28 TheEconomistJanuary 30th 2021
1“W
e are allheaving a sigh of relief,”
says a South-East Asian diplomat,
about the exit of President Donald Trump.
Never has America’s ability to underpin
Asia’s stability and prosperity been so
doubted by the region’s leaders and policy-
makers as over the past four years. Unfor-
tunately for America’s standing in the re-
gion, the diplomat adds glumly, “The
damage has been done.”
The damage was inflicted in part by Mr
Trump’s scorn for the kind of open, multi-
lateral trading regimes that have buoyed
Asia’s economic success. He demonised
the wtoand took America out of the Trans-
Pacific Partnership, a 12-country free-trade
deal. In effect, the United States abdicated
economic leadership in the region for the
first time since the second world war.
As for regional security, Mr Trump
asked not what America could do for its
friends and allies, but what they could do
for it. By threatening to rupture military
alliances with South Korea and Japan iftheir governments did not cough up more,
he unsettled those two countries while im-
plying to all that America’s commitment to
Asia was impermanent and conditional.
Mr Trump’s secretary of state, Mike
Pompeo, also alarmed governments in
South-East Asia by pressing them to join in
the administration’s loud and often ideo-
logical demonisation of China. True, near-
ly all Asian countries are troubled by Chi-
na’s growing assertiveness, including
towards Taiwan and over bogus maritime
claims in the South China Sea. But the Chi-
nese presence is too large, close and, in
economic terms, largely beneficial for de-monisation to be an option.
Hence widespread relief at Joe Biden’s
incoming administration. Whereas Mr
Trump disdained the policy wonks who
typically flit from think-tanks to govern-
ment (and vice versa), the new president
has recruited squads of them. Several of his
Asia hands are well-known in the region’s
capitals, notably Kurt Campbell, who
helped engineer Barack Obama’s pro-
claimed “pivot” to Asia in 2012. He will be
Mr Biden’s new tsar for “Indo-Pacific” strat-
egy. “Washington”, says Miyake Kunihiko,
a foreign-policy adviser to the Japanese
cabinet, “is back.”
But the relief is tempered by scepticism.
It is not as if American policy will return to
a “prelapsarian state of grace”, says Bilahari
Kausikan, formerly Singapore’s top dip-
lomat. And it would be troubling if Mr Bi-
den’s approach resembled Mr Obama’s sec-
ond term, Mr Kausikan argues. It was
marked by a reluctance to exercise power.
He set red lines for Xi Jinping in the South
China Sea but did nothing when the Chi-
nese president crossed them. He urged
“strategic patience” with North Korea
while it built nuclear weapons. At least Mr
Trump’s team, for all its chaos, understood
power. Few South-East Asian policymakers
publicly praise the American navy’s height-
ened “freedom of navigation” exercises in
the South China Sea; yet none, in private,
will criticise them.Asia and AmericaRelief tinged with scepticism
HONG KONG
The region is hungry for reassurance from President Joe BidenAsia
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