Other Asia Pacific countries have regular meetings with ASEAN leaders. The United States has come late in acknowledging the geo-strategic significance of the organisation. Southeast Asian leaders have already had 18 summits with China and 17 with Japan.
The Sunnylands Summit is a continuation of the US rebalance to Asia which started in 2009. US–ASEAN summits have been held on the sidelines of East Asia Summit meetings since 2013 after the United States ratified the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and appointed an ambassador to ASEAN — the first non-ASEAN country to do so.
The ASEAN group is the fourth largest trading partner of the United States and American companies are the largest single source of foreign direct investment in the region. In fact, US companies have invested more in Southeast Asia than they have in Japan, China and India combined. The US–ASEAN relationship was elevated to a strategic partnership in Kuala Lumpur in November 2015 and a Plan of Action is being worked out for engagement over the next five years.
The agenda for Sunnylands is to strengthen economic, political, security and people-to-people ties. But the meeting comes at a time when ASEAN is at sixes and sevens and has the potential to undermine regional coherence unless the ASEAN group is clear about what it wants from its relationship with the United States. This raises some big questions.
ASEAN is a central anchor in Asia’s geo-strategic order. Against how some realists called the odds, ASEAN has not only survived but has also been a useful fulcrum in managing relations among the major regional powers. Driven to unity and cooperation in its relations with large neighbouring countries, ASEAN has been larger than the sum of its parts. ASEAN’s approach to international diplomacy carries weight despite the contradictions in coordination and coherence across a vastly diverse group of nations.
ASEAN, in the face of China’s rise and its competitive rivalry with the United States, now seems more important than ever.
Maintaining ASEAN centrality will depend on progress with its own economic integration. The ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) came into force at the beginning of this year. It is an ambitious project to move ASEAN towards a single market and production base. The United States, China, Japan, Australia and others in the region have a deep intersection of interests in a strong ASEAN. Making the AEC work is now essential to that.
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is being negotiated between ASEAN and its six East Asian free trade agreement partners China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand. RCEP is an ASEAN-led agreement that, if successfully negotiated, will entrench ASEAN centrality. At best it can reinforce and extend the AEC so it is of vital importance to conclude an ambitious agreement that ultimately matches or betters the ambition of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
High on the US agenda in Sunnylands will be a strategy for dealing with the maritime territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea and getting more countries lined up to sign on to the recently concluded TPP.
ASEAN cannot approach the TPP with a common position any time soon. Four ASEAN members — Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam — are members of the TPP and Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand have expressed interest in joining. It is unrealistic to expect that there can be movement towards their membership for half a decade or more. That leaves the three least developed countries, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, still at the starting blocks given the high hurdles to entry and also because they are not members of APEC — a requirement under the current TPP arrangement. Meanwhile ASEAN’s engagement in the East Asian economy is the main game.
The TPP is yet to be ratified by its 12 members — which include Japan, Australia and the United States, but not China or India — and will not come into force until at least the beginning of 2018. It is very unclear how much longer after that new members will have to wait before they can expect to join. And even when they are eligible, they will have to negotiate entry separately through US Congress. This could be a very divisive process for the ASEAN group.
Former Indonesian trade minister, Mari Pangestu argues in this week’s lead that the discussion around the TPP this week should not be about urging ASEAN members to join the TPP. Instead, ASEAN should ‘address the potential diversion of trade and investment away from those ASEAN members not in the TPP. This is especially important for the least developed ASEAN countries, such as Cambodia, which are set to lose the most.’
‘The Summit should consider other initiatives that will help to secure ASEAN centrality and provide some transition flexibilities for countries choosing to join the TPP’, she says.
If individual countries chase entry to the TPP there is a risk that the focus in ASEAN will shift away from the AEC and ASEAN’s core agenda in East Asia through RCEP. Dealing with ASEAN countries bilaterally in this manner is precisely what the United States opposes China doing on territorial issues in the South China Sea. And yet, ironically, the conduct of its economic relations with the ASEAN economies embeds this strategic error.
In the economic and security spheres, ASEAN needs a common position that embodies the interests of all ASEAN members. The Philippines, Vietnam and Brunei have territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea. Peaceful resolution of these disputes and counterbalancing China’s assertiveness will be the other major agenda item in Sunnylands. The United States and ASEAN have similar positions on these issues but, as Pangestu suggests, it would be unwise of the United States to wrong-foot ASEAN efforts to secure agreement on its code of conduct in the South China Sea.
‘Leadership and neutrality from the largest ASEAN country, Indonesia — which is not a claimant — can help achieve’ a code of conduct that is being negotiated in an ASEAN-led regional forum, says Pangestu. That would seem to be a more likely way forward towards a peaceful resolution than a US-led response, especially since the United States is not yet signed up to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Of course, ASEAN will need American backing but it is with ASEAN that the diplomatic initiative needs to remain.
ASEAN needs to balance the United States and China. China is ASEAN’s most important economic partner. ‘Asian countries may support America against China to avoid Chinese hegemony’, says Hugh White, ‘but not to preserve US primacy. They are too polite to say that out loud, but if President Obama listens carefully to his guests … that is what he will learn’.
Let’s hope that ASEAN leaders speak up, and also hope that the importance of ASEAN centrality to the region is not accidentally overlooked in the pursuit of other objectives.
The EAF Editorial Group is comprised of Peter Drysdale, Shiro Armstrong, Ben Ascione, Ryan Manuel and Jillian Mowbray-Tsutsumi and is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy in the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.
This must be an old photograph, a misrepresentation, because the President of Myanmar cancelled his trip at the last minute.
In the late 1954, the US, France (after her decisive defeat at Dien Bien Phu and kicked out of Vietnam) Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO.
Its mission was to stop the spread of communism. Only two South East Asia Nations joined SEATO at the material time, the Philippines and Thailand.
“By the early 1970s, members began to withdraw from the organization. Neither Pakistan nor France supported the U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and both nations were pulling away from the organization in the early 1970s. Pakistan formally left SEATO in 1973, because the organization had failed to provide it with assistance in its ongoing conflict against India. When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the most prominent reason for SEATO’s existence disappeared. As a result, SEATO formally disbanded in 1977.”
Source: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953-1960/seato
Is the United States trying to form another SEATO to contain China, when China is the biggest trading partners of most if not all of the Asean nations. Will it succeed this time? The jury is still out.
I certainly agree with the Forum’s managers that ASEAN has a role to play. But I wonder if their apparently enduring faith in the organization’s centrality and unity is becoming anachronistic. The rise of an economically dynamic and politically assertive China could not help but undercut the significance of ASEAN. It was not Obama’s pursuit of a TPP that first divided the organization. Singapore and Brunei broke ASEAN’s ranks to pioneer the original partnership with Chile and New Zealand in 2005, three years before the US joined the process and five years before the American “rebalance” got underway. How much of ASEAN’s unity does it owe to its inability to tackle hard issues?
If the TPP stimulates policymakers inside ASEAN to regain its centrality by accelerating progress toward an RCEP, so much the better. But the task in this changing context is not how to rekindle deference to ASEAN’s symbolic keystone role. If centrality is to be more than a location, it must be productive-a means to an end, not the end in itself. The task to which ASEAN can and should contribute is how to mesh different trade initiatives while managing the new realities of China’s economic outreach, e.g., AIIB and OBOR. Nor is it clear that a worsening of China’s economic troubles will necessarily reinvigorate ASEAN by comparison-centrality redux-given the vulnerability of Southeast Asia’s economies that their reliance on Chinese demand implies.
The Canberra editors worry that the US could “wrong-foot” ASEAN’s efforts to reach an agreement with China to regulate conduct in the South China Sea. Thanks largely to foot-dragging by Beijing, however, that goal has become an institutionalized mirage-invoked hopefully year after year in ASEAN’s communiqués to no meaningful avail.
Rather than cling to a chimera, ASEAN would do better to brainstorm the alternatives to wishfully waiting for China, someday, to relent. At this point it is hard to imagine Beijing signing a code of conduct that is enforceable and that does not at least implicitly validate the new infrastructure of would-be dominance that China has so speedily dredged, reclaimed, paved, and built on the potentially deadly sites that it now controls in the South China Sea.
Between centrality in hosting meetings and creativity in hatching solutions, the latter role will be harder for ASEAN to pursue. But it is more likely to promise results, for the association and the larger region as well.
Cheers, Don