Eric's Insight: Beware of Biden intention to invite ASEAN leaders

A combination photo of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and US President Joe Biden. (Photo source/TWITTER)

In a January 14 letter to Prime Minister Hun Sen, US President Joe Biden wrote: "Under Cambodia’s chairmanship, the United States hopes to both grow our relationship with ASEAN and continue to pursue our common goals in the region."

Here, we’re wondering what the US goals in the region are, especially in the so-called Indo-Pacific region, as is indicated in the ensuing lines of the letter. Since the US National Security Strategy 2017, the prominent goal of the country has been aimed at China.

The "enclosed" correspondence also conveyed Biden’s intention to invite ASEAN leaders to Washington for a special summit in the coming months. The ASEAN-US special summit itself is actually nothing new. It was first proposed by Biden’s predecessor Trump in 2019, but was postponed by the Covid pandemic in the following year.

The US has long been a dialogue partner of ASEAN, and we can fully appreciate the group’s willingness to develop relations with the US if the country’s role in the region is really constructive and it sincerely holds the ASEAN centrality in regional affairs.

US President Joe Biden's January 14 letter to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (Online photo subject to deletion)  

 However, the US practices turned out to be the contrary. Its frequent muscle shows in the South China Sea, as well as its military alliances with Japan, Australia, India and the UK, have endangered the Asia-Pacific region, including the nations of ASEAN, one of whose founding missions is to make the region free from nuclear weapons.

Now the US ally Australia, also a key neighbor of ASEAN, is pursuing the nuclear capability via the AUKUS alliance, threatening regional maritime security. 

In handing his confidential letter to the ASEAN presidency Cambodia, Biden has interestingly endowed Indonesia the “capacity as country coordinator for the United States in ASEAN,” instead of contacting the Cambodian premier directly.

Actually, the US administration has inwardly seen Indonesia as a potentially strategic democratic alliance in its effort against China, and that’s why Biden praised Indonesia’s "essential" leadership in the Indo-Pacific and "strong commitment" to democratic values during meeting his Indonesian counterpart, Joko Widodo, in Glasgow last November.

Thong Mengdavid, a research fellow at the Asian Vision Institute’s Mekong Centre for Strategic Studies, told The Phnom Penh Post on February 6 that ASEAN remains at the heart of US foreign policy and a major trading partner that could help curb the growing influence of its strategic rival China.

(The writer Eric Wang Shixue is an English editor with the Mekong Magazine based in Kunming, Yunnan province. The view in the article does not necessarily represent that of Yunnan Gateway.)