Biden’s Asia Pacific booster plan thwarted  

JOE Biden began his presidency with Asia-Pacific as the focal point of his foreign policy. Yet almost two and a half years later, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dramatically recast his international priorities.

Around 450 days into that conflict, the biggest international legacy that Biden may leave as president, especially if he fails to win a second term, will probably be his determined defence of Ukraine. Plus also his wider statecraft which has seen the rebuilding of the fragile Western alliance after the Trump presidency.

However, he has not lost sight of a longer-term ambition to intensify the US “pivot” to the Asia-Pacific. For while Russia remains the major immediate threat to Washington’s security interests, this has done little to alter the administration’s view that China remains the paramount longer-term challenge.

And this is why the reported curtailing of his forthcoming trip to the region – which will still be headlined by the G7, hosted by Japan but no longer including the Quad meeting, hosted by Australia – is so galling for him. It will also badly disappoint regional allies.

His trip has been cut short because of continuing US domestic political brinkmanship over the debt ceiling, with Biden scheduled to return to Washington reportedly on Sunday (May 21). This closes a rare window of opportunity to reset the regional balance in US foreign policy.

The president’s big Asia-Pacific trip had been intended to see a determined effort to double down on US attention on the region. And in so doing re-emphasise the US pivot which is, primarily, focused around balancing China’s rise to power, including by increasing US military presence and forming security alliances.

However, this goal has been set back by the cancellation of Biden’s attendance at the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or Quad) summit in Australia. This is a blow for him for multiple reasons, including his hope to serenade India’s President Narendra Modi, whose government may well be re-elected for a third term this year. Washington remains concerned that Modi continues to play a diplomatic balancing act between the West and Russia, and has refused to condemn the invasion of Ukraine.

While the Quad was initiated in 2007, it has come into much greater focus in the last few years. Some have dismissed the importance of the group, but its relevance as an emerging anti-China alliance has also been buttressed by the formation by the United Kingdom, United States and Australia of a trilateral security partnership to defend “shared interests in the Indo-Pacific”, with China again the unmentioned key focal point. The so-called AUKUS partnership could be hugely important with former UK national security adviser Stephen Lovegrove asserting “it is perhaps the most significant capability collaboration anywhere in the world in the past six decades”.

The main goal of the Quad meeting is to advance a shared vision for a free and open Asia-Pacific with all four nations agreeing about the threat from Beijing. The emerging fault lines in this growing challenge are often cited as being Taiwan, or the continuing tensions in the South China Sea where it is not just Japan and the US, but also other countries such as Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam and Brunei, that are in dispute with China in the waters through which some US$5 trillion of ship-borne trade passes each year.

However, the problem for the US and its allies is broader as was to be shown by Biden’s previously planned visit to Papua New Guinea (PNG), in between the Japan and Australian legs of his latest trip, where he was scheduled to have met 18 Pacific island leaders.

There, Biden was to have signed defence and surveillance agreements with the PNG to renew the strategic importance of the nation where his uncle died in World War Two. PNG, the South Pacific’s most populous nation, will also benefit from a doubling of US development assistance to US$32 million.

The US goal is seeking to deter Pacific island nations – which span 40 million km of ocean – from forming deeper security ties with China, including with a proposed US$800 million economic assistance package from Washington. Beijing has a growing history of infrastructure projects in the Pacific, and last year struck a security deal with the Solomon Islands.

Disappointed as Biden will be by the cancellation of the Australian and PNG legs of his trip, he will now put extra emphasis on the G7 in Japan. At the summit from May 19 to 21, there will also be a range of measures announced relevant to China.

This includes plans for the Western club to issue, for the first time, a statement on economic security alongside the main summit communique, including a commitment to “collectively deter, respond to and counter economic coercion” from authoritarian powers. An example sometimes cited here is China’s increasing tariffs on key Australian imports after the latter’s government pushed for an international inquiry into the origins of the Covid pandemic.

However, the issue has also come onto the radar screen too since the Ukraine war began with the G7 condemning Moscow’s intent to use Europe’s dependence on Russian oil and natural gas as a weapon. For instance, state-owned Gazprom cut gas deliveries last year to numerous nations, including France and Italy, just days after their leaders were in Kyiv to formally back Ukraine’s bid to join the EU.

The G7 is also spearheading the massive international package of sanctions against Moscow; has pledged never to recognise any redrawn boundaries for Ukraine; provided tens of billions of dollars in military and humanitarian assistance; and is currently looking at plans to rebuild Ukraine in what would be a mini-version of the post-war Marshall Plan which saw the US-backed rebuilding of post-war Europe.

Meanwhile, the Japanese hosts will also discuss with Biden whether he might look to reopen potential US participation in the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership. This is the trade and investment deal originally intended to lock Washington into deeper partnership with US allies in the region, including Singapore.

It is plausible that Biden may still eventually seek to bring the United States into this pact which accounts for around 13 per cent of global trade and a combined population of around 500 million. However, any such move would very likely need to wait till any second term given the political unpopularity of international trade in some key US states, which he will be conscious of before his re-election campaign in 2024.

Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics