Raise the U.S. Profile in Southeast Asia

[ 54 ] asia policy “Washington should raise the political, economic, and diplomatic profile of the United States in Southeast Asia while sustaining U.S. Pacific Command bilateral and multilateral exercises, training programs, and civic action cooperation with regional militaries and governments.” • Raise the U.S. Profile in Southeast Asia Sheldon W. Simon To a considerable degree, Southeast Asian concerns about the United States are both psychological and geostrategic. Psychologically, regional leaders complain that Washington has paid insufficient attention to Southeast Asia’s economic interests and has not adequately recognized the region’s relative political stability. Geostrategically, the region’s strategists are concerned that the U.S. obsession with the Middle East and South Asia has led the Bush administration both to approach Southeast Asia solely as the “second front” in the global war on radical Islamic extremism and to leave an open playing field for China, which has seized the initiative in diplomacy and trade, thus undermining Southeast Asia’s hedging strategy toward the two great powers. In short, Southeast Asian leaders believe that the new administration must be more fully engaged with the region along a variety of dimensions. Though it is true that Washington provided counterterrorism assistance to the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) states and helped enhance their capacities to cope with regional terrorist threats, other U.S. policies dealing with trade, investment, and diplomacy received little public recognition in Southeast Asia. That said, however, this essay argues that the new administration should adopt a more proactive policy to help Southeast Asia pursue its hedging strategy more effectively. In effect, Washington should raise the political, economic, and diplomatic profile of the United States in Southeast Asia while sustaining U.S. Pacific Command bilateral and multilateral exercises, training programs, and civic action cooperation with regional militaries and governments. In the political-psychological dimension, U.S. public diplomacy has been a dismal failure in Southeast Asian states with large Muslim populations—Malaysia and Indonesia. Positive attitudes toward the United sheldon w. simon is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University. He can be reached at . [ 55 ] special roundtable • advising the new u.s. president States seldom exceed 30% when measured by such instruments as the Pew Global Attitudes Survey. In October 2008, at a conference in Kuala Lumpur, I spoke with a well-known Indonesian scholar from a prestigious Jakarta think-tank. He repeated the discredited and scurrilous charges that the CIA and the national intelligence agency of Israel, Mossad, perpetrated September 11, and that thousands of Jews who worked in the twin towers had been warned to stay away on that tragic day. If a highly educated political analyst still utters this nonsense, it is little wonder that the general Indonesian population has such a negative view of the United States. Simply claiming that Muslims are free to worship in the United States, as the Bush administration emphasized, fails to address the real issue: Muslim attitudes toward U.S. policies. Though the underlying antipathy is a result of the presence of U.S. soldiers in the Muslim lands of Iraq and Afghanistan— as well as the intractable Palestinian-Israeli conflict—there are ways of ameliorating Southeast Asian Muslim attitudes toward the United States. In the past few years the Bush administration provided financial support for moderate, mainstream Islamic universities in Indonesia; supported activities promoting pluralism throughout the region; and invited the upcoming generation of Islamic community leaders to visit the United States and discuss U.S. foreign policies toward Southeast Asia and the Muslim world with government officials and experts. These policies should be enhanced by the new administration. In addition, the new administration should apply political pressure to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and other sources of financial aid for madaris and pondoks (Islamic schools) in Southeast Asia that preach an intolerant Salafi form of Islam—a version of the faith that is alien to the dominant syncretic strain of Islam historically more characteristic of the region. With respect to more traditional diplomacy, Washington has made some positive moves that the new administration should accelerate. After several years in which the secretary of state missed important annual ASEAN and ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) meetings, the...