However, international politics hardly follows such binary dynamics. Indeed, for many reasons, Beijing’s goal to bolster its position in Southeast Asia at Washington’s expense is very likely to fail. First, regional leaders understand very well that one cancelled presidential trip to Southeast Asia doesn’t equal a change in the US’s Asia strategy. Key regional powers such as Malaysia and Indonesia acknowledged Obama’s imperative to stay at home. Instead, Secretary of State John Kerry attended both meetings and delivered the key message Southeast Asian countries wanted to hear: America expects China and its neighbours to peacefully resolve their territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
Second, this message exposed China’s Achilles’ heel in Southeast Asia: while ASEAN claimants are eager to talk, Beijing isn’t willing to compromise on its extensive territorial claims in the South China Sea. In Darussalam, China’s Premier Li Keqiang not only reiterated Beijing’s ‘indisputable rights’ within the ‘nine-dash’ line, he also warned countries not directly involved, including Australia and Japan, to stay out of the disputes. So China didn’t make much progress in persuading Southeast Asian countries about its benign intentions. Put simply, its assertive behaviour in the South China Sea has caused an almost intractable trust deficit between Beijing and ASEAN countries. It also provides an avenue for external players such as India and Japan to increase their security role in Southeast Asia.
Third, the result is that some Southeast Asian nations show signs of ‘internal’ and ‘external balancing’ behaviour against China. With mostly Russian support, Vietnam is developing the components of an ‘anti-access/area-denial’ (A2/AD) capability to offset China’s impressive regional maritime build-up. After decades of preoccupation with internal security issues, the Philippines is attempting to build a ‘minimum credible defense’ posture against China. Others are clearly hedging against the possibility of more tensions in the South China Sea. Singapore, for example, invited the US to forward deploy up to four Littoral Combat Ships. It’s also likely to opt for the Joint Strike Fighter as its next combat aircraft, which will only increase its defence cooperation with the US.
Fourth, interpretations that Obama’s absence is evidence of a lack of commitment to the rebalance are problematic. Typically, two main arguments are advanced. The first is that Washington is too preoccupied with the Middle East and the second that the US no longer has the money to support the Pentagon’s shift to the Asia Pacific. The first claim doesn’t recognise that the US still is a global power with global responsibilities — just because Obama’s recent speech before the UN General Assembly had far fewer references to the Asia Pacific than the Middle East doesn’t mean the US suddenly has lost interest in Asia.
The second claim isn’t convincing either. Despite pressures on the US defence budget, the Pentagon continues to shift key military systems into the Asia-Pacific region. In early October, US officials announced that the US will deploy Global Hawk UAVs to Japan at the beginning of 2014. And in 2017 the Marines will begin the deployment of F-35Bs to Japan, marking the first deployment of the Joint Strike Fighter outside the United States. Moreover, the US Marines are building a new, advanced command post on Palawan Island in the Philippines to monitor the South China Sea. The airstrip on the island will be upgraded to accommodate US strategic airlift (and potentially fighter aircraft). In other words, the Philippines is the latest step in America’s strategy to enhance the Marines’ rotational presence in the Asia Pacific, significantly complicating Chinese military operational planning.
Finally, US allies appear willing to shoulder a greater burden to support America’s pivot. Australia is a case in point. Prime Minister Abbott just announced his government’s decision to share the financial costs of an enhanced US Marine presence in the North. As well, his warmer approach to Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — America’s other key Asian ally — at summits, which included a recognition that Tokyo needs to play a more active regional security role, earned him critical remarks in Beijing.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Australia and America’s Southeast Asian allies and partners are now on an anti-China course. But they have a key interest in maintaining an American presence in the region and an acute awareness of when to step up the plate. China is a long way from undermining America’s position in Southeast Asia.
Benjamin Schreer is a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
This article was first published here on ASPI.
This author refers to ‘Beijing’s goal to bolster its position in Southeast Asia at Washington’s expense’. If this goal indeed exists, it shows that China’s leaders have fallen victim to the fallacy of zero-sum thinking that the author castigates earlier in his post. By asserting in his final sentence that ‘China is a long way from undermining America’s position in Southeast Asia’, the author reveals that his own liberation from zero-sum thinking has only just begun. To this observer, by contrast, it seems that Beijing’s principal goal in Southeast Asia is to secure the extravagant territorial claims that it has made in the South China Sea, more or less regardless of the cost to its bilateral relations with individual Southeast Asian countries. The United States has no territorial claims in Southeast Asia. This absence of territorial claims gives the United States a great advantage. But the dysfunctionality of its political system confers no diplomatic advantage whatsoever. The author so convincingly argues that Obama’s absence from the meetings in Bali and Brunei didn’t matter that one is tempted to conclude that Obama’s presence in future heads of government meetings will be equally superfluous. The author asserts, without providing citations, that the leaders of Malaysia and Indonesia acknowledged ‘Obama’s imperative to stay at home’. International relations would be an untaxing discipline if we could take leaders’ public statements at face value. One would not have expected the leaders of these two countries to denounce Obama’s decision to stay in Washington as a betrayal of Southeast Asia. Let’s just consider Indonesia. The likelihood that President Yudhoyono understood how the shutdown of the US government occurred is remote. It’s hard enough for Australians to grasp. Does SBY understand that a similar shutdown won’t in future prevent Obama focusing on some major crisis in Southeast Asia? Obama’s absence has prevented SBY from basking in whats would have probably been Obama’s last visit to Indonesia before he, SBY, steps down next year. Did the presence of John Kerry, fresh from his triumphant handling of the Syrian issue, not to mention his deft management of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations which are going nowhere, really reassure Southeast Asia?
Mr Ward makes some very strong points in his comments on Mr Schreer’s piece, especially in respect of its implausible assertion that the dysfunctionality of US government that led to President Obama’s no-show in Bali and Brunei bear no costs. This is dreamland stuff as Mr Ward suggests: no one would suggest that the US president’s continuing absence from these affairs doesn’t impact on their outcome and chemistry. There appears to be a core stream of thinking in Australian thinkers who are constitutionally unable tell things to Australia’s partner across the Pacific like they really are on any issue. They come dangerously close to defining Australia’s national interest in terms of being unable to brook any questioning of the US role on any matter at all. Australia diminishes its standing in the region and its partnership with the United States by being a slavish and unthinking apologist for any frailty or weaknesses that its ally inevitably displays from time to time. Mr Schreer’s piece is deeply disappointing from this perspective.