Southeast Asia in America’s Rebalance to the Asia-Pacific

Introduction

President Barack Obama’s mid-November 2012 post-re-election travel to Myanmar, Cambodia, and Thailand, including attendance at the East Asia Summit (EAS) and United States-ASEAN Leaders Meeting, marks three important “firsts” for a sitting American president: the first bilateral visits to Myanmar and Cambodia, the first mainland Southeast Asia-only trip, and the first Southeast Asia-only trip. Even more significant is the growing structural importance being accorded to all of Southeast Asia in the context of a broader American rebalance or “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific region. The emphasis on Southeast Asia in the U.S. rebalance to Asia arguably constitutes the most distinctive element of the overall strategy — next only to the inclusion of India. The opportunities and constraints for U.S.-Southeast Asia relations in the immediate years ahead can best be appreciated by understanding how the rebalance strategy implicates Southeast Asia, and how Southeast Asia is critical to its success.

Southeast Asia’s Place in America’s Rebalance to the Asia-Pacific

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s November 2011 article “America’s Pacific Century”¹ is the single most comprehensive and detailed public articulation of the Obama Administration’s Asia rebalance policy. In it, she is forthright that American objectives are to “sustain leadership”, “secure interests”, and “advance values”. In other words, quite reasonably, American policy objectives vis-à-vis Asia are not fundamentally different than in any other region — or, for that matter, nearly every functional issue. The instruments identified to help achieve these objectives are sixfold: strengthening bilateral security alliances, deepening working relationships with emerging partners, engaging with regional multilateral institutions, expanding trade and investment, forging a broad-based military presence, and advancing democracy and human rights. This list of instruments is noteworthy in the regional context not because they are unique to the Asia-Pacific region, but because they are all increasingly, intensely, and deeply salient there. It is in the Asia-Pacific where five of seven American treaty allies reside including two in Southeast Asia and one very close strategic partner — Singapore; where rising powers such as China, India, and Indonesia, as well as Vietnam and a transitioning Myanmar, provide possible new partners; where new multilateral institutions are trying to take root; where resilient and growing economies are altering the global landscape of production and supply chains and hence trade, investment, and finance; where unresolved territorial and historical disputes pose challenges requiring a recalibrated military presence; and where the opportunity to improve democracy and human rights is compelling.

What is crucial about the rebalance to Asia is not the novelty of American objectives or instruments, but the region’s growing centrality to advancing and applying American foreign policy and security objectives and instruments in cooperation with allies, friends and partners. To the objectives and instruments of the rebalance strategy may be added two other contextual aspects of the policy: the “new geography” of America’s strategy, and the effort at reprioritization away from Southwest Asia and towards the Asia-Pacific region. The objectives, instruments, and premises of America’s rebalance to the Asia-Pacific all directly implicate and depend on greater interactions with Southeast Asia.

The first premise of the rebalance strategy is that with the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq and the planned drawdown of forces in Afghanistan, the United States will be able to pay even more attention to the Asia-Pacific region. Southeast Asians among others complain that America is over- and even unproductively-engaged in the broader Middle East. Clashes between Hamas and Israel during President Obama’s Southeast Asia visit in November (causing the diversion of Secretary Clinton to the region for crisis management) highlighted how that region could intrude into America’s Asia rebalance. But what is abundantly clear from the last four years is that ongoing American involvement in Southwest Asia and the Middle East has not constrained American attention to Asia or to Southeast Asia.

The more difficult challenge for U.S.-Southeast Asia relations is not a United States distracted by Middle East disruptions but by...