ASIA
HAND Stand up to Uncle
Bully By Shawn W Crispin
When US Ambassador to Thailand Ralph
"Skip" Boyce led a peeved delegation of US
companies - including Marlboro and big alcohol
producers - to lodge their complaints with the
Public Health Ministry about a national ban on
cigarette advertisements and a pending one on
liquor promotions, US commercial diplomacy toward
Southeast Asia hit a new nadir.
If it
seems odd that a senior US envoy would so publicly
play the
role
of US corporate spokesman, that's because
historically it is. But Boyce, a career diplomat
who speaks fluent Thai and often portrays himself
as a friend to the country, has perhaps more than
any other senior US diplomat in Southeast Asia
pushed forcefully President George W Bush's many
controversial policies in the region - regardless
of the moral consequences.
After September
11, 2001, Boyce was Washington's point man in
chastising Indonesia's government for not taking
more seriously the "war on terror" in the region.
Now, Boyce is the highly visible spokesman for
Washington's new drive to reshape its commercial
relations with Southeast Asia more to the United
States' advantage, partly through lopsided
free-trade agreements (FTAs) and partly through
good old-fashioned bullying - as demonstrated
through Boyce's lobbying effort at Thailand's
Health Ministry.
Seasoned Southeast Asia
observers now realize how tragically the United
States' clandestine counter-terrorism campaign has
played out across the region, giving new,
US-backed life to the anti-democratic tendencies
that many countries had tried to bury with their
recent authoritarian pasts. Governments in
Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have all created
their own dirty little versions of Guantanamo Bay,
detaining unknown numbers of terror suspects to
satisfy Washington's demands.
What has
gone less noticed, but with potentially far wider
consequences for Southeast Asia's future
prosperity, is the hard new turn in Washington's
commercial diplomacy toward the region.
The US had first packaged its current
drive to broker FTAs in Southeast Asia as economic
rewards for governments' cooperation with its
counter-terrorism policies. Singapore and
Australia, both staunch supporters of US
counter-terrorism policies, were first in line to
receive bilateral trade pacts. Thailand, which
serves as the Central Intelligence Agency's secret
regional hub for counter-terrorism logistics and
operations, was logically next. And now that
Malaysia and Indonesia have detained, from
Washington's perspective, a sufficient number of
suspected Muslim militants, they too have recently
been invited to join the bilateral club.
Throughout the Cold War, the US was eager
to help capitalism take root in Southeast Asia as
a bulwark against communism's spread - and
provided generous aid and market access to budding
capitalist countries such as Thailand and
Indonesia. Nowadays, Washington's FTA drive is
often framed as a parallel but more efficient
free-trade track than the World Trade
Organization's stuttering multilateral course.
The reality, however, is that the US
prefers the leverage of one-on-one negotiations
with the region's small, export-dependent
countries, which, at least historically, have
relied hugely on US consumer markets for their
economic growth. But as the United States' demands
become more apparent at closed-door FTA
negotiations, regional governments are starting to
realize that the FTAs on offer are not so much
economic rewards as do-or-die propositions.
Reward cum
punishment Washington's current drive to
renegotiate its terms of trade with Southeast Asia
is, at least in part, symptomatic of its growing
desperation in an increasingly competitive global
economy driven by lower-cost Asian producers.
That's evident by the United States' attempts to
impose strict new intellectual-property-protection
measures through bilateral pacts. Such measures
would never pass muster at the WTO, but would
provide substantial competitive padding for US
pharmaceutical and media companies.
The
United States' bilateral drive in the region also
comes at a time when its own free-trade
credentials are very much in doubt. The
terror-obsessed US Congress moved to block China's
proposed acquisition of US oil company Unocal last
year on spurious national-security grounds. The
same flimsy rationale was used to block a United
Arab Emirates-based port operator from winning
management deals for US ports. At the same time,
the US is pushing through FTAs to gain greater
access to sensitive Southeast Asian industries,
including telecoms and energy.
In short,
Washington is bidding to impose its more
legalistic version of capitalism on Southeast
Asia's more free-wheeling economies, which many US
businesses, with their comparatively bloated costs
and without preferential treatment, have
difficulty competing with. And if the Bush
administration can't have its way at the
negotiating table, it's willing to resort to
bullying.
Three months ago Asia Times
Online first reported, and the mainstream media
later followed up, that senior US officials
pressured the World Health Organization to remove
its representative to Thailand after the UN
official publicly called into question the adverse
impacts a US-Thai FTA would have on Thailand's
public health (World health: A lethal dose of US
politics, June 17). The WHO official
had noted that the stricter
intellectual-property-protection measures in the
pact would inevitably lead to higher drug prices
and jeopardize hundreds of thousands of Thais,
including a large number of the country's 600,000
citizens with the AIDS virus who depend on locally
produced cheap generic medicines to survive.
US-Thai FTA negotiations, which Washington
had hoped would serve as a model for other
regional pacts, have recently stalled in the wake
of a grinding political conflict, allowing Thai
trade officials valuable time to assess the merits
and demerits of a potential trade deal. Washington
has threatened to make Thailand pay for the delay
by suspending the country's GSP (Generalized
System of Preferences) privileges, a move that
Thai trade groups estimate would cost the country
a million jobs through lost exports. Indonesia
faces a similar US threat.
As the US
flexes its economic muscles, it is prime time that
Southeast Asian governments ask themselves whether
further integration with the US economy on the
proposed terms is truly in their respective
national interests. America's hard trade stand
also presents a golden opportunity for the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to
wade into the fray and through its collective
numbers enhance its member states' negotiating
leverage vis-a-vis the US.
Southeast Asian
policymakers should bear in mind that very soon
the US may not be as attractive a destination for
their products as in the past. Collapsing housing
prices and spiraling consumer and national debt
levels promise to dry up America's once insatiable
appetite for consumer goods. Rather, regional
governments would be wise to expend their trade
energies in forging closer ties with less
demanding, higher-growth-potential China, India
and petrodollar-rich Middle Eastern regimes, and
less on deliberating unequal pacts with the US.
That way, when the likes of Ralph Boyce
come knocking with US corporate demands, it will
be that much easier for Southeast Asian
governments to keep the door shut.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times
Online's Southeast Asia editor.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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