So Much for 'ASEAN Centrality'

If an administration wants to show that it considers a region to be important to the U.S., it doesn’t keep sending the vice president to show the flag.

Kelley Grieco and Jennifer Kavanagh connect Biden’s snub of the ASEAN summit this week to the larger errors that the administration is making when it engages with Southeast Asian countries:

The Biden administration insists its approach “is not about forcing countries to choose” between Washington and Beijing, but as we learned through interviews with former senior government officials and security experts in Southeast Asia, its actions often do not match its rhetoric. And the ASEAN countries — Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam — are noticing.

According to our interviews, Washington has publicly and privately pressured ASEAN members to turn down China’s global infrastructure projects, known as the Belt and Road Initiative, reduce their economic and technological dependence on Beijing and cancel their military partnerships with the People’s Liberation Army.

The administration contends that it isn’t neglecting Southeast Asia and that Biden’s absence from the ASEAN summit is just a matter of scheduling, but blowing off the summit and sending Harris in Biden’s place show that they do not consider it to be a priority. The U.S. will have someone at the meeting, but the fact that Biden was already going to be in the region later this week and couldn’t be bothered to attend signals how unimportant the administration thinks the meeting is. If an administration wants to show that it considers a region to be important to the U.S., it doesn’t keep sending the vice president to show the flag. The vice president is usually sent to attend events that the president considers beneath him or not worth his time. Southeast Asian nations will get the message and remember it the next time that Washington wants something from them.