The Decline of U.S. Diplomacy in Southeast Asia

THE DECLINE OF U.S. DIPLOMACY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA Gareth Porter O1 "ne ofthe first tasks ofthe new administration in foreign policy must be the reconstruction of U.S. diplomacy in Southeast Asia. Since 1977, the most striking feature of the politics of the region, apart from the violent character ofthe conflicts among Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian communists, has been the sharp decline ofAmerican diplomatic influence. Despite the dominance of American military and economic power, the close political relationships between the United States and the states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the obvious interest of both Beijing and Hanoi in closer ties to the United States, Washington has become a passive and subordinate actor in the central issues in Southeast Asia. It has yielded the initiative to a coalition of states whose ability to define a common interest is doubtful , at best. Washington's low profile in the region reflects in part the fundamental readjustment in the relationships between the United States and the noncommunist states of Southeast Asia that followed the Vietnam war. The ASEAN states, no longer expecting—or desiring—U.S. military intervention in any local conflict in the region, have charted more independent paths in foreign policy than during the Vietnam war when ASEAN was established. The influence of ASEAN relative to all outside powers has been further enhanced by its greater unity since 1974 in the face of Hanoi's emergence as a new regional power. But the Carter administration's diplomatic passivity in an area where the United States still has security commitments and military presence does not simply mirror ASEAN's response to the Indochina Gareth Porter is associated with the Indochina Project ofthe Center for International Policy. He has long been involved in research, teaching, and writing on Southeast Asia, and formerly served as Saigon Bureau ChiefforDispatch News Service International. His most recent book is The Third Indochina War. 149 150 SAIS REVIEW war. The primary factors in the decline ofthe U.S. diplomatic-political role in the region have been subjective, rather than objective, in character : first, an overriding preoccupation with establishing a new strategic relationship with China, which has been given priority over regional concerns, and second, a lingering feeling that the United States should minimize its involvement in Indochina, from which it had been forced to leave in humiliation only a few years earlier. Because of these two constraints, American policy has not conformed to any long-term strategy. No policy in the region can be coherent unless it takes fully into account Vietnam's pivotal role both in relation to outside powers and to the rest of the region. By 1978, Vietnam had once again become the center of a major conflict involving the Soviet Union and China which would inevitably affect noncommunist Southeast Asia. The evolution of the conflict could hold the key to the balance of power in the region for years to come, and the United States had to decide how its own policy might influence that outcome. A crucial turning point in U.S. policy, relatively unnoticed at the time, occurred when the Carter administration rejected, in effect, any effort to exert such influence. Instead it substituted the new strategic alignment with China and automatic support for ASEAN initiatives to formulate an independent regional policy. As a result, the United States acquiesced and ultimately had to publicly support a rather pathetic effort by China, seconded by the ASEAN states, to use the remnants of the army of Cambodia's murderous Pol Pot regime as an instrument of leverage against Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia. Lacking an independent diplomacy with Southeast Asia, the Carter administration not only reduced its own influence in the area to negligible proportions, but gave both China and the Soviet Union greater influence than either communist power would otherwise have had. The challenge to the Reagan administration, therefore, is to arrest and reverse the trends toward polarization, violence, and greater prominence for the Soviets and Chinese in the region by again playing a conscious role in maintaining the balance of power there. The situation in postwar Southeast Asia offered the United States an opportunity to play a...