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.
But then there was an election in the Philippines. The steadfast American ally Benigno Aquino III, who made checking Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea a national security priority, was replaced by the apparent Sinophile and America-critic Rodrigo Duterte on June 30th of this year. Aquino had struck an agreement granting U.S. forces rotational access to Philippine bases.
The subsequent ruling against China by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in the Hague followed on July 12, addressing a suit brought by the previous Aquino administration. In a clear victory for the Philippines, the tribunal concluded that there was no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to resources within the sea areas falling within the ‘nine-dash line,” according to a statement released to the media at the time. However, given the subsequent statements and actions of the new sheriff in Manilla, the PCA ruling is proving to be a pyrrhic victory. Duterte has publicly suggested that the Hague ruling could “take a back seat” to reopened bilateral negotiations with Beijing.
Duterte dispatched former Philippine president Fidel Ramos, a highly respected former general, as a “special envoy” to Hong Kong in August. The Ramos mission was “to mend fences with Beijing,” according to the South China Morning Post. China’s official mouthpiece, Xinhua, commented that the Ramos visit was a first concrete step to “engage in bilateral talks on the South China Sea.” This was something Duterte’s predecessor had consistently refused to do. Aquino apparently feared that what a previous Chinese foreign minister once haughtily referred to as “the big country” China would seek to pick off “small country” ASEAN nations one by one through bilateral negotiations. In an apparent reflection of growing concerns about Duterte’s tilt toward Beijing among the Philippines foreign policy establishment, ex-President Ramos announced on October 31 his resignation as special envoy to China.
Duterte also disparaged not only his Washington ally but even the late mother of the president of the United States. His very public remarks were so crude, in fact, that President Obama took the rather unprecedented step of cancelling a scheduled meeting with the newly elected leader of a treaty ally at the September ASEAN leaders’ summit in Laos. Duterte had previously expressed irritation at the prospect of being lectured by Obama concerning the extrajudicial killings that have taken place in the Philippines in connection with Duterte’s anti-drug crackdown. Before arriving in Laos, an enraged Duterte told a journalist that “I do not have any master except the Filipino people, nobody but nobody. You must be respectful. Do not just throw questions.” More than 3,000 people had been killed in the anti-drug campaign in the four months since Duterte took office.
Apparently realizing that Beijing has no such qualms about summarily executing people, Duterte decided to follow up the Ramos testing of the waters in Hong Kong with his own visit to Beijing in mid-October. Speaking to enthusiastic applause in the Great Hall of the People, Duterte announced his “separation” from the United States. He added that, “both in military, not maybe social, but economics also, America has lost . . .[there are] the three of us against the world, China, Philippines, Russia.”
Nor did Duterte leave China empty-handed, having received $24 billion in pledges for investment and financing deals.
Duterte’s defense chief had announced in early October that he had told the U.S. military that “plans for joint patrols and naval exercises in the disputed South China Sea have been put on hold,” according to the Associated Press. Then in Tokyo on October 26th, Duterte said, “I want them out,” meaning U.S. military forces in the Philippines (the U.S. has about 100 troops stationed on the southern island of Mindanao engaged in counter-terrorism training.) Maybe “within two years,” he added.
The possible switching of sides on the South China Sea question by a vital treaty ally of the United States certainly is a watershed. The United States can continue to operate under the principles articulated by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Hanoi in 2010: “The United States, like every nation, has a national interest in freedom of navigation, open access to Asia’s maritime commons, and respect for international law in the South China Sea.” However, conducting assertive freedom of navigation operations (FONOP) in the South China Sea without the support of the Philippines, the party most directly involved, reminds one of the old saying “to be more Catholic than the Pope.” The New York Times quoted the hawkish Chinese Professor Yan Xuetong on the matter on October 24th as stating that “generally speaking, this problem in the South China Sea is over, and the United States cannot do anything now.”
In addition to the new complications with its Philippine ally, the death of long-ailing King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand on October 13th added a further complication to the Obama Administration’s ASEAN outreach policy. The world’s longest-reigning monarch, the Thai King, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts where his father was studying, was considered both pro-American and a source of stability in a rather shaky Thai political environment. A 2014 coup by the Thai military had already strained Washington-Bangkok relations. As pointed out in a recent column in the Financial Times, Bangkok further announced in 2015 the purchase of three submarines from China, which has no concerns about military rule, in a $1 billion dollar deal. The king will be succeeded by the heir to the Thai throne, Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, who is considered highly eccentric. He had made his poodle Foo Foo an air force marshal – just as the Roman Emperor Caligula once planned to appoint his horse a consul.
The crown prince also reportedly has received substantial financial support from the ousted former prime minister and business tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra. Thaksin once famously presented the crown prince with a luxury car. Thaksin, who like Duterte has Chinese ancestry, visited Beijing before Washington as prime minister and has had several business dealings with Chinese interests. In 2008 he violated his bail term, while facing corruption charges, by attending the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing and then refusing to return to Thailand.
As two ASEAN mutual defense treaty allies of the United States, the Philippines and Thailand, both engage in varying degrees in their own “pivots” toward China, one is left asking: what has become of America’s own “pivot” to Asia? The answer is that it is in trouble.
Dennis P. Halpin, a former adviser on Asian issues to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute (SAIS) and an adviser to the Poblete Analysis Group.
