Bye, bye, pivot to Asia?
As the chances of US military intervention in the Middle East rise, focus on the Indo-pacific region is being challenged.
former US president Bill Clinton hosted the Leaders’ Summit of the Asia-pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum in Seattle in 1993, the Middle East started to feel like old news.
Resisting pressure to oust Saddam Hussein and launch new military campaigns in the Middle East, Clinton promoted a trade liberalisation agenda in East Asia and tried to transform Apec from a “talking shop” into a pillar of an Asia-centric foreign policy.
America did embrace that outlook that was front and centre in the Clinton years, which included, among other things, an active policy of diplomatic and military engagement with China, before 9/11 pulled the focus of American diplomacy and national security back to the broader Middle East.
Focus shifted
The US war on global terrorism necessitated a new set of priorities. Washington invaded Afghanistan, and Iraq and tried to bring democracy to the Middle East.
Indeed, East Asian officials and pundits criticised George W Bush throughout his presidency for changing the course set in Seattle in 1993, investing so much time and resources on the Middle East-centred war on terrorism while treating the dramatic geopolitical and economic changes in Asia as a global sideshow.
Hence, Asian diplomats were furious when former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice skipped the 2007 Asean Regional Forum in Manila, and instead travelled to the Middle East for discussions in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and visits to Israel and the West Bank.
Adding to those angers, Bush also postponed talks with Asean leaders scheduled in Singapore for September that year. Instead, he turned his attention to the “surge” in Iraq.
Even when Bush and Rice did spend time in Asia, much of their focus was on terrorism. Asian leaders wondered why Americans invested so much effort to “remake” the Middle East, “restart” the Israelipalestinian “peace process” and adjudicate the bloody Iraqi tribal wars.
After all, they noted, in East Asia they did not have to invade countries in order to maintain their trade and military presence.
And while the Americans were being pulled into Middle Eastern quagmires, the Chinese, with their much less expansive defence budgets, were devoting their resources to strengthening their economy.
But when Barack Obama hosted the Apec leaders’ forum in Honolulu, Hawaii in November 2011, close to two decades after the Seattle Summit, it felt like a diplomatic
Groundhog Day, with US officials insisting once again that the time had come to shift American global priorities from the Middle East to the Asia-pacific region, proclaiming the Obama administration’s vision of “America’s Pacific Century”.
That Obama – born and raised in Hawaii, and America’s self-described “first Pacific president” – was hosting the Apec leaders’ meeting in one of America’s territorial possessions in the Pacific was meant to symbolise these changing US priorities.
“The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the centre of the action,” then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton wrote in Foreign Policy magazine in October 2011. She stressed that America’s diplomatic and economic frontiers this century lay not in the Middle East or Europe but in Asia.
America was pivoting now from Europe and the Middle East into the Indo-pacific region.
Americans were exhausted from the costly military intervention in the Middle East, leading to Obama’s decision to withdraw US troops from Iraq and reach a nuclear deal with Iran. He recognised that a diminishing economic base was constraining America’s ability to maintain its hegemony in South-west Asia.
Thus, the Obama administration had a new opportunity to reorient US geostrategic priorities, which it did to some extent, increasing US economic and military cooperation with South Korea, India, Australia and Asean countries that had called for the US to expand its presence in the region as a counterweight to a more assertive China.
But the 2008 global financial crisis ended up creating a political backlash against globalisation and free trade. At the same time, politicians in Washington were focusing on China as a new global threat to US global interests, pressing to change the engagement policy towards China to a more confrontational approach.
All of which spelt bad news for Obama’s plans to speed up negotiations on the ESWHEN tablishment of another free trade deal – the Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which was supposed to ensure that the US assumed a leading position in this new regional free trade system.
Under Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, the US pulled out completely from the TPP.
But like his predecessor, Trump continued to refrain from launching new US military interventions in the Middle East and pursued an approach of gradual disengagement from the region, while focusing US geostrategic attention on the Indo-pacific region, where containing China became his administration’s central foreign policy priority.
In a way, President Joe Biden seemed to embrace Trump’s agenda when it came to continuing to shift US economic and military resources from the Middle East to the Indo-pacific, signing new security deals with India and the Philippines, expanding military exercises in Asia, and trying to retard China’s technological development.