Thailand by Benjamin Zawacki

Author:Benjamin Zawacki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2017-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine: China’s Pivot (2006–2014)

In many ways, the story of Thailand is the story of this region … And when a new occupant moves into the White House next year, America’s alliances in Asia will be the strongest they have ever been.1

George W. Bush, August 2008

Initially, we held out hope that—as happened with the 2006 coup—the military would move relatively quickly to transfer power to a civilian government and move towards free and fair elections. However, recent events have shown that the current military coup is both more repressive and likely to last longer than the last one.2

Scot Marciel, June 2014

When China emerges because of her size, because of history, some other countries start talking about a China threat. But for Thais, because we are so close by blood, we are naturally more at ease in engaging with China. You would be surprised at how many Western delegations came through that used the term “China threat” or “Chinese threat”, and my response was always, “Well, what threat?” We didn’t see China as a threat. We obviously saw her as a major power and therefore maybe having a lot of influence, but we didn’t have this feeling that she would be a threat.3

Abhisit Vejjajiva, February 2015

In a late 2011 article in Foreign Policy, articulating a vision first mentioned two years earlier, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began: “As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point.”4 The pivot in question was away from a decade-long policy of reactive and bellicose anti-terrorism in the Middle East, toward one proactively focused on peace and prosperity in Asia. She went on to state, “Our treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand are the fulcrum for our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacific.”5 Yet in the preceding three years, Clinton and her boss in the White House had done little to make such a pivot possible, and as subsequent years would show, none was forthcoming. The result was not regional inertia, however, or even continuance of the status quo in which Sino-Thai relations grew at US‒Thai expense, but an acceleration of that trend. Despite its sound conception and calculated introduction, the pivot had the innate capacity to alarm the Chinese. The Americans knew this, and rightly judged it unavoidable but manageable: it was natural that one global power would react to a major policy change of another, and an actual pivot could present as much opportunity as challenge for Beijing. It was, after all, a belated response to China’s powerful rise. The problem was that the US announced its plan but failed to carry out more than preliminary steps. Where the US response to Thailand’s coup had been welcomed and taken advantage of by China, its plan to pivot was unwelcome, spurring still more engagement in Thailand, Southeast Asia, the Asia-Pacific. US policy was finally spot-on, but its architects and agents could not get out of their own way.

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