SOUTHEAST ASIAN SECURITYASEAN, Still Toothless, Is Losing Its Faith in the U.S.
At the July meeting of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers, most of whom were already furious at the United States, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio did little to lower the temperature. But ASEAN also continued its trend of saying much while doing almost nothing.
In late July, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Manila for the annual ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting with a message Southeast Asian officials have heard, in one form or another, for a decade. The United States, he assured them, remains a committed Indo-Pacific partner—devoted to Southeast Asia, dependable, and invested in the region’s security and prosperity. “I believe very much that the future and the story of the twenty-first century will be written in this region,” Rubio said.
Rubio’s message was designed to convince the region that despite the resumed war in Iran, the United States would not just ignore Southeast Asia—or regional flash points such as the South China Sea, China’sgrowing pressure on Taiwan, and Beijing’s increasing assertiveness farther out into the Pacific Ocean.
But despite Rubio’s efforts, it was clear to most ASEAN officials that his words had little meaning, and that maybe he too was out of sync with the White House. While the summit was taking place, the Trump administration imposed new tariffs on the Philippines—a treaty ally and the strongest U.S. supporter in the region—as well as six other ASEAN members. Although the tariffs were supposedly based on findings of forced labor and nonadherence to certain reciprocal commitments with Washington, in reality they seemed almost arbitrary.
The new levies provided regional leaders with further evidence that negotiating with the United States over tariffs, as many ASEAN members had done the year before, makes no sense. After all, recent years have shown that U.S. tariffs are subject to revision whenever Washington finds a fresh rationale.
The same week of the ASEAN summit, fighting between the United States and Iran reignited, with Trump considering and then putting off a ground invasion. Those choices sent energy prices skyrocketing, which is a big problem for Southeast Asia.
Anger toward Washington spilled out at the meeting, with ASEAN ministers and lower-ranking officials outraged at the possibility that renewed war with Iran would again close the Strait of Hormuz. Southeast Asia is perhaps the region most dependent on oil and liquefied natural gas from the Persian Gulf, and has already faced one massive energy shock during the first part of the war.
