Just eight months after President Obama announced a new Association of South East Asian Nation (ASEAN) economic initiative at a “first-ever” exclusive meeting with ASEAN leaders in the United States, America’s new policy towards the group is in shambles. President Obama’s premier trade initiative, the Tran-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which includes four ASEAN members has been rejected by both leading presidential candidates. And relations with the two ASEAN treaty allies of the United States, the Philippines and Thailand, have entered uncharted, murky waters. The emergence of a bombastic, anti-American president in Manila and the recent death of the Thai king threaten to make the underpinnings of U.S. strategy in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea come unglued.

The two-day February 15-16 U.S-ASEAN Sunnylands Summit, seen as a vital component of the U.S. “pivot” to Asia, followed on the heels of last year’s Plan of Action to Implement the U.S.-ASEAN Strategic Partnership. The follow-up call for economic engagement announced at Sunnylands was dubbed by the Obama Administration as the “U.S.-ASEAN Connect.” It is designed to “utilize a network of three hubs across Southeast Asia– in Singapore, Jakarta, and Bangkok –to better coordinate U.S. economic engagement in the region and connect entrepreneurs, investors, and businesses.” This intensified engagement with ASEAN was also meant to underscore a joint U.S.-ASEAN commitment to a “rules-based order” in the Asia-Pacific, a not so subtle message to Beijing that its increasing belligerence in pushing maritime territorial disputes with its Southeast Asian neighbors would not be tolerated.