WASHINGTON—Barack Obama heads to Laos in Southeast Asia for his last meeting as president with leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as well as its offshoot, the East Asia Summit. Given China’s success in preventing ASEAN members from raising contentious territorial issues, the coming summit promises to lack drama. Yet Obama’s steady improvement in U.S. relations with the group will leave long-lasting effects.
To be sure, the meeting has little of the high symbolism or strategic weightiness of the historic February 2016 U.S.-ASEAN Summit, the first ever in the United States, held at the marvelously named Sunnylands—in Rancho Mirage, California, no less. The poignancy was all the greater because the president’s summit guest was China’s President Xi Jinping. Inevitably, many saw the summit and the selection of Sunnylands as a sign of Washington’s “strategic messaging” in the face of China’s assertive actions and extravagant claims to the South China Sea, claims decisively rejected by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in July.
Despite frustrations, even exasperation, about ASEAN’s snail-paced decision-making, lack of consensus on issues such as the South China Sea disputes and relentless meeting schedule, the United States gains strategic and foreign-policy benefits from engaging ASEAN and stands to lose much if it moves to the sidelines. The Obama team has been wise to pursue improved relationships with all Southeast Asian countries including, controversially, Burma/Myanmar, whose State Counselor and Foreign Minister Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, visits Washington later in September. For the first time in roughly a generation the U.S. has full diplomatic relations with every ASEAN capital, and Obama, on arriving in Vientiane, Laos, will become the first sitting president to visit each Southeast Asian capital during his terms in office. And signing ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, assigning an ambassador to the organization, and participating in the various and reportedly tedious regional meetings that address Asia-Pacific issues are solid moves.
But modern Southeast Asia is not just for strategy anymore. And seeing the region primarily through the lens of the South China Sea or competition with China would be simplistic.
