PRESIDENT BUSH'S November 2006 visit to Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum was of enormous interest to Southeast Asians. It was a rare but excellent opportunity to discuss America's strategic role in the region-one, unfortunately, that was not taken. While there was a full agenda-fighting terrorism and disease, promoting economic freedom and human rights-the president failed to lay out a U.S. vision for regional security. And he seemed to ignore the reality of intensifying Southeast Asian security dilemmas and competition.
China, anticipating an "Asian century", does not underestimate the region's strategic importance-including the shipping lanes within the Malacca Straits and South China Sea. Moreover, it is clear that China's Southeast Asian ambitions exist at the expense of current and future American strategic influence. Behind all of this diplomacy lies a hardened but creative application of realist strategy.
While the United States remains ascendant in the region, it lacks the capacity to imagine strategic disaster. Americans think they hold nearly all the aces, because U.S. influence, maintained through a network of security partners, appears impregnable. As such, the American military presence is conspicuous, robust and generally welcome.
But America is becoming a careless and tired superpower. To most observers in Southeast Asia, the Chinese are out-thinking, out-enthusing and out-flanking America's more sedate and settled diplomatic efforts. While the United States remains the backbone of the region's security structure, China's flurry of diplomatic activity is gradually wearing down traditional Southeast Asian resistance to, and reasoning against, a rising China. Regional politics and the strategic balance are complicated, and the United States cannot simply revamp Asian alliances to face "unnamed over-the-horizon threats" (i.e., China).
