Published 10 December 2024
As a fever of foreboding grips the global policy intelligentsia ahead of a second Trump presidency, we take a step back to look at the long arc of American interests in the largest trading continent on the planet. In his Gaston Sigur Memorial Lecture delivered in Washington, Bilahari Kausikan speaks directly to Americans on how Southeast Asia has to confront the realities of dealing with both the US and China, and that "dealing with both is the necessary condition of dealing with either effectively."
"Let me begin with a story," Bilahari says in opening the Gaston Sigur Memorial Lecture, delivered earlier this year at George Washington University, as he recounts an anecdote on how Singapore defied protests from its neighboring countries to offer the US military use of the island-nation’s facilities.
Speaking directly to Americans, Bilahari details an arc of consequences and lessons that flowed from that decision more than 30 years ago, spanning the depth and history of American interests in Asia and a highly variegated region indispensable to both US and China’s strategic interests.
"There has been a strong tendency in American policy to see Southeast Asia as a blank sheet on which you project your own hopes and fears. These hopes and fears are more often than not expressed in binary terms. If the region is not 'free' it is going 'red', if Southeast Asian Muslims are not 'moderate' meaning pro-western, they must be plotting terrorism; if 'democracy' is not advancing, it must be in 'retreat'; and most recently, if Southeast Asia does not align itself with the US, it must be falling under Chinese domination.
This simplistic cast of mind has often got US policy into trouble in Southeast Asia – as during the Vietnam War. It is perhaps more understandable under current circumstances where strategic competition between the US and China is undoubtedly the single most important geopolitical issue confronting the world, coloring every other international issue.
Download The future of American policy in Southeast Asia by Bilahari Kausikan:
But even so, a binary cast of mind is not the best mental framework in which to try to understand the nature of US-China competition, let alone how it is likely to play out in Southeast Asia. Some of you have heard me say this many times before, but it is a crucial point and I am afraid you will have to endure listening to me say it yet again: one of the most intellectually lazy and misleading ways of describing US-China competition is to call it 'a new Cold War'. There are superficial similarities to the US-Soviet competition of a different era, but the trope of 'a new Cold War' fundamentally misrepresents the nature of US-China competition."
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Author
Bilahari Kausikan
Bilahari Kausikan is a former Ambassador-at-Large in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Singapore.
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