Trump isolationism lets China fill up void in Asia
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 U.S. 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 U.S.-sized void left behind in the region, boosting cooperation on infrastructure, security and trade.
China’s rise in influence, and the perceived decline of the United States 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 Manila-based Asia specialist.
“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 protec- tionist 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.”
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.
The biggest signal that Trump appeared willing to cede ground to China came when he withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong nicely summarized the dilemma many in the region face.
He said the Chinese 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 U.S. and the Chinese, and the Chinese are ready and I will start with them.”