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America reaches out

Last week, Lloyd Austin, US Defence Secretary, travelled to the Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines—part of a weeklong Indo-Pacific tour intended to demonstrate American allyship. Austin is the first member of Biden’s cabinet to set foot in Southeast Asia, but he is the second senior US official to visit in as many months. And his trip brought with it news that Kamala Harris, US Vice President, will visit Singapore and Vietnam next month—making her the first American vice president to set foot in Hanoi since reunification. If there had been some grumbling over how long it took the new US administration to pay heed to Southeast Asia, they appear to be making up for lost time now.

‘I’ll be carrying a few key messages and agenda items,’ Austin explained before setting off. ‘The first is simply that the United States remains a reliable partner: a friend that shows up when it counts.’

As ever, friendship to the US is intimately twinned with conflict—in this case in the South China Sea, where Beijing has grown increasingly hostile as it seeks to stake its claim on the valuable waterway. In its efforts to push back on China’s global dominance, the US has long been engaged in the geopolitics surrounding the South China Sea. It is hardly surprising that Vietnam and the Philippines, two nations that have faced Chinese incursions, made Austin’s itinerary.

‘Beijing’s claim to the vast majority of the South China Sea has no basis in international law,’ Austin said last Tuesday in Singapore. ‘That assertion treads on the sovereignty of states in the region. We continue to support the region’s coastal states in upholding their rights under international law.’

Those words may come as a relief, if not a particular surprise to the region’s claimant nations. But the ongoing tension between the US and China is unlikely to serve Southeast Asia well. ‘Two elephants do battle; ants die,’ goes the Khmer proverb. The dilemma for these countries is how best to balance the warring giants.

That reality has been particularly acute during the pandemic, during which, despite Austin’s efforts to highlight Washington’s largess, the US has been conspicuously absent. The 40 million doses Austin noted had been shared by the US in Southeast and East Asia is far higher than the 7.3 million doses donated to Southeast Asia by China—but a fraction of the more than 200 million doses the region has been able to purchase from China.

With the need to vaccinate greater than ever, the distinction between donated and sold fades fast. Cambodia, for instance, has maintained the second highest vaccination rate in the region by buying Chinese vaccines early and often. More than 40 per cent of the country has received at least one jab, with children as young as 12 eligible as of 1 August. Had the country chosen to wait solely for foreign ‘friendship’, its infection graphs would look far more like its neighbours’ terrifying spikes.

As the pandemic proceeds, with the highly contagious Delta variant surging across the region, the US could yet make up for lost time—flooding Southeast Asia with vaccinations. These days, there is no particular need for the US to win hearts and minds. It’s simply the right thing to do.

From the archives

Call me Ant

Sunisa Manning

Anthony Veasna So was a new friend who felt almost immediately like an old one. We called ourselves diasporic neighbours—him from a Khmer American family, me from a Thai American one. We talked about visiting Southeast Asia together. I’d show him Bangkok, glitzy and delicious, where his exuberance would fit right in. Then we’d go to Cambodia and ‘visit some family’ before finding another spot in the region where neither of us had been. I have a husband and son, but, somehow, I was sure the trip would happen.

We met in January 2020 at the Tin House Writers Workshop, in a blustery coastal town in Oregon. I had a bad cold that we later learned was pneumonia. Anthony sat next to me, even though I was a snotty mess. He handed me tissues as we talked with other friends about Asian writers entering the US market, and Sianne Ngai’s work. I didn’t know he was going to be one of the last people outside my family to hug me; soon after we returned to the Bay Area, California declared a lockdown.

At Tin House, Anthony spoke all the time of Alex Torres, his partner, who was home in San Francisco eating potato chips, he said, because Alex couldn’t cook. Anthony made him breakfast every day of their relationship, which began when they were undergraduates at Stanford. There was a moment when Anthony turned to me and said with this solemn face: ‘You can call me Ant. Ant and Al. That’s us.’ I knew I had been invited into the circle. I have a small circle too.

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