Is the US getting Asia wrong? 

At first glance, President Biden’s upcoming state visit to Vietnam this weekend — coming on the heels of a successful trilateral summit last month, where it forged new defense and high-tech cooperation with South Korea and Japan — appears to underscore Biden’s efforts to deepen U.S. ties in the Asia-Pacific.  

Hanoi and Washington are poised to declare a “comprehensive strategic partnership,” another Asian partner seeming to line up to counterbalance China. This is part of a larger pattern. For example, earlier this year, the U.S. cemented deals with the Philippines, a treaty ally, to gain access to four military bases, and with Papua New Guinea, as tensions mount over Taiwan and disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea. 

But things are more complicated than that. Biden’s stop in Vietnam after the G20 Summit in New Delhi may come at a cost to wider U.S. credibility in the region. Why? Biden is skipping two inclusive institutional summits; the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit. Both are hosted by Indonesia, the world’s fourth-largest nation, a democracy, the largest Muslim state and arguably, the most important actor in Southeast Asia. 

Most Asia-Pacific nations want a greater U.S. security and economic role in the region, but fear being forced to choose between the U.S. and China. But a perpetual concern is how reliable America is. As Woody Allen once said, “Ninety percent of life is just showing up.”   

With regard to the Asia-Pacific, the U.S. is fighting geography (the “tyranny of distance”) and economics. Though in absolute terms, the U.S. economic role in Asia is growing, it is shrinking in relative terms because Asian economies grow faster than the U.S. China borders 14 countries and is the largest trading partner and major investor in all U.S.-allied and partner nations in the region. 

The ASEAN Regional Forum and East Asia Summit are inclusive regional institutions that emerged after the Cold War ended in the early 1990s. While they have been largely process-oriented talk shops, they provide a venue for high-level bilateral diplomacy and a ritualistic comfort level of U.S. engagement. 

One reason why Biden’s absence raises hackles in Jakarta and other Asian capitals is that like the elevated ties to Vietnam his visit will cement, and the recent Camp David U.S.-South Korea-Japan trilateral summit, the U.S. is fashioning a network of defense cooperation and new supply chains, eclipsing the forum and the summit.

These include the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (known as the Quad), composed of the U.S., India, Japan and Australia, and AUKUS (U.S.-United Kingdom-Australia), a defense industrial Anglosphere alliance initially created to provide nuclear submarines for Australia.     

Unlike existing Asian regional groupings, this new U.S.-driven network is exclusive, aimed at countering China and functional rather than process-centered. Taken together, these and other U.S. bilateral defense upgrades, like the new base access in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, are a formidable counterbalance to China. 

But this gets to the different approaches to world order between the U.S. and many Asia-Pacific nations. Where U.S. efforts are designed to shape a regional coalition to oppose and confront China’s assertive, provocative behavior toward Taiwan, the East and South China Seas and South Pacific islands, ASEAN and others in the region are hedging, multi-aligning with and against both the U.S. and China.  

This is in part, the “two Asias,” problem: a U.S.-led “security Asia” of competing nationalisms, Chinese military ascendance and territorial disputes versus “economic Asia.” This is a dynamic, integrating, tech-driven region focused on bolstering market access, trade accord and investment. The business of Asia is business. These two forces are pulling in opposite directions. Hence, Asians impulse to hedge. 

This is about the dual fears of U.S. allies and partners in the region. Fear of abandonment on the one hand, and of entrapment on the other — getting pulled into a conflict with China — which is close and with whom they have to live. 

It has not helped that Asia-Pacific nations have deepened integration aided by major trade expansion via the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which includes China but not the U.S., and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.  

The U.S. is missing in action. Worse, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), now renamed under Japanese leadership, was seen by both the Bush and Obama administrations as a pillar of U.S. economic strategy to counter, which Trump rejected. Now China is trying to join it. 

Biden has continued on that economic nationalist path, rejecting the idea of market access and tariff reduction trade agreements, resisting calls from Japan and other Asian partners to rejoin TPP. This reinforces Asian concerns about America’s staying power, as the region’s economic party continues with the U.S. outside, face pressed against the glass. 

One possible way to square the circle may be to use the Vietnam meeting and the ASEAN Regional Forum and East Asia Summit, which Vice President Kamala Harris will attend, to build on outrage over China’s coercive maritime behavior in the South China Sea. Beijing’s Coast Guard and maritime militia have been firing water cannons at Filipino resupply ships and Vietnamese fishing boats in their own respective territorial waters. China has also intimated or tried to block offshore oil and gas projects in Malaysia and Indonesia with their respective economic zones. 

All these actions violate the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which China has ratified. Beijing sees its actions as enforcing “sovereignty” based on fictional territorial claims, rejected by the International Court of Justice in 2016. China rejected this international law and outraged many ASEAN states and India (with whom it has disputed claims) recently by publishing a map showing all these disputed territories as part of China. 

Biden laid a foundation for countering Chinese claims at the Camp David summit last month, issuing an unusually strident joint statement denouncing China’s claims and actions in the South China Sea. One way to tie the various regional bodies together would be to work with like-minded states at the East Asia Summit to demand a freeze on new construction in the South China Sea, compliance with the convention on the law of the sea, and call for a code of conduct for the Western Pacific. 

Even if China rejected such ideas, the U.S. and its partners could forge a near-consensus, isolate Beijing and create a basis for further international responses.  

Robert A. Manning is a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center. He previously served as senior counselor to the undersecretary of State for global affairs, as a member of the U.S. secretary of state’s policy planning staff and on the National Intelligence Council Strategic Futures Group. Follow him on Twitter @Rmanning4.