Vice President Kamala Harris sought to portray Washington as a reliable counterweight to China as the administration faces questions over its commitment to long-term partners amid its chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal.
“We know that Beijing continues to coerce, to intimidate, and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea,” Harris said during her trip to Asia this week. She said China’s “unlawful” claims “continue to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations.”
Harris, who is on a weeklong trip to Southeast Asia, seeks to cement ties with Washington’s partners and refocus efforts on Beijing’s rising economic and security influence instead of fighting “forever wars,” such as the 20-year Afghanistan conflict.
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Beijing has leveraged coronavirus vaccines, loans, and other tools to bolster its regional standing. It has seized on the chaos in Afghanistan to discredit Washington’s support for its allies.
“What is currently happening in Afghanistan has clearly shown the world what truly are American-led rules and order,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Tuesday. “This is the kind of order the U.S. wants. It always tries to defend its selfishness and bullying and hegemonic actions by citing ‘rules’ and ‘order.’ But how many people would actually buy it?”
The timing of Harris’s visit delivers an important message about the administration’s interests, according to former administration officials.
Singapore and Vietnam are increasingly critical partners that play essential roles shaping regional politics, said Jacob Stokes, a fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security and former adviser to then-Vice President Joe Biden.
Moving forward with her trip, despite the crisis in Kabul, which has enveloped the administration for nearly two weeks, “sends a signal about the importance of these relationships in their own right, and perhaps an even higher level of importance to them that this trip went forward as planned,” Stokes said. “The axiom in Asia is you have to show up, and it means a lot to be there in person.”
Stokes said the substance of Harris’s agreements with counterparts in Singapore — including on climate issues, trade, cybersecurity, and defense — add up.
“It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, these are small bureaucratic agreements,’” he said. “But these are the sinews and muscles that you use to build relationships, deep relationships, over time.”
Stokes added that multilateral agreements drive regional diplomacy in Southeast Asia, with countries working together “to be more than the sum of their parts.”
The focus on economic ties signals Washington’s intent to strengthen the region beyond just countering China. For instance, Singapore has sought to stay neutral amid rising tensions between Washington and Beijing. Alluding to this, Harris said the U.S. was not looking to “make anyone choose between countries.”
“That is a tone that our partners in the region will want us to strike,” Stokes said. “It is also much more effective to go there and talk about what our aspirations are, and what we can build together, rather than going there and trying to say to them that we think China is bad, and you should think that, too.”
This week, Harris offered to host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in 2023, a meeting involving trade and economic officials from 21 members. It’s a move backed by U.S. interest groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, which urged the Biden administration to do so earlier this year.
Harris is the most senior U.S. official to visit the region since Biden took office in January and comes on the heels of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s travel to Singapore, where the U.S. has a longstanding naval presence.
Singapore, Vietnam, and other countries are closely watching the withdrawal from Afghanistan, said Anthony Ruggiero, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and veteran of Democratic and Republican administrations.
A question is whether the U.S. “can increase its activities in the Indo-Pacific region or if the aftermath of the Afghanistan withdrawal draws the administration’s attention away from the region, leaving a vacuum for Beijing to exploit,” Ruggiero said.
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Though Biden said the U.S. is on pace to complete its Afghanistan withdrawal by Aug. 31, delays in the evacuation could spark new contingencies.
“If I were Taiwan, I wouldn’t be sleeping very comfortably. If I were South Korea, I wouldn’t sleep well, or Japan,” said Bradley Blakeman, a former White House adviser to President George W. Bush who is on the advisory board of No One Left Behind, a nonprofit organization to help Afghan’s eligible for special visas reach the U.S.
