Multilateral Asian Security Architecture: Non-ASEAN Stakeholders by See Seng Tan

Author:See Seng Tan [Tan, See Seng]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, Asia, History, Security (National & International), General
ISBN: 9781317447832
Google: WfQsCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 26271350
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

7 United States

This chapter looks at the contributions the United States of America have rendered to the shape and substance of Asia’s multilateral architecture, its content and its conventions. More than any of the other key external stakeholders, America did not particularly favour Asia’s ‘multilateral turn’ primarily because it read that as an either/or proposition at the plausible expense of the longstanding security architecture of alliances and other collective defence arrangements that it had built during the Cold War and has sustained to the present. America relented only when it realized its Asian allies and partners continue to value their security ties with it. By and large, the United States has been a strong supporter of Asian multilateralism, albeit not as much as countries like Australia and Japan. While Washington has chafed at times over the lack of substantive progress in regional cooperation, it nonetheless has persisted in supporting and legitimizing ASEAN’s centrality and leadership in Asian multilateralism even when other non-ASEAN stakeholders criticized and dismissed ASEAN’s relevance.

There can be no question over the vital importance of the United States to Asian multilateralism, even when its focus on the Asian region, already uneven at the best of times, has waxed and waned over the years. Despite its long and deep historical engagement with Asia, the United States has proved ambivalent in its disposition and policy towards the region – an unfortunate yet understandable situation for the only global power, one preoccupied at times with developments in other parts of the world. For instance, while Washington’s post-Vietnam orientation towards Southeast Asia throughout the remainder of the Cold War era could not really be termed as isolationist – even though Nixon warned against such a prospect back in 19711 – its general approach to Southeast Asia has been described as an inadvertent policy of ‘benign neglect and missed opportunities’ and/or ‘systemic neglect’.2 Yet no other great power has ever received from Asians the resounding pleas for attention which America gets whenever regional countries – presumably with the exception of a more assertive China in recent times – feel they are being ignored by the Americans. On the other hand, there have been times when American attention on the region has had the opposite impact not least because of its destabilizing effects real or imagined.

Against that backdrop, this chapter will survey and examine US involvement in Asia and in Asian multilateral institutions from the Cold War period to the present. It compares the dispositions and policies of succeeding US administrations towards Asia and Asian multilateralism to that of the Obama administration in the light of President Obama’s claim to be his nation’s first ‘Pacific president’ and his ardent advocacy of a US role in multilateralism.3 Discounting differences in presidential and foreign policy leadership styles as well as expected policy variations between Democratic and Republican administrations – obviously by no means insignificant – it could be argued that there is a fairly consistent trend in how the United States has engaged the Asian region

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.