Trump isolationism allows China to fill SEAsia void
BEIJING – When Chinese leader Xi Jinping said last month that “no country can afford to retreat into self-isolation,” he might as well have been talking about Donald Trump as the US president makes his first official visit to Southeast Asia.
As Trump steers his administration’s focus inward, China has stepped into what many see as a US-sized void left behind in the region, boosting cooperation on infrastructure, security and trade, flooding eager countries with tourists and offering itself up as a model for developing nations with sometimes dodgy rights records.
China’s rise in influence, and the perceived decline of the United States by some in the region, is all the more extraordinary because Beijing has often been seen as an arrogant bully in Southeast Asia, where it is mired in disputes over competing claims in the South China Sea.
“Throughout the region, countries have looked at Xi and Trump and found more stability and reassurance from the Chinese president,” said Richard Heydarian, a Manilabased Asia specialist and author.
“America is clearly on a downward trajectory in terms of its influence in the region,” Heydarian said. “Donald Trump comes in and he sounds even more protectionist than China. So you have a strange, in fact surreal, situation whereby China is now presenting itself as the guardian of the global economic order.’’
Xi’s biggest move in the region, the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, seeks to link China to Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, Europe and beyond with a sprawling network of roads, railways, ports and other economic projects.
Radical approach Perhaps Trump was always destined to come up short in any Asia comparison with his predecessor, Barack Obama, whose childhood was partly spent in Indonesia and Hawaii.
Obama, who hosted Southeast Asian leaders last year in the United States, made much of a supposed “pivot” of US attention back to Asia after what his administration portrayed as years of neglect.
The biggest signal that Trump appeared willing to cede ground to China came shortly after his January inauguration, when he withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, saying he preferred one-on-one pacts that brought more benefits to the United States.
Obama had presented the deal among Pacific Rim countries, including Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and Singapore, as symbolic of US commitment to the region – and a crucial curb of Chinese power.
As the remaining TPP countries discuss ways to do the deal without Washington, critics say Trump’s protectionism will allow China to establish greater inroads.
During a recent trip to Washington, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong nicely summarized the dilemma many in the region face because of a “radically different approach’’ under Trump.
The Chinese, Lee said, will pursue their objectives “assiduously, quietly farming away, and they will make friends and influence people whether or not you (the United States) are there, and if you are not there, then everybody else in the world will look around and say, `I want to be friends with both the US and the Chinese, and the Chinese are ready and I will start with them.’’’
Trump is set to attend the AsiaPacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam, where he may offer up a broader Asia policy, and meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in the Philippines.
A scheduled meeting with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte could be a good signal on how Trump may be received in the region.