OBAMA'S ASIA ENGAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE : A FRAMEWORK ON WHICH TO BUILD.
Less
than one month into 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry visited Laos,
Cambodia, and China, U.S. President Barack Obama welcomed Australian
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to the White House, and Secretary Kerry
and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter hosted their Philippine counterparts
for a 2+2 ministerial meeting. The pace of top-level engagement with
Asia-Pacific leaders will accelerate in February when President Obama
hosts a landmark summit with all ten ASEAN leaders at Sunnylands.
Already scheduled to visit Japan in July for the G7 summit,
Laos in September for the East Asia Summit, Vietnam before or after
Laos, and China in September for the G20 summit, President Obama is set
to blow by President George W. Bush’s record for the most visits by a
U.S. president to countries in the region. In the first seven years of
his presidency, Obama’s seven trips to Asia have been a major pillar of
the “new normal” of U.S. engagement in Asia that Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Danny Russell often touts.
Presidential attention has contributed to substantial gains
for the United States in Asia during the Obama administration – a
successful conclusion to the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations,
agreements for military access in Southeast Asia and Oceania, a historic
climate agreement with China, and new guidelines to modernize the
U.S.-Japan alliance, among others. These accomplishments leave a
substantial legacy on which the next U.S. president can build even
deeper ties with the region.
But a key, underappreciated element of the administration’s
focus on Asia has been the construction of an intricate architecture
for engagement with the region that was only beginning to take shape
before 2009. These vehicles have been essential to the Obama
administration’s progress in deepening ties throughout the region and
will also help the next U.S. president to build on Obama’s success in
Asia.
While a robust framework for engagement with Europe
developed during the Cold War – regular NATO summits, G7/8 summits,
innumerable NATO Ministerial Meetings – relatively few structures
existed in the Asia-Pacific to force U.S. leaders to focus attention on
Asia. As a result, for decades, when Presidents and cabinet officials
looked at their commitments for the year, they saw a raft of
transatlantic meetings and very few requirements to engage with Asia.
This manifested itself in meager top-level travel to the region —
Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and H.W. Bush each made
only two trips to Asia during their presidencies; Presidents Truman and
Kennedy did not make any. And the travels of their Secretaries of State
and other cabinet members followed a similar pattern.
The pace of presidential travel to Asia began to increase
substantially under President Clinton, largely due to the establishment
of APEC, which put a mark on the calendar for Clinton, George W. Bush,
and Obama to travel to Asia, at least during years when an Asian country
would chair APEC. But this still did not mean Clinton and Bush always
had a reason to travel to Asia, as they failed to travel to the region
when the APEC summit took place in the Americas (1997 and 2004) and
Oceania (1999, 2007).
President Obama’s decision to join the East Asia Summit
was, critically, a commitment for the President of the United States to
visit an ASEAN country every year, for the first time creating the kind
of structure for Presidential engagement with Asia that has existed with
Europe (but also still doesn’t exist for the Middle East or Africa) for
decades. As a result, in years in which APEC is not held in Asia, like
2016, the president will still travel to Southeast Asia to attend the
East Asia Summit, which this year will make Obama the first U.S.
President to visit Laos. President Obama’s decision to hold regular
U.S.-ASEAN leaders summits on the sidelines of UN General Assembly
meetings and elsewhere has also raised the bar for U.S.-ASEAN
leaders-level engagement.
Obama’s secretaries of state and defense have also been
busy created an architecture for regular engagement with Asia that goes
far beyond ad hoc bilateral visits. Together, the Secretaries of State
and Defense have expanded the use of “2+2” meetings at the cabinet
level, which had previously typically only been done with Japan and
Australia, to include such meetings with allies South Korea and the
Philippines. Moreover, with Australia, rather than having deputy
secretaries stand in at the annual 2+2 Australian-United States
Ministerial consultations (AUSMIN), as took place under previous
administrations, AUSMIN has been attended by the cabinet secretaries
every year since 2009. Perhaps most importantly, the secretaries of
state and treasury have joined forces for the annual U.S.-China
Strategic and Economic Dialogue, now bringing together more U.S.
officials for this meeting than any other event on the diplomatic
calendar.
Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry also created
mechanisms for annual dialogues with the foreign ministers of Indonesia
and Singapore. In 2010, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates effectively
institutionalized multilateral cabinet-level defense engagement in Asia
by joining the ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting Plus process and
subsequent Secretaries have regularly attending special 10+1 sessions
with ASEAN defense ministers on the sidelines of the grouping’s
10-member ministerial retreats. This track record has raised the bar for
the next secretaries of state and defense.
The State Department and Pentagon have also created a raft
of mechanisms for engagement with Asia at the sub-cabinet level that did
not previously exist. For instance, an annual U.S.-Philippines
Bilateral Strategic Dialogue co-chaired by Assistant Secretaries of
State and Defense, created in 2010, has guided the alliance to its
strongest state in decades, culminating in the U.S.-Philippines Enhanced
Defense Cooperation Agreement. Under the radar, forums such as an
annual U.S.-Malaysia defense policy dialogue, created in 2009 at the
Deputy Assistant Secretary level, have deepened U.S. ties with the
region, in this case bringing U.S.-Malaysia defense cooperation out of
the shadows and facilitating enhanced U.S. military access in Malaysia.
Even the annual U.S.-Laos Comprehensive Bilateral Strategic Dialogue,
raised to the level of the Assistant Secretary of State in 2009, is set
to yield dividends this year during Laos’ ASEAN chairmanship, as this
framework has enabled both sides to better understand one another and to
build ties.
When the Obama administration touts its record on Asia, it
naturally points to concrete accomplishments such agreements on trade,
defense, and climate change. But a key, underappreciated aspect of its
policy has been to rebalance the time commitments of the U.S.
government’s most senior leaders and to create an architecture for
engagement with Asia that will outlive this administration. When
observers debate the Obama administration’s legacy on Asia, this much
will be clear – the bar has been raised for the time and attention a
U.S. president must pay to Asia.
Yahoo owns 35.5% of Yahoo Japan, but says it does not condone the sale
of ivory which is used for hanko, or small personal seals for
letterwriting.
Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP