Amerika verliert Südostasien: Warum sich US-Verbündete in der Region China zuwenden

[SS from essay by Lynn Kuok, Lee Kuan Yew Chair in Southeast Asia Studies at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Research Fellow at Cambridge University.]

The United States has recently been touting its “convergence” with Asian partners. At the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin titled his remarks the “New Convergence in the Indo-Pacific.”At the Brookings Institution the following month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken maintained that the United States enjoys “much greater convergence” with key Asian partners, citing improved ties with Japan and South Korea and the strengthening security links between NATO and the Indo-Pacific. And, also in July, at the Aspen Security Forum, Blinken reiterated that he had “not seen a time when there’s been greater convergence between the United States and our European partners and our partners in Asia in terms of the approach to Russia, but also in terms of the approach to China.”

But the truth is that the United States is losing ground in important parts of Asia. Each year, the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute—a research institute funded primarily by the Singaporean government but that conducts its work independently—polls between 1,000 and 2,000 respondents in academia, think tanks, the private sector, civil society, nonprofit organizations, the media, government, and regional and international organizations from the ten countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The survey is the closest thing the region has to a longitudinal study of “elite opinion” on regional and international matters, providing a good sense of the trajectory of perceptions, even if some might quibble with its finer details. In the poll this year, the majority of respondents picked [China](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/regions/china) over the United States when asked whom ASEAN should align with if forced to choose between the two. This was the first time respondents picked China since the survey began posing this question in 2020.

Eh, looking at the numbers, this is mainly driven by large declines in Laos (a given, and back to it’s standard levels, not sure why US support exploded for one year there), Malaysia (Muslim majority country very pissed about Palestine), Indonesia (Muslim majority country very pissed about Palestine), and Brunei (Muslim majority country very pissed about Palestine). There was also a drop in Cambodia, also to pre-covid norms. Isn’t this hugely expected?

As far as I can tell, this is almost exclusively due to Palestine, and a reversion to norms. The nations which largely dropped, outside of Cambodia, are driven by religious issues or have always been in China’s sphere (over 50% of respondents in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei stated Israel-Hamas as their top concern, over all issues economic, territorial, etc).

Meanwhile, it also mentions only small gains in Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam. However, Ph and Vietnam hardly have any room to go up anyways, while Singapore is always straddling, and always will, straddle both sides.

This really does seem like a combination of obvious and really nothing to worry significantly about.