China vs America: the struggle for south-east Asia

Is Antony Blinken, President Joe Biden’s secretary of state, preparing to abandon Barack Obama’s powder-puff Asian foreign policies? It is now widely agreed that Obama, under whom Blinken served as deputy secretary of state, ceded to China uncontested control of the South China Sea. Obama’s so-called ‘pivot to Asia’ was all talk and no trousers. Blinken, who believes that diplomacy must be ‘supplemented by deterrence’, may be about to implement a more aggressive foreign policy in south-east Asia and elsewhere.

In his first speech as general secretary of the Communist party in 2012, Xi Jinping made his intentions clear. He stated his commitment to ‘accepting the baton of history and continuing to work for realising the great revival of the Chinese nation in order to let the Chinese nation stand more firmly and powerfully among all nations’. Xi’s international adventurism, under the umbrella of his ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, has been most evident in his illegal military occupation of the South China Sea, but it is a global strategy for domination which can be observed in Central Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, Europe, even the Arctic.

How did Obama respond? He did nothing. He issued platitudes. He vacillated over whether the Mutual Defence Treaty with the Philippines included the disputed South China Sea. By the end of his presidency, it was too late. And weakness in the South China Sea was undoubtedly an invitation for Xi to push elsewhere on Obama’s open door.

Neither did Donald Trump stem the geopolitical red tide. Arguably Trump’s focus on China’s mercantilism rather than its geo-political expansion was misguided. In spite of secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s vigorous China-Russia containment policy, Trump’s America-first stance and his personal toxicity made any formal coalition to contain China a non-starter.

In south-east Asia, while Trump was warmly embraced by President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, a fellow scourge of the political establishment, the Philippines continued to kowtow to China.