Word: southeast
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...scheduled joint appearance with ASEAN leaders is about more than childhood sentimentality. For decades, the U.S. held a comfortable position as ASEAN's third-largest trading partner. No more. China displaced America last year. Even with persuasion from the popular U.S. President, it will be hard to convince Southeast Asians that their futures are more tied to a giant across the Pacific than one closer to home. (See pictures of how Indonesia thrived under the dictator Suharto...
Part of the problem, too, is the distance with which the U.S. held ASEAN in recent years. While China, India, Australia and other regional economies have been assiduously wooing Southeast Asia by signing free-trade agreements with the bloc, the U.S., particularly under the presidency of George W. Bush, kept ASEAN at arm's length. One reason was Burma's accession to ASEAN in 1997, which put the U.S. in a tough spot. Washington had been tightening sanctions on the Burmese junta because of its dismal human-rights record. By participating in ASEAN confabs, Bush's State Department worried that...
...didn't boycott the United Nations just because countries like North Korea or Sudan were members. And, in truth, Burma wasn't the only factor. With more pressing foreign-policy priorities in the Middle East, Washington was naturally distracted from courting other parts of the globe. Nonetheless Southeast Asian ministers couldn't help but spot a deliberate snub when then U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice skipped two ASEAN summits that historically had been attended by a U.S. envoy...
Obama's Administration moved quickly to change the mood. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took part in the ASEAN regional forum earlier this year, pointedly announcing that ?the U.S. is back in Southeast Asia.? Since then Washington has designated an Ambassador to ASEAN, and its Southeast Asia love-fest will culminate with the Nov. 15 summit between Obama and the 10 regional leaders...
Luckily for the U.S., China's pre-eminence in Southeast Asia isn't yet a foregone conclusion. Countries like Vietnam, which was colonized by its northern neighbor for a millennium, are wary of China's growing footprint. And in nations like Indonesia, Burma and Cambodia, it wasn't so long ago that the economic dominance of local Chinese communities catalyzed bloody pogroms and discriminatory laws against the ethnic Chinese. Despite the occasional bursts of anti-Chinese violence, businesses in Thailand and Indonesia are still disproportionately controlled by overseas Chinese today. As a consequence, even as Beijing pleads that...