By Graham Webster
ASEAN centrality, or stuck in the middle?
When U.S. President Barack Obama hosts leaders from the ten countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on Monday and Tuesday, he will symbolically reinforce the concept of ASEAN centrality—traditionally the idea that the group’s diverse states should economically integrate and gradually develop a collective voice in the world.
But other kinds of centrality will also be apparent as observers and officials confront regional security issues in which two of ASEAN’s strongest suitors, the United States and China, are on opposing sides.
U.S. officials have, with some legitimacy, sought to deemphasize the U.S.–China narrative in U.S. relations with ASEAN. Speaking Thursday at the Center for American Progress, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes described an agenda emphasizing economic growth and innovation and a variety of security challenges, including counterterrorism and disaster response. Rhodes also described the Obama administration’s strategy as using ASEAN as a hub—“a platform to build out a broader series of engagements, and that ultimately is what the East Asian Summit became.”
That East Asian Summit—which now includes the ASEAN 10, plus Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea, and the United States—supports another notion of “ASEAN centrality,” in which regular ASEAN meetings become occasions for even broader summits at the same time. Obama became the first U.S. president to attend the East Asia Summit in 2011, on the same trip during which he announced a greater emphasis on the Asia-Pacific.
Read the full story at The Diplomat