 |
| Image: Flickr User - The White House |
By Joshua Kurlantzick
The president’s visit to Malaysia and the Philippines offered several lessons about U.S. relations with Southeast Asia.
Although President Barack Obama’s Asia trip earlier this month was overshadowed by the international response to the Paris attacks and debates in the United States about refugee policy, the president’s visit to Malaysia and the Philippines did offer several lessons about U.S. relations with Southeast Asia. The Obama visits to Southeast Asia, part of a longer trip that included the G-20 summit in Turkey, were intended to demonstrate the administration’s commitment to the pivot in Southeast Asia. Part of that commitment has included ensuring that high-level U.S. officials, including the president, regularly attend Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summits. Previous U.S. administrations had been criticized in Southeast Asia for not sending top officials to ASEAN meetings.
Although the president did make it to the ASEAN meeting in Kuala Lumpur, the fact that many of his press briefings during the trip focused, naturally, on counterterrorism policy and refugee policy, undermined some of the administration’s efforts to use the trip to highlight the importance of Southeast Asia. There was little Obama could do about this, but even administration officials admitted to Reuters that the timing of the refugee policy debates “could hardly have been worse,” and that the Asia portion of the trip did not happen as the White House had planned.
Read the full story at The Diplomat