"So I don't think there is any doubt, if there were when this administration began, that the United States is back in Asia. But I want to underscore that we are back to stay."Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, January 12, 2010.
Hillary Clinton's proclamation that the US is "back in Asia" begs the question of whether the US could be said ever to have really left.
Since its comprehensive defeat of Japan in the 20th century's second great war, the US has maintained a substantial, unbroken strategic presence in Asia, fought in two other big conflicts (Korea and Vietnam) and is still engaged in a shadowy, "long war" against terrorist groups in the Muslim heartland of southeast Asia. For many Asians, the US is the principal guarantor of regional stability. Like it or not, America remains Asia's indispensable power.
Clinton and former secretary of defence Robert Gates aver that being back in Asia means a robust reiteration of US strategic interests in the region: specifically, the right of the US Seventh Fleet to untrammelled passage through the South China Sea and the western Pacific more broadly; a multilateral resolution of the region's maritime disputes rather than the bilateral solutions preferred by China; and a repositioning of its military forces to better advance US strategic interests.
Gates even asserted that the US is a residential power in Asia, famously betting an interlocutor $100 at the Shangri-La Dialogue in June this year that five years from now, US influence in the region "will be as strong, if not stronger, than it is today".
In the face of China's rising might, most southeast Asian nations have enthusiastically welcomed a stronger US presence in the region as a classic hedging strategy against the possibility that China's rise may not be peaceful or benign, which has made for some strange bedfellows. It may well be that the Stars and Stripes could soon flutter once again from the pennants of US naval ships at anchor in their former southeast Asian bases.
Thirty-six years after the US beat a hasty and humiliating retreat from Vietnam, both countries signed their first formal defence agreement in Hanoi on August 1 following a rapid warming of defence and political ties that has seen joint maritime exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin and the possibility that the former US naval base at Cam Ranh Bay may be opened to ships from the Seventh Fleet. The Philippines is also pressing the US to strengthen defence ties, while Indonesia and Singapore have quietly indicated that they would welcome an enhanced US naval presence in the region that will probably lead to the stationing of new littoral combat ships in Singapore.
The more congenial political environment in southeast Asia comes at an opportune time for Washington, which wants to beef up its capabilities in southeast Asia as part of a broader global force posture review.
