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Southeast Asia has won along with Biden
Now, with America's return, Southeast Asian nations would not need to be price-takers in the bidding war between the American and Chinese contenders to global supremacy.
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ne sentiment that resounded among internationalists when Joe Biden won the presidency was that America is returning to the world. That is good news for Southeast Asia in general and Indonesia in particular.
This is so because America's return inaugurates the possibility of a new relationship with China that would release Asian nations from the burden of having to choose between Washington and Beijing. The resulting division could have caused a rift serious enough to test ASEAN to its core. That threat has receded with America's departure from the Trumpean dream of remaking the world in the image of a defiantly isolationist America.
The domestic politics of divide-and-rule that marked the Donald Trump presidency was reflected in America's global dealings as well. Trump's notions of ethnic and economic exclusivity resonated with right-wing Americans, including white supremacists who would free their country of the diversity that has marked its evolution from being a settler-state to becoming the vibrant and resilient multicultural nation that it is today.
Those tactics of division were replicated on the international front. By starting a trade war with China that disrupted global supply chains, Trump sought essentially to divide the world into two hostile blocs that would have to swear economic allegiance to either Washington or Beijing. By withdrawing his country from the Paris accord on climate change, he divested the world's most powerful economy of the leadership expected of it in meeting one of the chief threats to our world today.
The American withdrawal undermined explicitly the need for a global consensus on the most global of issues. By deciding to leave the World Health Organization during COVID-19, Trump signaled his dismissiveness of a pandemic that has cut a deadly swathe through his own population.
What he did to America was amplified by what he did to the world: face it with a take-it-or-leave-it option. To not be with America was to be against it.
While it is easy to be critical of Trump’s foreign policy, the Biden administration must also avoid the shortcomings of Obama’s foreign policy in Asia. Despite Obama having once referred to himself as the first Pacific president, and calling his foreign policy a “Pivot to Asia” – which was intended to rebalanced America’s foreign policy focus away from the Middle East to elsewhere in Asia – in hindsight, the eight years of Obama marked a significant decline in US presence and influence in Asia.
And by seemingly putting Asia at the center of its foreign policy, Beijing saw this as an effort to contain China, causing China to take on a more aggressive foreign policy.
Biden has the opportunity to rectify the mistakes of both his predecessors. The hope is that Biden will represent the default force of unity in American national life. Once that unity becomes the norm again, its beneficial effects will be felt internationally as well.
In Southeast Asia, the chief variable will be the change in the tempo, if not the direction, of Sino-American relations. President Trump presented this region with a false fait accompli in the form of a choice between the US and China. Biden could be expected to be more discerning. He would protect American rights vis-a-vis China without demonizing it as a threat to an America-led world.
Those who believe that he would go soft on China will be wrong. His victory does not change the fact that America and China, the world's two largest economies, are locked in a struggle to the end for global supremacy. This power transition differs fundamentally from America's own ascendancy in the wake of a waning British Empire in the last century.
That passage of power from one Anglo-Saxon democracy to another was peaceful. The transition of power in this century from an Anglo-Saxon democracy to a Confucian-Leninist autocracy, as many Americans see China, is inherently complex.
The Sino-America trade war is one manifestation of that existential contest. Its goal is strategic: to change the economic basis of the strategic balance of power between the two sides. It is unlikely that Biden will be able to, or indeed will want to, withdraw from the contest of wills with China.
However, there will be a marked difference between him and his predecessor. Trump's battle with China was related to the delusion of making America great again through short-term gains and isolationism. Biden's contest with China will proceed on the basis of the renewal of America's ties with the world. That shift signifies a huge change in the character and direction of American foreign policy regarding China.
Should America rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which is one of the best ways in which it can constrain growing Chinese power without antagonizing it strategically, it would signal definitively that it indeed has rejoined the struggle for the future of Asia.
ASEAN would gain immediately. One of its chief worries was to have to choose sides between the US and China, the first a strategic benefactor and the second an economic partner, when Washington was withdrawing from global affairs and yet was resistant to the idea of China filling the vacuum left behind.
Now, with America's return, Southeast Asian nations would not need to be price-takers in the bidding war between the American and Chinese contenders to global supremacy. ASEAN can focus on its own interests without having to weigh every step in the precarious balance between an assertive America and a defiant China.
Indonesia would benefit. Its foreign policy is predicated on its ability to engage all its partners, even when two of them might be at loggerheads at any point of time. However, if those two happen to be great powers, Jakarta cannot but be faced with realpolitik choices about the way in which to go. There is no way in which a middle power such as Indonesia can ignore the dynamics of great-power relations.
Once relations between America and China stabilize at a higher level than now, Southeast Asia will breathe more easily than it has done during the breathless pace of acrimony that marked China's place in the global imagination of the Trump administration. Under these conditions, Southeast Asia and each country within it will then have the space to work together strategically and constructively for the betterment of each country and the region as a whole.
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The writer is CEO of PT Lippo Karawaci Tbk and president commissioner of PT Siloam Hospitals Tbk.
