Posted by Catharin Dalpino on November 13, 2009. Filed under Special Report: President Obama's November 2009 Trip to Asia , Regional Organizations, Regional Security Architecture, Southeast Asia, United States.
Obama in Southeast Asia: Where Form Is Function
Presidential visits abroad are meticulously scripted, and the President seldom goes out without a variety of “deliverables” in his briefcase. When Barak Obama makes his first trip to Southeast Asia as President, however, the meeting he will hold with leaders from all ten ASEAN members will itself be the deliverable. The first-ever US-ASEAN Leaders Meeting is the completion of a trifecta of US policy initiatives in recent years – the other legs being the establishment of the position of US Ambassador for ASEAN Affairs during the Bush administration and Secretary Clinton’s signing the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation last July – intended to raise the profile of the United States in Southeast Asia and re-engage with the region. The meeting will be brief – under two hours – and is not expected to forge new ground.
Rather, it will consolidate recent Obama policy initiatives in Southeast Asia, most notably the review of Burma policy that resulted in a forty-five degree turn to allow more high-level engagement with the Burmese regime. Last week National Security Council Senior Director for Asia Jeffrey Bader summarized this policy shift when he declared that the administration was “not going to let the Burmese tail wag the ASEAN dog.” The participation of Burmese Prime Minister General Thein Sein in the US-ASEAN meeting will be the personification of this new paradigm, as was the trip to Burma last week of Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia/Pacific Kurt Campbell and US Ambassador for ASEAN Affairs Scot Marciel. Some quarters of the Southeast Asian press expect that the issue of Burmese elections in 2010 will be addressed in the Singapore meeting and have reported on drafts of a final group statement urging the regime to guarantee that the polls will be free, fair and inclusive – the last a reference to the participation of National League for Democracy Leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
If Burma is a topic in the meeting room, there is likely to be considerable corridor discussion on - and informal attempts to mediate - the present tension between Thailand and Cambodia over Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s hiring former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra as an “economic adviser,” the latest in a series of bilateral incidents that have eroded relations between the two countries over the past two years. This week Cambodia declined Thailand’s request to extradite Thaksin, who was convicted last year of corruption charges. As the United States and ASEAN mark a new milestone in their relationship, the limitations on ASEAN’s ability to resolve disputes among member states is a discouraging punctuation.
Nor will President Obama lunveil new initiatives in US trade with Asia at the APEC Leaders Meeting. There, the pressure in the room will be not on Burma or Cambodia/Thailand, but on the United States. Although Asian leaders broadly heralded the milestone in US political development that Obama’s election symbolized, the majority were wary that a President from the Democratic Party would resist trade liberalization. This issue has largely been moot with the global economic crisis, but APEC leaders will listen closely to indications for a post-crisis Obama trade policy. In the lead-up meeting to the APEC summit this week, US Trade Representative Ron Kirk signaled that future US trade agreements would depend in part on other countries’ commitment to “playing by the rules,” a jab at China among others.
For the present, Washington’s vehicle of choice for regional trade arrangements appears to be the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which enables countries to accede individually as they see fit, rather than mandating a more inclusive group. The United States has expressed interest in joining, and Vietnam is also considering accession. In the near-term and on a more bilateral basis, the fate of the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement, which is still to be approved by Congress, will be considered the harbinger of Obama trade policy.
Apart from present and future trade agreements, there is also the matter of APEC itself. The Bush administration’s addition of counter-terrorism issues to the agenda skewed APEC away from its original mission of economic cooperation, and the proliferation of Asian regional frameworks in the past two decades, including ASEAN-Plus-Three and the East Asia Summit, have called into question APEC’s mandate and utility. APEC is likely to remain an important mechanism in the Obama administration’s Asia policy toolbox, because it reinforces the concept of an Asia-Pacific community over a more narrow Asia framework (which would exclude the United States). However, Obama will be expected to articulate his administration’s vision for APEC in short order, by the time the United States hosts the Leaders Meeting in 2011 if not before.