No shame in the art of the fawn – Asia’s way with Trump and China
The long-term strategy will have to be diversification of ties, already evident from some of the interactions seen during this summit season
IN ONE telling, the outcome of US President Donald Trump’s recent Asia swing does not deserve the “win-win” tag it has widely been getting. In this view, the seeming goodwill – after all the gifting, gold-dessert offering, and other acts of obeisance – in fact masks a loss for the region.
At the Oct 31 Asean Roundtable organised by the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, Thai political scientist Thitinan Pongsudhirak wondered if the likes of Malaysia, Cambodia and Thailand would soon suffer “buyer’s remorse” once the initial euphoria of the trade deals they inked with Washington wears off. It is a brutal but not inaccurate reading, going by what learned observers say as they parse the fine print.
That said, there is room to be far more charitable, because this downbeat view focuses almost entirely on the deals – which, by the way, are not mutually initiated free trade agreements but one-sided pacts meant to lower Washington’s unilateral “Liberation Day” tariffs.
Looked at in totality – and, more importantly, against the severe anxiety Asia as a whole felt about the return of Trump exactly this week, a year ago – it is not all that bad that he made these visits, turned up for the summitry, and gamely appreciated the air bomber jacket, the gold-leaf golf ball and the gold dessert rolled out for him.
While big-name commentators were suggesting he would have no time for Asean, here he was in the room, even if he did not stay for the whole thing.
We should not give all the credit for this to the seeming magnanimity of Trump.
BT in your inbox
Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.
Little appreciated is how, taken as a composite, the region bent over backwards to stay in Washington’s good graces and keep the US President engaged in its interests – and did so while making it seem effortless when surely it was not.
Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, whose skills as host of the Asean talks were so good that Trump raved about him even after leaving Malaysia, surely knew the political cost he would face from domestic critics for cosying up to a leader whom wide swathes of pro-Palestine sympathisers in his country see as the arch-backer of what they see as a genocide.
Yet, he seemed able to mute this part of his activism, reserving it for private conversations. “It’s much better than what I expected – the trust, the friendship and the commitment to enhance relations,” Anwar was quoted as saying of his relationship and talks with Trump in Kuala Lumpur.
Another example was South Korea, where President Lee Jae Myung’s administration managed to clinch a trade deal that capped Seoul’s annual investment in the US at US$20 billion, after earlier anxiety that proceeding with Trump’s expected US$350 billion investment pledge without phased instalments would destabilise the local currency market.
On top of that, Trump also green-lit Seoul’s request to build a nuclear-powered submarine in an American shipyard – an outcome that was not quite on the bingo cards of most regional watchers before the summit.
Asian unflappability
These are but two examples of outcomes secured through a kind of unflappability in the face of browbeating, and a dexterity in dealing with Trump that felt almost innate.
There may be many explanations offered, but one cannot deny that the rule of the game was pragmatism. It helps that public opinion in much of the region – Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia and Japan included – has not been coloured by the idea that doing what is necessary to engage Trump is automatically a surrender of self-respect.
It is quite different from the case in Europe, where considerable voices remain disdainful, saying this type of behaviour risks the continent’s liberal “political soul” and is “a recipe for distrust and a poison for democracy”, as the Financial Times’ commentator Martin Sandbu argued in August in the aftermath of the European Union’s post-Liberation Day trade deal with the US.
By and large, the argument can be made that governments in Asia, with the backing of their voters, saw what they were facing and, each in its own way, seemed to channel the old Deng Xiaoping axiom – that it does not matter if a cat is black or white; if it catches mice, it is a good cat.
India is the odd one out – with Prime Minister Narendra Modi absent from the summits and the two countries’ trade impasse still not resolved.
Yet even there, there were glimpses of the same pragmatism. On the sidelines of the Asean Defence Ministers’ Meeting in Kuala Lumpur, held after the main Asean and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summits, the US and Indian defence ministers inked a long-in-the-works framework on information sharing and technology cooperation. It signalled a thaw, and suggested that even New Delhi, with its lesser inclination to genuflect, has reserves of the hard-nosed flexibility on display elsewhere in the region.
In the interactions and deals struck during this summit season, the instinct was simple: get Trump onside, blunt the effect of his tariffs while conceding as little as possible, and above all not leave bruised or empty-handed. There is no shame in the odd strategic kowtow.
Keeping China onside
The successful Trump-whispering is all the more impressive if one also considers how well Asian nations’ engagements with the other superpower, China, went during this hectic summit season.
Regional countries – again, taken as a composite – did not seem trapped in the usual “either China or the US” box that commentators love to put them in. They showed deft diplomacy in being able to do both.
The image of Premier Li Qiang timing a Singapore visit ahead of the Asean summitry, then attending the regional meeting for the signing of an upgrade to the Asean-China free trade pact – all while Trump was also in the neighbourhood – underlined the point.
In South Korea, what piqued attention was not only the much-hyped summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, but Xi staying on for the whole Apec proceedings and the clear bonhomie he projected with regional leaders.
Going viral on social media was a video of the Chinese President cheekily suggesting to Lee that he had better check whether the Xiaomi phones he had gifted him had “backdoors” – with the South Korean leader laughing out loud.
Again, this was an Asian middle power whose ties with China have not always been on an even keel, now finding its footing in managing the relationship.
In some ways, it appears these countries are heeding calls by the likes of former Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao, who has suggested the region’s middle powers have the potential to be stabilising forces – by keeping diplomatic channels open, bringing empathy into dealings with the superpowers and being insistent about not abandoning difficult relationships.
Only a bridging strategy
The region should by no means dwell on what seem to be its superior skills in pleasing and appeasing – propitiating, to be very precise – the superpowers. This can be a bridging strategy only for now, not a long-term answer.
The long-term strategy will have to be diversification of ties, already evident from some of the interactions seen during this summit season. The presence of leaders from outside the region’s usual radar, including Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, at the meetings seemed not just a box-ticking exercise, but part of an ongoing effort to build a future not overly tethered to either superpower.
It must be clear to leaders that they have to be on guard – as surely Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi will be, even as Trump gave her assurances during his meeting with her to call him “any time” if she needed favours or “anything you want”.
Such is the nature of hegemonic powers that one can never be too sure one has them onside. The bullying tendencies will always be there.
One case in point is the Trump administration’s reported haranguing of officials from smaller countries to derail a now-delayed climate agreement for the global shipping industry.
The Financial Times reported on Nov 2 that, at meetings in London in October, a “phalanx of US officials intimidated African and small Pacific and Caribbean island countries into dropping support for the framework, which would have imposed a carbon emissions levy on shipping”. One veteran of these meetings told the newspaper that the interactions were like “dealing with the mob”, where countries were not told exactly what non-compliance with US directives would mean, only that there would be consequences.
These “bully boy” tactics are by no means the preserve of the US, as countries dealing with China on issues such as the South China Sea dispute will know. In that context, feeding the leaders of the superpowers golden citrus and gold-adorned brownies will not be the solution.
Countries will have to internalise, much faster, the idea of hanging together or being hanged separately. They will need to be better prepared for sharper, more decisive decision-making and less willing to be bogged down by a constant quest for consensus.
Those instincts must develop in concert with the impressive obeisance strategy on display this summit season. The danger is that these short-term concessions, because they feel so effective in the moment, harden into permanent statecraft – that charm and kowtows become the whole playbook for dealing with the superpowers, instead of a way to buy time to build something sturdier, with more predictable outcomes. THE STRAITS TIMES
Copyright SPH Media. All rights reserved.
