24 - Southeast Asia in the US Rebalance: Perceptions from a Divided Region

Summary

This article explores perceptions and reactions across Southeast Asia towards the Obama administration's “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia. The US approach has been dismissed as more rhetorical than substantive grand strategy, its credibility under renewed scrutiny following President Obama's cancelled visit to Southeast Asia in October 2013. Nonetheless, the rebalance has expanded from its origins in 2010–11, acquiring diplomatic and economic “prongs” with a particular focus on Southeast Asia, broadening the bandwidth of US engagement beyond military diplomacy and force realignment. However, the US “pivot” has had to contend with entrenched narratives of the US role in the region oscillating between extremes of neglect or over-militarization. The US-China strategic dynamic weighing over the region, itself central to Washington's strategic calculus across Asia, has also coloured the lens through which Southeast Asians have viewed the re-balance. Varied reactions to the US rebalance at the national level in Southeast Asia are further suggestive of a sub-regional divide between “continental” and “maritime” states that to some extent predisposes their perspectives and orientation towards the Great Powers.

The rebalance to Asia — launched two years into Barack Obama's first term — initially re-awakened the over-militarization critique of US policy, given its up-front focus on US force realignment and rising tensions in the South China Sea. Within the US military global commands structure, the Western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean fall within the Pacific Command (PACOM) and Pacific Fleet's area of responsibility. This automatically subsumes Southeast Asia in a wider strategic context. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's intervention at the July 2010 ARF in Hanoi, and her subsequent November 2011 Foreign Policy article — still the closest document to an official doctrine for the pivot — clearly signalled an intensification of US interest in the South China Sea. Attention in Southeast Asia was further garnered by Washington's apparent interest in a more “redistributive” footprint for the US military forward-deployed presence in the Western Pacific, given its top-heavy dispositions in Japan, South Korea and Guam. Since 2012 there has been a conscious re-calibration to the pivot/rebalance, widening the base of US engagement efforts to include diplomatic and economic legs to match the already extended defence component.