U.S. tired misunderstanding of SE Asia
Michael J. Montesano, Assistant Professor, Southeast Asian Studies Program, The National University of Singapore
For all its glitter and buzz, Monday's White House state dinner in honor of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo could not conceal the tired, misconceived nature of America's approach to Southeast Asia. Now, just as for most of the past half-century, Washington views the region's problems merely as local variations on its own global preoccupations. Its distorted understanding has led to a long series of bad choices -- bad both for Southeast Asia and for the United States.
Arroyo enjoyed a hero's welcome in Washington. In noting that hers was the first state visit by an Asian leader during his administration, President George W. Bush toasted her as a woman of strength and courage, "a friend of America, and a friend of freedom". The United States used the occasion of Arroyo's visit to the United States to announce its designation of the Philippines as a "major non-NATO ally". It will now share that status with such neighboring states as South Korea, Japan, and Australia.
Washington also pledged help to the Philippines with a variety of other measures: Military and security assistance, trade preferences, expanded benefits for Filipino veterans of the United States armed forces, and development funds for the island of Mindanao.
And Bush reaffirmed, in terms that left the question of a combat role ambiguous, his determination to send American troops to the southern Philippines, where Manila confronts a long- running separatist rebellion.
Just how did President Arroyo earn the esteem and assistance of the Bush administration? Her successes and failures in national or regional affairs had nothing to do with it. Rather, she shrewdly went along with her country's former colonial master as it played its favorite game: Taking interest in local situations only when official Washington believes that those situations relate to American global priorities.
First, Arroyo complied in the recasting of separatist violence and endemic banditry on Mindanao as the stuff of a key theater in Washington's world-wide war on terror.
Second, though without committing a single soldier to the American invasion of Iraq, she enlisted the Philippines in President Bush's embarrassingly hollow "coalition of the willing".
As Arroyo traveled to the U.S., the Armed Forces of the Philippines began the aerial bombardment of guerrilla elements of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front on Mindanao. As she and her husband sat down with George and Laura Bush for the lavish White House dinner put on in her honor, up to 300,000 of her countrymen had fled their homes to escape the violence of that renewed offensive.
This conflict has long resisted military solution. Manila's recent decision to abandon the route of negotiation in favor of a return to warfare is one of the unrecognized tragedies of Southeast Asian today.
American support for war in the southern Philippines is a sorry mistake. And the Pentagon and White house are naove to discount the risk that American military "trainers" will be sucked into the conflict.
But this is hardly the first time in recent memory that Washington has misread events in the Philippines. American Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has proven fond of referring to the February 1986 "People Power" uprising that toppled Ferdinand Marcos as the first in a series of peaceful transitions to democracy that would sweep the globe.
Wolfowitz served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs -- his last post before becoming America's ambassador to Indonesia -- at the time of that uprising. He thus takes clear pride in what he supposes was his own role in launching the wave of democratizations that he describes.
He makes, however, scant reference to more local aspects of "People Power", such as Washington's long-term support for the Marcos dictatorship. This support included its wanton failure to break with Marcos even after his cynical declaration of martial law in 1972.
Other parts of the region have also suffered for Washington's compulsion for missing real trees for the imaginary forest in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, unfocused global anti-Communism led America to underwrite military domination of Bangkok's politics from the late 1940s to the early 1970s.
Similar fears led arch-Cold Warrior John Foster Dulles to abet the regional rebellions that challenged the Indonesian state in the late 1950s. And this is to say nothing either of America's embrace of Jakarta's New Order regime after 1965 or of its failure to appreciate the appeal of Vietnamese nationalism, in either Communist or non-Communist variant, from the 1950s to the 1970s.
In each of these instances, just as today, Washington showed the same bad habit: Underrating regionally significant, autonomous forces and instead regarding events in an ostensibly passive Southeast Asia as nothing but local manifestations of America's own broad concern of the moment.