When the surge is fully debated, the troops come home, the war is ended, and the losses counted, an unexpected casualty of the Iraq War could end up being the Far East. America’s longstanding relations with Asia are steadily going up in smoke.
The Bush administration has upset the 10 leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) by recently calling off the commemorative U.S.-ASEAN Summit planned for September. The reason: the administration’s ugly face-off with Congress over Iraq. No one in the administration foresaw that the September 5 summit in Singapore was going to conflict with General Petraeus’s report card on the surge. The congressional calendar is predictable, even if politics is not, and the 10 heads of government are being stood up over what is apparently a scheduling glitch.
The diplomatic bungling would not have been so disappointing if the meeting were routine. But this is no mere dress rehearsal. The inaugural summit was meant to celebrate and cement 30 years of U.S.-ASEAN ties.
Bush plans to continue with his plans to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting (APEC) in Sydney in September. But the decision to snub ASEAN fits a larger pattern. Although the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) brings together an A-list of regional leaders to talk real business, Condoleezza Rice decided not to attend 26-member political and security roundtable in 2005. She was the first U.S. secretary of state to send her deputy to a meeting in which China, Japan, India, Burma, and even North Korea participate. Washington had never treated the ARF this way since its inception in 1994, and the faux pas made for flashy headlines. The administration scrambled to make amends and argue that it was still a player in the region. Skeptics, however, doubted the administration’s seriousness of purpose. Their misgivings turned out to be prescient. Secretary Rice has again sent a deputy to the ARF that is taking place in Manila this week.
Rice’s passing over of yet another Asian jamboree may seem minor in the scheme of foreign policy issues confronting America and its beleaguered administration. But consider this: ASEAN is a bigger export market for American products than China. Yet the United States chose to be absent from the 2005 ASEAN economic ministers meeting held in the Lao capital, Vientiane. The United States is also not part of the ASEAN Plus Three annual gatherings that connect ASEAN with its three northeast Asian partners, China, Japan, and South Korea.
Finally, America has been excluded from several recent multilateral initiatives. The new, continent-wide East Asia Summit, which has welcomed Australia and New Zealand but not the United States, may lack substance for now but it represents half of the world’s population. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is another rising bloc in Central Asia that briefly got Washington’s attention in 2005 when it issued a timeline for U.S. forces to pull out of Uzbekistan.
Taken together, a discernable pattern is emerging – of no-shows and American invisibility – no matter what the administration says about engaging Asia. Yes, America has fought three wars in Asia. It has built a vast network of multiple alliances over time. But habitual absences and lower-level representation at critical forums dilute the message, even if the messenger is Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte who is attending the ARF in Secretary Rice’s place. Culturally, the substitution will go down as contempt, and culture counts. In short, missteps, missed opportunities, and miscalculations have slowly come to shape America’s Asia policy.
The implications are far-reaching. America has few friends, and it should keep the ones who wish it well. Rather than a “second front” in the “war on terrorism,” Southeast Asia has become a backburner issue for the Bush administration. Secretary Rice once labeled Myanmar – known to the United States as Burma – an “outpost of tyranny.” If difficult diplomacy is yielding progress in North Korea, the same patience and care can be pursued elsewhere.
In real terms, these VIP meetings in far-away places make a difference when America wants Asia to buy U.S. products. Should Harley-Davidsons or Japanese models flood the consumer-crazy Asian market? What about pushing against compulsory licenses in the pharmaceutical sector? America’s voice on weighty global issues will not likely carry weight. As it is, only the political elite in a dwindling number of Asian countries cares to listen to what America has to say.
Strategically speaking, no one yet knows what kind of political and security architecture is going to emerge in the Asia-Pacific. It will, however, coalesce with or without the United States. For all of ASEAN’s bureaucratic shortcomings and penchant for ceremony, Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet rightly observed during his recent visit to Washington that ASEAN is today more cohesive, and its institutional partnerships with China, Japan, the European Union (EU), and a host of middle-powers are growing. In a major milestone, ASEAN will soon unveil a new rules-based ASEAN Charter at its annual November Summit that it hopes will make it as grounded in legal certainty as the EU.
America can help strengthen reform-minded institutions and together with its allies tackle problems where interests converge, like Burma. Or the United States can go it alone. If a power vacuum arises in Asia, other countries at ASEAN’s doorstep are certainly willing to step in. The State Department acknowledges that relations with ASEAN are “rough right now,” but it is “something we can recover from.”
Maybe. In another era.
Haseenah Koyakutty is a freelance journalist, a former Indonesia bureau chief for Channel NewsAsia, and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org).
