Southeast Asia in the US rebalance: perceptions from a divided region.

• Author: Graham, Euan
• Position: Essay

President Obama's "no-show" at the October 2013 East Asia Summit (EAS) and US-ASEAN Summit in Bali--compounded by cancelled bilateral visits to Malaysia and the Philippines either side--has added to doubts already being expressed volubly within the region about the durability and commitment of the US "pivot" or "rebalance" to the wider region, particularly given Washington's claims to be pursuing a sub-regional focus on Southeast Asia. There is, however, nothing especially new about alternating swings in regional attitudes towards the United States. As Alice Ba has argued, regional perceptions have tended to cast US policy towards Southeast Asia in binary terms, alternating between the extremes of over-militarization and "systemic neglect". (1) The first and second George W. Bush administrations typified this curve, initially sparking concerns that the United States was intent on opening up a "second front" in the so-called "war on terror" in Southeast Asia, yielding to disappointment at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's non-attendance at successive meetings of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). (2)

The rebalance (3) to Asia--launched two years into Barack Obama's first term--initially re-awakened the over-militarization critique of US policy, given its up-front focus on US force realignment and rising tensions in the South China Sea. Within the US military global commands structure, the Western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean fall within the Pacific Command (PACOM) and Pacific Fleet's area of responsibility. This automatically subsumes Southeast Asia in--a wider strategic context. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's intervention at the July 2010 ARF in Hanoi, and her subsequent November 2011 Foreign Policy article--still the closest document to an official doctrine for the pivot--clearly signalled an intensification of US interest in the South China Sea. (4) Attention in Southeast Asia was further garnered by Washington's apparent interest in a more "redistributive" footprint for the US military forward-deployed presence in the Western Pacific, given its top-heavy dispositions in Japan, South Korea and Guam. According to Don Emmerson, "the pivot's association with security unbalanced the policy itself", overshadowing the pivot's economic rationale and creating the impression that the "goal of tapping into the material dynamism of emerging Asia seemed to be more of an afterthought" (5). Since 2012 there has been a conscious re-calibration to the pivot/ rebalance, widening the base of US engagement efforts to include diplomatic and economic legs to match the already extended defence component.

Although the pivot concept, as originally used by US officials, "suggested the transfer of resources and strategic attention from the Middle East and Europe to Asia", the military substance--at least in terms of additional US military deployments--in Southeast Asia has been somewhat underwhelming. (6) Nonetheless the region has maintained a consistently high profile within the overall geographical focus on Asia, borne out in the high number of senior administration officials visiting the region, beginning with Hillary Clinton's February 2009 visit to Jakarta in the early phase of the Obama presidency, which was judged to be "the public relations highlight of her first trip to Asia as Secretary of State". (7) Clinton went on to visit all ten ASEAN capitals, while "a greater emphasis on Southeast Asia" was further reflected in the thirteen visits to Asia made by Defense Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, as well as senior officials and military officers including the National Security Advisor and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (8) Notwithstanding the cancellation of two previous presidential visits to Southeast Asia before October 2013, the overall engagement effort has been relatively consistent, given the considerable presidential "face time" invested in annual attendance at both the EAS and APEC leaders meeting. The US diplomatic focus on Southeast Asia has also benefited from the Obama administration's embrace of multilateralism, given ASEAN's importance as a hub for Asia-wide trade and security dialogues and groupings. (9) A recent study from the Center for New American Security duly acknowledges the administration's efforts to "expand engagement with partners in Southeast Asia". (10)

However, as doubts have accumulated about the fiscal sustainability of the US forward-deployed posture and whether its commitment is primarily rhetorical, the narrative has swung from over-militarization back towards "neglect", a theme reinforced in recent media coverage. (11) The trend was evident even before the US federal government "shutdown" in October 2013, but has since gathered momentum, especially given unfavourable comparisons inevitably drawn with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang's inaugural and highly symbolic visits to the region. (12) Pendulum-like swings between these persistently polarized narratives about America's role in Southeast Asia prompt the question whether, in fact, there is such a thing as a happy medium for US engagement in Southeast Asia that is neither overbearing nor inattentive, and how this might be defined?

