering whether the Gaza war – another distant war on top of the one in Ukraine – may be turning the Indo-Pacific region into old news as far as Washington is concerned.
Indeed, how can a superpower that is stretched militarily thin abroad and facing huge economic and political challenges at home, continue pivoting to East Asia while devoting so much time and energy dealing with and responding to the wars in Europe and the Middle East?
In a way, being drawn back into Europe and the Middle East is like returning home for the foreign policy elites in Washington, with their traditional transatlantic preoccupation and something close to an obsession with the Middle East, as opposed to the more distant and exotic East Asia.
Moreover, some in Washington are now adopting simplistic notions of America’s geostrategic challenges, seeing the Gaza war as part of an effort by China and Russia to encourage Iran to challenge US interests in the Middle East.
It’s too early to know whether America’s re-pivoting to the Middle East, requiring shifting resources there from East Asia, will turn out to be a transformative development as far as the US position in the Indo-Pacific is concerned.
Asked in Japan on Nov 8 if the US was too occupied with the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine to continue its pivot to Asia, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “I can tell you that we are determined and we are, as we would say, running and chewing gum at the same time. The Indo-Pacific is the critical region for our future.”
He added: “Even as we’re dealing with a real crisis in Gaza and the Middle East, we’re also not only able, but we’re fully engaged in all of the interests we have in the Indo-Pacific.”
Or perhaps, America’s Pacific Century, alluring as it is, may have to wait.