Page 3 of 3 ASIA
HAND US, China square
off By Shawn W Crispin
million in credits for Indonesian
infrastructure projects and more than $10 billion
more in private-sector investments. The policy
U-turn also notably came at a time the Indonesian
military was coming under new fire from
international rights groups for alleged
human-rights abuses in Papua province - where the
Indonesian government tellingly bans foreigners
from traveling.
Similarly, Washington
repealed about $14 million in military aid to
Thailand in the wake of the
September 19 military coup that abolished the
progressive 1997 constitution and ousted
democratically elected prime minister Thaksin
Shinawatra - who coincidentally was viewed in
Washington as moving its erstwhile strategic ally
in the region closer to China.
Tellingly,
in the wake of the coup the US quietly maintained
aid earmarked for Thai-US anti-terrorism
cooperation, including funds for the Bangkok-based
Central Intelligence Agency-led Counter-Terrorism
Intelligence Center, which apparently played a
role in establishing the secret prison Thailand
hosted for the US to interrogate regional terror
suspects, as first reported in the Washington
Post.
Concerned that the US might lose a
step to China - which significantly remained mum
on the military coup - US Ambassador to Thailand
Skip Boyce in a meeting directly after the coup
reassured the country's new military leaders that
Washington was obliged by law to sanction the
military intervention and that bilateral relations
would stay on track despite the Thai junta's
suspension of civil liberties, according to a
senior Thai official.
Even in the
Philippines, where the US has now stationed troops
to help the Philippine armed forces flush out
Muslim insurgent groups that Washington believes
have links to international terror groups, China
is making distinct economic inroads. In September,
China announced its intention to extend $2 billion
in loans to the Philippines, a generous offer that
dwarfed the $200 million the US-influenced World
Bank and Asian Development Bank tabled. Moreover,
Beijing's backing to a an official Code of Conduct
for the South China Sea helped to ease Philippine
concerns about the two countries' longtime
competing claims to the Spratly Islands.
Shifting strategic calculus China's economic diplomacy is in effect easing
Southeast Asia's historical skittishness about
Beijing's long-term intentions toward the
contiguous region. In turn, that's slowly but
surely starting to erode the United States'
rationale for maintaining and expanding a strong
strategic position in the region, and is in effect
undermining Washington's apparent designs to
fragment the region into competitive pro-US and
pro-China camps. To be sure, certain regional
countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines and
Indonesia remain wary of China's growing strategic
clout and still favor a counterbalancing US
presence.
Yet the US is tellingly having a
tougher time selling new strategic regional
overtures, because of a growing number of
countries' concerns that overtly siding with the
US could irk China, which has long feared US
strategic designs of encircling its porous
southern periphery. In July, landlocked and
impoverished Laos rebuffed a US offer to send
military engineers to help build schools, clinics
and roads. Laotian Defense Minister Major-General
Duangchay Phichit said his country would welcome
US funds, but not US troops on Laotian soil.
More significant, Vietnam, which fought a
border war with China in 1979, has reacted coolly
to recent US overtures to gain access to military
port and airport facilities at Cam Ranh Bay
because of its concerns about how China might
react. And strategic analysts say Indonesia's
recent decision to purchase as much as $3 billion
worth of Russian rather than US armaments was
partially made to allay Beijing's concerns about
US-Indonesian military interoperability during a
potential US-China conflict where the US might
attempt to block the nearby Malacca Strait,
through which about 80% of China's imported oil
currently flows.
All this means that the
US has lost a significant step to China -
economically, politically, and strategically - in
Southeast Asia's increasingly important strategic
theater. All indications are that the region is
moving toward more Chinese and less US influence,
and as US hegemony gradually comes to an end, so
too it seems are Southeast Asia's short-lived
experiments with democracy and financial
liberalism.
Shawn W Crispin is
Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia editor.
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