Asian opinion-makers seem unconvinced of this White House’s commitment to East Asian diplomacy and security.
At a time when president Joe Biden’s Republican rivals are criticizing his administration’s failure to devote what they regard as the proper amount of attention to U.S. interests in the Pacific, the Biden administration announced that the president is outsourcing East Asian diplomacy to his vice president, Kamala Harris.
For weeks, the White House has been telegraphing the president’s likely decision to skip the annual 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit. He would instead likely travel to the G20 summit in India, which was scheduled to take place just two days after the conclusion of the ASEAN confab in Indonesia.
Asian diplomats responded to Biden’s likely decision to triage his time and energy with disappointment. Having only just canceled a planned swing through Papua New Guinea and Australia in May amid debt ceiling negotiations in Washington, sidelining the region a second time would send an unmistakable signal, the South China Morning Post reported.
“For him to skip the summit when he will already be nearby attending a summit in India, and likely making an official visit to Vietnam, will prompt many in the region to wonder whether the U.S. is again slipping back to its episodic and half-hearted engagement with the region,” said Center for Strategic and International Studies associate Murray Hiebert.
On Tuesday, the White House made it official. Harris would attend the ASEAN summit in Biden’s stead, according to a statement that emphasized the number of trips Biden has made to Pacific Rim nations in the past. The region’s opinion-makers seem unconvinced of this White House’s commitment to East Asian diplomacy and security. “We fail to see any valid reason that has forced the U.S. leader to send his deputy to Jakarta,” read an editorial in the Jakarta Post bleakly headlined “Biden won’t come.” The president’s conspicuous absence “will only raise questions about the U.S. commitment to the region amid the rising tension between Washington and Beijing and China’s escalating military actions in the South China Sea.”
The White House’s defenders will be quick to provide mitigating context. They’ll insist that Biden hasn’t taken his eye off the ball in the Pacific. After all, what are his White House’s efforts to augment security cooperation between the U.S., U.K., and Australia (AUKUS), the successful negotiation of a diplomatic breakthrough between South Korea and Japan, and executive actions designed to curb China’s ability to access sensitive American technology but engagement with the region? Some might add that Donald Trump skipped the ASEAN summit in November 2020, too, the pressures of the pandemic notwithstanding.
These are not invalid contentions, but each fails to address the fact that Biden is not going to attend back-to-back diplomatic gauntlets because he can’t put himself through something as grueling as that. If the aging commander-in-chief can’t manage a ceremony in honor of the victims of Hawaii’s wildfires without falling asleep, he most certainly can’t navigate a full week of high-powered summitry. Harris will have to pick up the slack. We can expect that she will be tasked with quite a few more slack-retrieval missions in the near future.