US Commitment and Southeast Asia: Towards a New Asia Pivot?
US Commitment and Southeast Asia: Towards a New Asia Pivot?
New pivot to Asia call spotlights state of U.S. Indo-Pacific policy amid an age of strategic competition with China and upcoming Biden-Trump election contest.
A new book argues that the United States needs to embark on a renewed pivot to Asia to address challenges in its regional engagement that remain nearly a decade-and-a-half after the idea was first suggested.
WonkCount: 1,719 words (~ 8 minutes)
Review: US Commitment and Southeast Asia: Towards a New Asia Pivot?
Context
"The message to Washington is you are losing the competition for influence to Beijing,” Singapore’s ambassador-at-large and former U.S. envoy Tommy Koh wrote recently in a widely-read account of the state of U.S.-China competition in Southeast Asia1. To be sure, that account also acknowledged that pulse checks are at best snapshots in time, and it had plenty of tough words for Beijing as well for economic coercion and assertiveness in the South China Sea and the Mekong subregion2. But this also raises broader questions about the level and distribution of U.S. commitment to Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific, and how that positions Washington in its competition with Beijing as it develops its regional approach (see snapshot graphic below). More pointedly, ahead of the upcoming U.S. elections and four presidential terms after then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton first publicized the case for a U.S. “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia during the Obama administration, to what extent has the United States managed to strengthen its commitment to a region which it identified as the priority global theater, and is Washington capable of such sustained prioritization given the challenges before it?
Select Recent Developments in U.S. Indo-Pacific Policy
A new book titled Lost Decade by think tankers Robert D. Blackwill and Richard Fontaine argues that the United States needs to embark on a “new and enveloping Pivot to Asia” that truly acknowledges U.S. multi-region interests, Asia’s significance and China’s challenge to American interests3. Blackwill and Fontaine, who both previously served in senior U.S. government positions, argue that despite U.S. rhetoric, metrics suggest that such an approach has been lacking, with a “lost decade” from 2011 to 2021 and an only “partial and belated shift” under U.S. President Joe Biden4. In doing so, Lost Decade adds to a growing list of publications written by current and former policymakers on how to manage an Asia-first U.S. foreign policy. This list includes Kurt Campbell’s The Pivot — which details the original pivot from the perspective of one of its architects — as well as Elbridge Colby’s Strategy of Denial and Mike Green’s By More than Providence5.
Analysis
Lost Decade provides a comprehensive, global take on the challenges of prioritizing Asia within wider U.S. grand strategy. Rather than taking increased U.S. commitment as a given, the authors speak to architects of U.S. Asia policy and evaluate the bid to boost U.S. commitment through assessments of metrics across security, economic and diplomatic domains as well as relative to Europe and the Middle East6. Close observers of U.S. Asia policy will also appreciate the attention to the policymaking process between and across administrations. This includes debates within the Obama administration about the initial “pivot” framing as well as the rapid emergence of the National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific directorate as the White House’s largest by the end of the Trump administration, when the Asia directorate had been nearly a quarter the size of its Middle East counterpart at its outset7.
The book also advances a new strategy to boost U.S. commitment to Asia that will be of interest to policymakers, scholars and businesspeople alike (see table below for a summary of key aspects of the strategy. Paid subscribers can read on for the rest of the “Analysis” section and an “Implications” section looking at how these dynamics may play out in the future).
Major New US Asia Strategy Components, Focus Areas and Policy Priorities
