Hard Interests, Soft Illusions: Southeast Asia and American Power

1. Beliefs about American Hegemony in Southeast Asia

1 1 BELIEFS ABOUT AMERICAN HEGEMONY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA There is little effusive sentimentality about the United States among foreign policy elites in Southeast Asia today. More than sixty years have passed since President Manuel Roxas of the Philippines declared that the safest course for his newly-independent country was to follow in the “glistening wake” of America.1 His view was emphatically rejected by many Southeast Asians at the time and does not resonate in a region formally committed to independence and norms of noninterference.2 Extravagant statements professing a kindred spirit and shared vision sometimes still adorn official speeches and communiqués, but these appear intended for diplomatic consumption only. Leaders and foreign policy thinkers in Southeast Asia more often seem to identify with Lord Palmerston ’s dictum: “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.”They generally paint themselves as rational and pragmatic, dealing with external powers according to the dictates of national interest rather than sentiment. Yet behind the apparently hard-headed calculations of interest lie beliefs that cannot be explained as straightforward responses to a set of external conditions. Rather than being the product of formal reasoning, assessments of probability, or self-aware attempts to navigate tradeoffs and uncertainties, many core beliefs informing foreign policy orientations reflect commitments 1. Quoted in Jose 1998, 407–408. 2. Acharya 2009. 2 CHAPTER 1 and biases that are political, cognitive, and affective. Beliefs in this sense are both powerful and independent.3 This book investigates one such set of beliefs: beliefs about the international role and power of the United States held by foreign policymakers and practitioners in six Southeast Asian countries. Their beliefs are the basis on which they define some countries as potentially threatening and others as relatively benign. Such beliefs are foundational in the sense of making possible specific foreign policy decisions as well as underlying broad foreign policy orientations of alignment , opposition, or nonalignment. With some qualifications and exceptions, majorities in the foreign policy communities of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines , Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam see the United States as a relatively benign international power. Although they may dislike many aspects of U.S. foreign policy, it is close to axiomatic in foreign policy circles that the United States is,“overall,”a benign and stabilizing power. This belief underlies Southeast Asian support for a regional order in which the United States has exercised predominant power and is thus instrumental in sustaining American power in the region.4 Beliefs therefore matter. But what drives the beliefs themselves? For those who share a belief in the benign nature of American global predominance , it may seem unnecessary to explain why some people believe the United States to be benign. If people manage to see an external reality more or less as it is, why bother to explain this? This book argues that foundational foreign policy beliefs are not straightforward reflections of an external reality and in many cases cannot be tested against an external reality. They inevitably reflect the interests and position of the believer. They depend on implicit tradeoffs that are not only incommensurable but also affectively disturbing. They frequently rest on attitudinal positions of liking or disliking and affective (feeling) dispositions , neither of which can be considered accurate or inaccurate. This does not mean that beliefs are insincere or merely instrumental rationalizations. Interests influence beliefs, but how they do so depends on available information, the social organization and practices of a professional sphere, and the prevailing standards for generating knowledge. Quite a lot changes if beliefs are understood in this way. Rather than seeing responses to American power as primarily dependent on what the United States is or does, this approach directs our attention to those holding beliefs about the United States. For this book, it means locating foreign policy elites in domestic contests for political power and material advantage and specifying the ways in which American actions have affected domestic contenders 3. Jervis 2006, 657. 4. Goh 2009. BELIEFS ABOUT AMERICAN HEGEMONY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 3 for power. Understanding the beliefs of foreign policy elites in Southeast Asia also requires paying attention to the conditions under which they operate: the practical demands of their work, the information that is most abundant and available to them, and the standards of evaluation and reasoning to which they are exposed. Ultimately, this provides greater leverage for explaining shifts in beliefs about the...