By Kavi Chongkittavorn*
Bangkok Post
Nov 9, 2017
The region’s premium strategic forum, known as the East Asia Summit (EAS), which was established in 2005, has been the only place where Indo-Pacific leaders can present concerns and establish goodwill.
After the US and Russia joined the EAS in 2011, they took advantage of this unique platform to take up issues they deemed crucial to strengthening their strategic roles.
As the 12th EAS approaches, US President Donald Trump has changed the plan of his Asian tour, adding an extra day at the end of the trip to attend the summit on Nov 13-14 in the Philippines.
Earlier, he opted out of the EAS, the region’s single most important gathering. On such a matter, the White House could have given any excuse for a presidential absence that it wanted, but it would not be able to escape the far-reaching repercussions that would ensue.
In Asian culture, it is a big loss of face for the host — bordering on an insult — when your guest of honor comes to your home and refuses to stay until the end after nearly a year of planning and repeated assurances.
This is a great opportunity for Mr Trump to drum up support for his North Korean policy and firm up his ties with ASEAN. Indeed, US experts on Asia, particularly on ASEAN, should give Mr Trump in-depth briefings and recommendations on the importance of the EAS to the region and broader US interests.
Lest we forget, ASEAN’s decision to add the US and Russia to the EAS was due to mutual desire to engage the world’s most powerful countries in the strategic forum while also maintaining the group’s leverage and relevance. ASEAN learned to do this during its long history of dealing with outside powers, reaching out to them, nurturing friendship and turning enemies into cooperative partners.
Back in 1995, when ASEAN came up with the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), the idea was to bring China into the loop so the new rising power would be able to cooperate and work with it for regional peace and security.
In the beginning, Washington feared that any multilateral security forum such as the ARF would weaken ongoing bilateral security alliances and other security arrangements, especially those in Northeast Asia. It took all of ASEAN’s persuasive power to convince the then Clinton administration that the ARF would benefit the regional security network of the US.
The ARF framework came amid regional efforts to strengthen economic cooperation, following the 1997 Asian economic crisis, among the ASEAN Plus Three countries, comprising China, Japan and South Korea, much to the chagrin of US policy-makers.
This effort was the residue of the aborted East Asia Economic Community trade bloc proposed by Malaysia in 1991. The plan was opposed by Washington, fearing it was a protectionist move against the US.
All along, while ASEAN members are thinking of ways to broaden China’s engagement, US policy-makers have taken the opposite stand at every turn — seeking to contain China’s influence in the region. During the first decade of the ARF, Beijing strongly backed ASEAN positions on regional and international issues. Its security profile in the region has been upgraded and recognized.
The ASEAN Plus Three countries then decided to form a strategic forum for its leaders with additional members from the group’s major dialogue partners, India, Australia and New Zealand — together known as ASEAN Plus Six. From the beginning, the proposed EAS was supposed to be inclusive, rules-based and serve as a forum to discuss political, security and economic issues.
But ASEAN had to slow down on the EAS process after an unexpected move by the Malaysian chair at its 2005 inaugural summit in Kuala Lumpur.
The chair wanted to admit Russia as the ninth EAS member because of its strong interest in ASEAN demonstrated by President Vladimir Putin’s frequent visits to the region from 2000-2008. It also underscored the excellent relations between Malaysia and Russia at the time, while US-Malaysian ties were at all time low after Vice President Al Gore criticized the human rights record of the host country and its leader during his 1998 visit. Following Washington’s strong objection, through the personal intervention of then State of Secretary Condoleezza Rice, Malaysia decided to invite Russia as a guest of the EAS chair instead.
In 2010, Singapore proposed a new format for the newly expanded EAS with major eight dialogue partners, namely China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Russia, known as ASEAN plus eight. The aim was to start a leader-only forum with all of them simultaneously. However, most ASEAN members thought that, given the EAS’s moderate success, the existing structure and priorities should be maintained to provide a sense of continuity and ASEAN centrality, and the group subsequently agreed to follow the existing format.
Former president Barack Obama understood the EAS’s importance to the US and its desire to rebalance its policies toward the region. Therefore, he took every opportunity to attend the EAS. He missed a series of summit meetings in Brunei in 2013, but after that he attended all EAS and ASEAN-US meetings and forged closer personal ties with all ASEAN leaders. In fact, Mr Obama was able to invite all ASEAN leaders to the US in February 2016 for a special meeting at very short notice, thanks to his personal rapport with them. As then US president, he met ASEAN leaders 12 times and visited the region seven times.
Now Mr Trump has decided to extend his trip one day to attend the EAS to avoid growing criticism that the US is only interested in bilateral dealings, not multilateral cooperation. Like it or not, from now on China’s presence will be the main driving force at the EAS and will subsequently feature prominently in the fast-emerging regional architecture.
Russia, another superpower, can also use this opportunity to end its longstanding inertia. Moscow has not paid as much as attention to the EAS because it wants to promote its model of an Asia-Pacific security framework.
Mr Trump should use this opportunity to forge a personal rapport with all of ASEAN’s leaders, as this is unlikely to be his last visit to the region. As long as he remains as US president, he will have to come to this part of the world each year. One caveat is in order: Mr Trump should not cause any more uncertainty to the ASEAN chair about his attendance. For the record, Chinese leaders have never missed an ASEAN-led summit, 19 in all since relations began in 1991.
It remains to be seen how Mr Trump engages with ASEAN leaders collectively after his faltering start. Whatever he says and promises will determine if ASEAN is the real pivot of US strategy in this part of the world.
*Kavi Chongkittavorn is a veteran journalist on regional affairs.
(https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/1357231/donald-trump-must-learn-virtues-of-eas)
