As Trump Looms, Blinken Aims to Reassure Allies on U.S. Commitment to Asia
For three and a half years, President Biden and his aides have insisted that the United States is a Pacific power, and that its allies and partners in the region need not worry about Washington’s commitments.
For U.S. officials, underscoring that message has become increasingly important as China’s power has grown. Now Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken plans to deliver assurances in person across six nations, his most ambitious trip in the region.
When Mr. Blinken lands in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, on Saturday, he will face a barrage of questions about what dramatic shifts in U.S. policy might or might not occur next year, given the upcoming change in the presidency.
Mr. Biden’s announcement last Sunday that he is no longer running for re-election sent shock waves around the world. Many of America’s allies are especially concerned about a second Trump presidency, given that former President Donald J. Trump has constantly declared that those allies are conning the United States into providing military support. They are uncertain if Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, can beat him in November.
Regardless, Mr. Blinken’s core message will be one of American resolve.
“I think the message that the secretary is going to be conveying to the region is that America is all in on the Indo-Pacific,” Daniel J. Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, told reporters on Monday. “I think from Day 1 of this administration, we have significantly and dramatically stepped up our engagement.”
But the talking point does not answer in concrete terms the main question from allies: Starting next year, will the United States invest significantly in Asia — in both economic and military terms? Mr. Blinken could argue that Ms. Harris’s foreign policy would be a continuation of Mr. Biden’s, but in no way can he speak for Mr. Trump.
“Honestly, it will be a challenging task because countries in the region, including China, are looking beyond the Biden administration and thinking of the future,” said Yun Sun, a director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a research group in Washington.
Mr. Biden, Mr. Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, have spoken about China as the greatest long-term challenge to American power. They have tried to shape U.S. foreign policy around that but have often been forced to address crises elsewhere in the world.
Even for this trip, Mr. Blinken left Washington one day later than initially planned after Mr. Biden agreed to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, at the White House on Thursday.
Yet, there has been a constant in Mr. Biden’s approach to Asia: He has bolstered military alliances, to the consternation of Xi Jinping, China’s leader. Along those lines, he has signed new agreements with Japan, the Philippines, Australia and South Korea. The United States is sending Tomahawk cruise missiles to Japan and nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, and it has obtained greater access to military bases in the Philippines.
Mr. Biden has also, for the first time, used presidential authority to send weapons to Taiwan, the de facto independent island that the Chinese Communist Party aims to rule.
But Mr. Biden has also been constrained by domestic U.S. politics, to the chagrin of Asian allies. He has not tried to revive American involvement in the regional free trade pact that President Barack Obama had helped to forge, and his economic policies have not given allies anything near the levels of access to U.S. markets they crave. China is the largest trading partner for many of the countries, and a common refrain across Asia is: How can the United States hope to compete with China when its economic commitment is so lackluster?
After Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016, Mr. Biden read the room on economic populism among American voters, both among isolationist Republicans and progressive Democrats as well as in American unions. He rarely talks about free trade, though he was once a champion of it.
Mr. Kritenbrink pointed out that the United States and Asian nations did $2 trillion worth of annual trade. But some of those countries have been caught in the crossfire of Mr. Biden’s economic policies. South Korean officials and car company executives were irate when it became clear that under Mr. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, Korean cars did not qualify for tax credits for customers buying electric vehicles. And in Japan, some officials are worried about the Biden administration’s push to force Japanese companies to avoid selling some semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.
At the same time, Asian officials know economic relations could worsen. Mr. Trump has talked about imposing high tariffs on a wide range of goods from many countries if he becomes president again. Asian officials will pepper Mr. Blinken about the future of trade as he hits the six countries: Laos, Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore and Mongolia.
China is binding some of those countries closer to it through infrastructure projects. One example is the Laos China Railway, a high-speed train line that runs from southwest China to Vientiane. Chinese businesspeople and tourists are everywhere in Luang Prabang, a small ancient capital along the Mekong River where the train stops.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has consistently said that countries that rely on the U.S. military to help with security should pay more to the United States. He has little strategic regard for American military presence overseas, even as some Republican lawmakers have argued that the United States must engage in a rapid military buildup in the Asia-Pacific region to deter China from invading Taiwan or making other aggressive moves in the region.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Mr. Trump criticized Taiwan, saying it “doesn’t give us anything.” And at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., he called Mr. Xi “brilliant” and mentioned a “beautiful note” he had received from the Chinese leader after a recent assassination attempt on Mr. Trump. He added that he “got along very well” with Mr. Xi until the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020.
His words sent a signal to China even as it stirred anxiety among officials in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia.
“For China, the anticipation of Trump’s policy toward the region is much more important than the trip by Blinken,” Ms. Sun said.
In Vientiane, Mr. Blinken might meet one on one with Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official. The two have had some calm discussions and some volatile ones, including in February 2023, when Mr. Blinken told Mr. Wang that the United States suspected China was on the verge of sending arms to Russia for the war in Ukraine.
“Wang Yi will be disciplined about not making news that could be construed as supporting or opposing any presidential candidate,” said Ryan Hass, the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.
“Beijing wants to minimize its role in America’s political debate over the next 100 days to the maximum extent possible,” added Mr. Hass, who was also a director of China policy on the National Security Council during the Obama administration. “They see no benefit, only downside, to becoming a focus of public attention and political debate in the United States during the election season.”
Mr. Wang and other Chinese officials no doubt will watch closely as Mr. Blinken flies to Tokyo and Manila in tandem with Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III. In each capital, they will meet together with their counterparts. In Tokyo, Mr. Blinken also plans to attend a meeting of top diplomats from the so-called Quad countries: India, Japan, Australia and the United States.
Tensions between the Philippines and China have risen sharply in recent months over clashes between Chinese coast guard vessels and Philippine naval ships in contested areas of the South China Sea. The encounters are especially fraught around the Second Thomas Shoal, where the Philippine Navy has sent a steady stream of resupply missions to a ship grounded on the reef.
The Chinese coast guard ships have tried to block those missions by shooting water cannons at the Philippine ships or even ramming them. In one instance, a Philippine sailor lost a thumb when two ships collided.
The White House has released statements emphasizing that the United States and the Philippines have a mutual defense clause in their treaty, but those appeared to have had little impact on China.
Before flying to Japan, Mr. Blinken plans to stop in Vietnam to pay his respects to Nguyen Phu Trong, the Communist Party general secretary who died this month. Vietnam and Mongolia, Mr. Blinken’s planned final stop, are both nations where the United States, China and Russia compete for influence.
Mr. Xi and Vladimir V. Putin, the president of Russia, both made recent visits to Vietnam, a country whose citizens often suspect China of coveting some of their territory. Vietnamese armies have repelled Chinese invaders over the centuries, most recently in 1979, when the two nations fought a border war.
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