BEIJING – When Donald Trump laid out his agenda for his first 100 days as president in a pithy video in November, his plans included only a single foreign policy initiative. But that one item speaks volumes.
Trump pledged to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation free-trade pact that he derided as “a potential disaster for our country.” The deal — which includes economies along the Pacific Rim as diverse as Japan, Vietnam and New Zealand — was a frequent bugbear of Trump during the presidential campaign. Such agreements, he insisted, allow foreign countries to steal American jobs.
Yet in pledging to scrap the TPP, Trump was also sending a distressing signal — that Asia, once again, is taking a backseat in American foreign policy.
The theme is a recurring one. Despite the rising importance of Asia on the world stage, something else always seems to divert Washington’s gaze, whether it is defeating ISIS, negotiating with Iran, confronting Russia in Europe, or even domestic politics. U.S. diplomats “tell you without a pause that Asia is where the U.S. needs to be,” says Jennifer Harris, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former State Department official. “And yet what is striking is that the execution just seems impossible.”
In the public discourse, too, Asia barely merits much attention. Newspaper headlines are dominated by the battles over Aleppo or Mosul. In the 270 minutes of presidential debates, China was discussed almost exclusively as a supposed burglar of American factories. Beyond one brief mention of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, America’s strategic interests in Asia barely came up.
Sure, America’s relationship with Asia doesn’t seem to possess the urgency of international terrorism or the drama of Ukraine or Syria. But this deficit of attention is potentially lethal to the U.S. and its future as the world’s indispensable country. The aggression of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the dangers presented by ISIS are real threats to American security and global interests, of course. But neither Russia nor ISIS is capable of toppling America from its perch as the world’s premier power or unraveling the global economic and security system Washington has created over the past 70 years.
In Asia, though, such a threat clearly exists. Despite its persistent but out-of-date image in the U.S. as a country of poor iPhone assemblers, China is a rising superpower intent on restoring itself as the region’s dominant force. And Beijing has displayed an unwillingness to abide by the rules and norms the U.S. has established, whether on human rights, trade or international law. Instead, Beijing is seeking to use its growing political and economic clout to push back U.S. influence in Asia and around the world. Through an initiative to recreate the old Silk Road trading routes, Beijing is planning to finance and build infrastructure across the continent, drawing more and more countries into its economic orbit. Frustrated with its constrained role in U.S.-sponsored global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, Beijing has created rival organizations under its sway, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Farther afield, China has sharply increased its presence in the U.S. backyard of Latin America. Beijing has signed agreements across the region substantially increasing investment in Latin American countries and two-way trade.
[READ: Latin America’s left turn.]
Asia has also become the most important region for America’s economic progress. Total trade between the U.S. and Asia has risen about eight times in the past 30 years, to nearly $1.5 trillion in 2015. That’s more than twice the volume of America’s trade with the European Union. Consumers in Asia are already critical for many U.S. companies. General Motors sells more cars to the Chinese than Americans, while Apple’s revenues in the Asia region are only slightly smaller than in the U.S. market. If anything, Asia will loom even larger in coming years. One study by the Brookings Institution forecast that by 2030, China, India and Indonesia will account for 45 percent of global consumer spending by the middle class, compared to a mere 7 percent from the U.S.
Foreign policy experts say not to be fooled by cable TV news. Asia, they insist, features much more prominently in the halls of power in Washington than political rhetoric and media attention suggest. “In the campaign, foreign policy per se was not a major issue. I don’t think it had the political attraction in the contest between Trump and (Hillary) Clinton,” says John Negroponte, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “These issues will come back into the forefront. The campaign is not a good test of the importance attached to Asia in Washington.”
