(Bloomberg) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken will seek to bolster the Biden administration’s outreach to Southeast Asian nations as a counterweight to China during a key policy speech in Jakarta on Tuesday.
Blinken, on a three-nation tour of the region, is seeking to rebuild relationships that frayed during President Donald Trump’s term with governments that aren’t part of the administration’s Quad partnership with Australia, India and Japan.
“I am not sure it is well-understood how much American diplomacy with Southeast Asia suffered under Trump,” said Aaron Connelly, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore. “Trump never attended an East Asia Summit. Their ‘America First’ trade agenda was extremely unpopular throughout the region.”
The speech in Jakarta also comes ahead of the administration’s release of its Indo-Pacific strategy and is expected to focus on areas of cooperation such as fighting the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change and promoting freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Blinken may also address the military takeover this year in Myanmar.
But regional leaders will also be looking to see if the U.S. can offer more on trade, although without the Biden administration reversing Trump’s decision to abandon a deal for a regional trade bloc.
‘Better Than Nothing’
“While the Indo-Pacific economic framework is better than nothing, it clearly isn’t the kind of economic engagement the region is looking for,” said Greg Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
There are bruised feelings in the region to assuage as well.
The administration didn’t invite Singapore — arguably America’s most reliable partner in Southeast Asia — to take part in President Joe Biden’s “democracy summit” last week. Cambodian leaders were frustrated with an arms embargo imposed by the U.S. over its growing military ties with China. And while the U.S. has a new ambassador in Singapore, many key envoy posts remain unfilled.
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Southeast Asia has taken on added importance to the Biden administration as it seeks to build up alliances to pressure Beijing over everything from human rights to its assertiveness in the South China Sea — an area where smaller Asian nations such as Malaysia and Vietnam often find themselves at a disadvantage with China.
Beijing has rattled Indonesia in recent months with repeated incursions into its exclusive economic zone, while Chinese boats have repeatedly harassed civilian vessels in Malaysian oil and gas fields in recent years.
“Beijing is the gift that keeps on giving on the security front,” said Poling.
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The speech in Jakarta is also meant to emphasize the importance the administration places on the U.S. relationship with Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy and most populous Muslim-majority nation. Indonesia is also due to host the Group of 20 next year and to chair the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 2023, further underscoring its significance in the region.
Blinken’s visit to Indonesia will be followed by stops in Malaysia and Thailand, two other influential regional players.
But simply showing up will only take the U.S. so far. Blinken’s audience in Jakarta and across the region will be looking for concrete actions. One bright spot for the administration is its efforts on vaccine diplomacy, which have seen it donate more than 25 million vaccine doses to Indonesia through the Covax program and has pledged to deliver tens of millions more across the region.
The administration’s economic pitch is harder to sell. The U.S. is unlikely to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement from which Trump withdrew in 2017 because of the domestic challenges of passing free trade agreements.
Other potential initiatives such as a digital trade agreement for the region are still nascent and would also be likely to encounter political opposition. That’s left the Biden administration pushing an economic “framework” for the region that so far is short on details.
“The Achilles heel is the lack of trade policy,” said Polling.
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