Asian Angle | Trump’s vanishing act sours Asia ties just as China hits a sweet spot
Twelve months ago the US president dined with Xi Jinping in the Forbidden City. Now, he’s nowhere to be seen even at the height of summit season. Just like its leader, US influence is at risk of disappearing
This time last year, Donald Trump triumphantly strode the Asia-Pacific stage on his way to completing the longest visit to the region by an American president in a quarter-century. During Trump’s stopover in Beijing, President Xi Jinping conferred an honour not granted to any of his predecessors since the normalisation of ties with the US – a state dinner inside the Forbidden City.
Twelve months later, at the height of Asia’s summit season, Trump is nowhere to be seen – either at the Asean meeting in Singapore or this weekend’s Apec summit in Papua New Guinea. He is the latest president to have passed on regional summits since Barack Obama cancelled on his Asean hosts in 2013 to deal with a government shutdown back home. In Trump’s absence, Vice-President Mike Pence has staked out his master’s unilateralist “America First” stance on trade policy, coupling it with a full-throated defence of America’s “values-based” diplomacy and resistance to revisionism in the Indo-Pacific.
Pence’s robust reconfirmation of the US commitment to the region notwithstanding, Washington and Beijing appear to be exchanging positions of influence in the Asia-Pacific. Indeed, eight years after five Asean countries, with the forthright backing of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, decried Beijing’s assertive actions in the South China Sea at a regional summit in Hanoi, China’s neighbourhood diplomacy is at a sweet spot that is without precedent in the post-cold war era. Every major bilateral relationship that China shares in Asia is enjoying a cyclical upswing. From Japan to Asean to India, and with both Koreas thrown in for added measure, there is a firm floor beneath every major bilateral relationship and each is on a warming track.
To be clear, not every bilateral relationship is particularly warm.
US Vice-President Mike Pence has stressed the US commitment to the Asia-Pacific. Photo: Reuters.
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Ties with Tokyo, especially, are just about stable and appear structurally unsound from a longer-term perspective. Additionally, each of these bilateral relationships has laboured through previous cycles of deterioration – foreshadowing similar difficulties in the future. In the case of Asean and China, these cycles can be traced to the 1992-1999 and 2009-2016 periods; in the case of India, 1998-2000, 2007-2010 and 2015-17; and in the case of Japan, virtually the entire period starting with the Koizumi premiership with brief exceptions in 2007-2008 and in early 2010.
That said, it is an utterly novel phenomenon in the region’s geopolitics for every major bilateral relationship that China shares to be simultaneously on a warming track. Previously, when relations with Asean and/or Tokyo were improving, Beijing’s ties with New Delhi were souring, and vice versa.