In surveying regional attitudes towards the US rebalance, there is a sub-theme to this article, premised on the assumption that perceptions may be indicative of a widening divide between "continental" and "maritime" Southeast Asia, porous though these labels evidently are. While it is not my intention to engage in a systematic discourse analysis, to give my guiding assumptions and analysis some grounding in local and elite opinion in Southeast Asia, I have cited from a range of regional commentators, drawing in particular from a National Bureau for Asian Research (NBR) report on Asia-wide attitudes to the US pivot/rebalance strategy, published in January 2013. (13) I also adopt a definition of the strategy offered within that report, as a "trident" combining the three prongs of multilateral/bilateral diplomacy, trade and investment promotion, and military presence. (14)

Recalibrating the Rebalance

While the primary focus of this analysis lies with the military and diplomatic elements to US policy in Southeast Asia, the economic prong, though less developed, is integral to understanding the orientation of Southeast Asian states towards China and the United States: specifically, whether America is perceived as a provider of broad-based public goods to the region including military security, or as lacking the economic foundation to sustain its engagement beyond the short term and over-reliant on military levers to maintain its influence. Economic factors are weighed closely if not always accurately within the region in the comparison with China, since it has overtaken the United States as the primary trading partner of many--though not all--Southeast Asian countries. (15)

US Vice-President Joe Biden, in a speech delivered at George Washington University ahead of his visit to Singapore in July 2013, noted that the United States has a bigger investment profile than China in Southeast Asia, hence "President Obama has put particular focus on Southeast Asia: ASEAN now represents a US$2 trillion economy of 600 million people." (6) Trade may be a limited indicator of "depth" and maturity to commercial relationships, yet by 2010 the US relative market share of ASEAN's trade had more than halved, to 9 per cent, from 20 per cent in 1998. (17) The Obama administration has appeared cognizant of the perception problem this has posed for the credibility of the "pivot" in Southeast Asia, as well as the genuine necessity of underpinning the expansion of its defence and diplomatic relationships in Southeast Asia with initiatives directed at economic revival. (18) Hillary Clinton, for example, focused on deepening US business partnerships as the theme of her November 2012 "economic pivot" speech delivered, notably, at Singapore Management University, while a sizeable commercial delegation accompanied President Obama as he toured mainland Southeast Asia in the lead-up to the 2012 EAS.

Meanwhile, to flesh out the multilateral and diplomatic aspects to US regional engagement, the appointment of a US Ambassador to ASEAN--resident in Jakarta since March 2011--appears designed to serve a twin objective: first, of endorsing ASEAN as the main vehicle for Washington's multilateral diplomacy in Southeast Asia plus the wider region; and second, to deepen US engagement across a raft of cross-cutting, transnational security and development issues. (19) However, bilateral relationships retain their traditional importance, especially in the security realm.

Part of the problem that America faces in enhancing its political leadership role in Southeast Asia is that power factors are difficult to divorce from the economic policy realm. Indeed, China's diplomatic gains in the region since the late 1990s have been delivered inseparably from economic initiatives, originating from Beijing's diplomatically effective if largely cost-flee supportive stance towards Southeast Asia as the region's economies recovered from the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis. Economic inducements (real or apparent) were an effective tool of China's regional diplomacy in the decade that followed, as Beijing "attempted to co-opt ... Southeast Asian states by providing incentives in the form of trade concessions, investments and large-scale Official Development Assistance projects". (20) Although China's economic statecraft in Southeast Asia has been characterized by regional analysts as an exercise in soft power, (21) an explicit linkage between geopolitical influence and trade in Southeast Asia is increasingly acknowledged in the mainstream Chinese media, while competitive comparisons are drawn openly with the United States. (22) China's confidence in the economic element of its statecraft has also taken on a selectively...