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Outside Publications by CNS Staff

An Op-Ed for the South China Morning Post.
© 2006 South China Morning Post. All rights reserved.
March 25, 2006

As US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice completed her first official visit to Indonesia last week, the issue of regaining US influence in the region - in response to China's perceived inroads in the past few years - was very much the focus of media and analyses.

The conventional wisdom is that, ever since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Beijing has made significant gains in a region that, only a few years before, had harboured strong suspicions of Chinese intentions and ambitions. Those misgivings were linked to Chinese structures built, then fortified, on a disputed reef in the South China Sea and the PLA's missile exercises adjacent to Taiwan, among other incidents. The "China threat" was a real concern.

What differences a decade has made. Beijing's leadership has since put forward the New Security Concept (which favours diplomacy over antagonism) and become an active participant in the region's only multilateral security arrangement - the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) Regional Forum. China had shunned the latter in the early 1990s, considering it a thinly veiled attempt by the region's states to gang up against it.

Beijing has embraced multilateralism - with Asean characteristics, of course. Further, it has been promoting its own virtues as a better alternative for regional security to what it considers a relic of the cold war - US-led bilateral military alliances.

Beijing has also softened its approach to territorial disputes, by signing a declaration on the code of conduct in the South China Sea. This commits it, at least in principle, to finding a peaceful solution to that row. It has also acceded to the Asean Treaty of Amity and Co-operation, the first major power to do so. This effectively accepts the organisation's principles of respect for sovereignty and non-interference in domestic affairs, and its code of consensus in reaching decisions.

At least as important - if not more so - than these political and diplomatic gains for Beijing are the increasing economic ties between it and its Southeast Asian neighbours. Bilateral trade has grown at 20 per cent per year over the past decade, with two-way trade now at more than US$100 billion.

Major initiatives, like the Mekong River Project, further promote economic co-operation. Even greater integration is projected with the proposed China-Asean free-trade area.

These are all significant achievements, and they do not necessarily come at America's expense. If anything, the United States remains the major market, and the source of investment and technology transfers, for both China and Asean. China and Asean rank fifth as each other's major trading partners.

Even in the political and diplomatic arena where Washington seems to have lost ground, the setbacks may be more apparent than real. American influence remains strong and deeply rooted, as are its institutional arrangements with the region in terms of alliances, military base access and visiting-forces agreements. At the same time, Asean member states have adopted deliberate hedging strategies to secure their own vital interests in a region that is drawing growing attention from major powers. That attraction is linked to its vital sea lanes, and its rising importance in the global campaigns against terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

But Washington does need to be more assertive, and to go beyond rhetoric in truly recognising Asean's critical place in American foreign policy. Specifically, it needs to change its current approaches. First, it should treat Asean as an important multilateral organisation and de-emphasise its distinctly bilateral approach. This requires a positive attitude towards multilateralism and greater patience in accepting the so-called "Asean Way" of gradualism, consensus and non-confrontational ways of settling disputes.

The multilateral approach is equally applicable in developing and expanding US-Asean economic ties.

Second, Washington should avoid seeing its Asean policy through a Chinese prism. This policy is not, and should not be framed as, a zero-sum game in which Beijing's gains must be seen as Washington's losses. China itself does not have a grand strategy to develop its own Monroe Doctrine - a proclamation by the US of moral opposition to colonialism - in Southeast Asia, nor does it have the capability to do so.

The zero-sum approach is particularly unhelpful - and indeed could be highly counterproductive - when presenting Asean member states with difficult either-or choices. And most of all, it can be embarrassing for Southeast Asian countries when American officials publicly chastise China on their turf.

Third, America needs to learn to apply non-military, non-confrontational means to address the challenges that the region is facing. These include fragile democracies, a need for good governance and accountability, the uneven distribution of wealth, and other social problems that could provide fertile ground for ethnic and religious intolerance and terrorist activities. The American response to the Asian tsunami disaster has won widespread goodwill in the region. On the other hand, too much emphasis on pre-emption, a penchant for unilateralism and the threat of force only heighten concerns among Southeast Asian states, and could fan anti-American sentiments.

Perhaps a good way to start would be to take a page from Beijing's book of diplomacy-by-charm. That would be easy and inexpensive. Washington should make better use of what is said to be its speciality: soft power.