That commitment does occasionally show itself in U.S. policy. The Obama administration, recognizing that Asia often played second fiddle to the Middle East and Europe, attempted a “pivot” to the region to ensure it received higher priority. Washington strengthened ties not only to key allies like Japan, South Korea and Australia — stationing U.S. troops at Darwin, for instance — but also with countries traditionally more aloof to the U.S., such as India, Myanmar and Vietnam. Obama challenged China’s encroachments in the South China Sea, which Beijing claims is almost entirely under its sovereignty, by continuing to sail warships through the disputed waterway. Obama personally showed the flag in Asia, visiting both its major powers — Japan, China and India — and also smaller players, including Laos, Cambodia and the Philippines.
[READ: Why you need to care about the South China Sea.]
Nevertheless, the pivot often seemed half-hearted. In 2013, Obama canceled a multi-country tour of Asia due to a wrangle with Congress over the national budget, Washington never devised a clear policy to quash major threats to regional security, whether North Korea’s nuclear weapons program or Beijing’s assertiveness on territorial disputes and incursions into the disputed South China Sea. Allies began to waver. Rodrigo Duterte, the newly installed president of the Philippines — a key U.S. ally — cozied up to Beijing. “I announce my separation from the United States,” he declared to an applauding Chinese audience during an October visit to Beijing. “America has lost.”
In the end, Obama’s pivot fell short because of Washington’s inability to truly shift its priorities away from traditional areas of focus, like the Middle East. “Don’t underestimate the power of habit in the execution of foreign policy,” says the Council’s Harris.
Trump and his team seem to believe a tougher stand in the region will restore America’s prestige. He infuriated Beijing officials when he suggested he’d accept the “One China” policy — in which Taiwan is considered a renegade Chinese province, not an independent country — only in exchange for concessions on trade and other issues. In a November essay in Foreign Policy, Trump advisers Alexander Gray and Peter Navarro wrote that the incoming president would rewrite America’s relationship with Asia based on “peace through strength.” Calling Obama’s pivot “an imprudent case of talking loudly but carrying a small stick,” they suggested U.S. clout in the region could be resurrected only by a massive expansion of its military presence, especially the navy. That, Gray and Navarro insist, “will reassure our allies that the United States remains committed in the long term to its traditional role as guarantor of the liberal order in Asia.”
Still, it is far from clear what Trump’s Asia policy will be. In other ways, he has suggested the U.S. may withdraw from Asia — most of all, with his pledge to kill off the TPP. The agreement is much, much more than a simple trade deal. It was designed to solidify America’s economic presence in the region, pressure China to abide by U.S.-determined standards of trade and business, and strengthen Washington’s ties to its allies. In scuttling the deal, Trump is, again, favoring domestic political priorities over long-term U.S. interests in Asia. Writing for the Financial Times, Republican Sen. John McCain warned that Trump’s decision “may be treated by leaders across the region as a sign of America’s retreat from the responsibilities of world leadership.”
Trump’s dumping of the TPP is not the only sign he may consider Asia a low priority. During the campaign, he warned that Japan and South Korea would have to pay a larger share of the costs of maintaining U.S. troops in their countries, which could roil relations with America’s most important allies in East Asia. During one campaign rally, Trump derided Japan’s defense treaty with the U.S., claiming that if America was attacked “they can sit home and watch Sony television.”
Such vitriol is music to Beijing’s ears. Every inch Washington vacates in Asia, China is more than happy to fill. Only days after Trump’s election, Chinese officials, already sensing the TPP’s impending death, quickly touted their own pan-Pacific free-trade pact at a regional summit. “If the U.S. is less engaged in Asia, Beijing will have an opportunity to shape regional political and economic integration on its own terms,” wrote Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at research firm Capital Economics, in November.
The consequences of that could be severe for America’s future. Without being fully engaged in Asia, the U.S. could find itself edged out of the tremendous economic benefits the region will continue to bring, while ceding those benefits to a rising China “There is this high level of anxiety about whether the U.S. can be relied upon to counter growing Chinese power,” says Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It is not in the interests of the U.S. If we are not present and China becomes a great big strategic bully in the region.”
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Pivot, What Pivot? America Forgets Asia originally appeared on usnews.com
