Don’t be used to provoke confrontations. Grab the Asian moment, show your wisdom. With that message, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has been on the phone with his Southeast Asian colleagues in recent days. He warned of a “Cold War mentality” during their meeting Thursday and Friday with US President Joe Biden.
‘Special top’
After his predecessors neglect the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Biden brings ASEAN members to Washington to celebrate 45 years of relations with the association. The Myanmar general regime has not been invited and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is staying at home because of the elections, but the presence of eight out of ten heads of government is already ‘a special summit’. Especially since former President Donald Trump did not even show up for consultations with the association during his term.
This symbolic tightening of ties in any case stimulates Wang Yi to ring the bell. He does not specifically mention the US, just as Biden does not say that his policy is about curtailing Chinese ambitions. But everyone knows what it’s about.
Nowhere in the world is the competition between China and the US more intense than in Southeast Asia, where countries prefer not to choose between the two superpowers. They have been fighting each other for several years and are trying to drag countries into their camp the hardest.
Economically, China has the best cards. Bilateral trade between China and Southeast Asian countries amounted to more than $685 billion in 2020, double what the US and ASEAN members trade with each other.
The Americans are valued above all as a guardian of the international rules of the game: a safe idea for countries involved in conflicts with Beijing, such as disputes over sea or land borders. When it comes to trade, a top priority for ASEAN after the pandemic, the US has less to offer. Trump torpedoed the world’s largest trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Subsequently, China registered with the successor to TPP and at the same time set up an even larger free trade zone of its own for fifteen countries. Southeast Asia has already played a key role in the Belt Road Initiative (BRI), China’s economic master plan for the world.
US counterparts such as Build Back Better World aren’t going to break Southeast Asia out of the Chinese economic architecture for a while, so Biden is kicking it up a notch with the Indo Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). Not a traditional trade agreement, but cooperation in the field of digital economy, clean energy and infrastructure. Under US terms on transparency, taxes and anti-corruption. What this new offshoot of Biden’s Indo-Pacific initiatives entails is as vague as the rest of his China strategy.
The US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, a Covid-slayed Secretary of State: the unveiling of Biden’s China strategy has been delayed so many times that China specialists and other insiders in Washington are whispering that there is no strategy at all. Except ‘Trump-light’: Biden does what Trump did, but smartly. For example, coordination between US government departments has improved and Asian allies are courted. This is already bearing fruit in Japan. As Biden’s forward post, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida goes out of his way to interest ASEAN countries in ‘a free, open Indo-Pacific’.
Deterrence Initiative
That doesn’t make a broad Asian coalition against China, so the US is reverting to its traditional defense and security stronghold. For the South Pacific, there is the US Department of Defense ‘Pacific Deterrence Initiative’. That ministry is allocating $6 billion to thin China’s influence. There is deferred maintenance. For example, the Solomon Islands are rapidly expanding a controversial security pact with Beijing to far-reaching cooperation in fisheries and mineral extraction. ASEAN chairman Cambodia has also surrendered to Beijing militarily, economically and politically.
These are extreme cases: Most countries in Southeast Asia have survived for thousands of years on the Chinese periphery by befriending China while keeping all options open. They want to keep doing that. While Biden says he doesn’t want changes to China’s political system, he sells the rivalry with Beijing as a struggle between democratic and authoritarian worldviews. That rhetoric is working among an American audience and in Europe, which is disillusioned with China’s refusal to let Russia fall into the Ukraine war. But in Asia it is a stumbling block in countries like Vietnam, where a communist party also rules alone.
The US is coming to get more than it brings, is the feeling in Southeast Asia. Tangible benefits, such as wider access to the US market, would do wonders to make Biden’s camp more attractive. Above all, there is a need for reassurance that the US is able to handle geopolitical distractions without abandoning Asian friends. Also in the new world order, where it is becoming increasingly difficult not to choose between Washington or Beijing.