The South China Sea (32 page)

We can't know to what extent the Hun dynasty feels beholden to the United States for this largess, but we do know that the Chinese authorities are prepared to spend plenty of cash trying to sway the Huns in their direction. Beijing has a key advantage: a dearth of domestic human rights activists
prepared to criticise its military aid policies. A year after the truck delivery in 2010, China loaned Cambodia $195 million to buy 12 new Chinese-built Zhi-9 military helicopters. In May 2012 the two countries’ defence ministers agreed a further $17 million training arrangement, augmented in January 2013 with commitments to provide yet more training and equipment.
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The Chinese embassy didn't need to investigate whether the beneficiaries were guilty of torturing farmers before committing to the deal.

There has been consternation in Phnom Penh, and also in American policy circles, about the extent to which Cambodia has been ‘bought’ by Beijing. Very large figures have been quoted for the amount of aid now being provided by China – such as the much-trumpeted $1.2 billion that followed Xi Jinping's visit. A more thorough look at that figure, however, shows a less impressive reality. The Chinese side gave no information at all and the Cambodians couldn't provide a detailed breakdown of the figures – just a list of 14 agreements mainly covering loans to build roads and other infrastructure. Shortly afterwards, the Cambodian ambassador to China, Khek Caimealy Sysoda, told American diplomats in Beijing that the figure was 60 per cent loans and 40 per cent grants and included hydro-electric projects.
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There was no way that the money could be disbursed in a single year. In short, the $1.2 billion included agreements made earlier and delayed so they could coincide with Xi's visit, commercial investments which were not aid and commitments that would take many years to fulfil.
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The headline announcement was just the kind of political spin designed to make American observers sit up and get nervous.

In 1964 the then Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk advised a
National Geographic
reporter, Thomas S. Abercrombie: ‘When two elephants are fighting, the ant should step aside’.
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Ten years later Sihanouk's country was crushed in the conflict between American capitalism and the Russian and Chinese variants of Communism. Nowadays, the Cambodian government, and particularly the military, regard playing the ‘elephants’ off against each other as good politics and good business. Their priority is to stay in power and continue to enrich themselves and fellow members of what local wits have dubbed the ‘Khmer Riche’. Having two wealthy rivals prepared to subsidise their political projects and personal lifestyles can only be a good thing. The trick is to keep both of them in a permanent
state of anxiety about whether they are losing out to the other. Hun Sen is a master of the diplomatic equivalent of ‘treat ‘em mean to keep ‘em keen’.

But Cambodia's foreign dealings are not simply about playing off the two rivals. The legacy of the country's bitter history is uneasy, sometimes hostile, relations with its two most significant neighbours: Thailand and Vietnam. Cambodia has active border disputes with both countries and nationalist feelings have been quick to surface during, for example, clashes with Thailand about which country owns the land around the highly symbolic Preah Vihear temple. Vietnam may have overthrown the Chinese-backed
génocidaires
of the Khmer Rouge in 1979 and installed Hun Sen in power but popular animosity towards the Vietnamese is widespread and fervent. In the Cambodian narrative of ‘national humiliation’ the ‘Yuon’ wrongfully seized Khmer lands in the Mekong Delta and are responsible for two centuries of atrocities and injustices since. There is little sense of regional solidarity and most Cambodians would relish a chance to get back at the foreigners who stole ‘their’ territory.

The battle for the loyalties of little Cambodia exemplifies the bigger struggle for influence across Southeast Asia. Like the monsoon winds, pressure and persuasion blow alternately from different points of the compass. Like the monsoon, these global, regional and local currents can bring good and ill: aid, trade and investment but also corruption and militarisation. Delegations sweep in from east and west and local elites seek to harness the forces they represent for their country's (or simply their own) benefit. American anxiety about China's rise and Chinese anxiety about American encirclement combine with long-standing local grievances and regional power struggles to create crises and opportunities.

The Southeast Asian ‘ants’ still fear the consequences of a rumble in the jungle. None of them wishes to make a choice between the US and China. The US is the region's largest investor and China is its main trading partner. Southeast Asian governments know that their rapid economic growth is based upon the stability created by American military dominance and most have some form of defence arrangement with the US. They are also well aware that China is close, and getting closer. The rivalry between the two has created new opportunities for the ants. In the half-century since Sihanouk used his animal metaphor they have learnt how to make the most of the elephants, bringing them on side when it's in their
interests, rebuffing their demands if they become too assertive. At the same time they can't avoid being caught up in big-power battles. The disputes in the South China Sea have caused local, regional and global battles to become interlinked in a way not seen in the region since the end of the Indochina wars in 1975.

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‘Southeast Asia’ is a relatively new part of the world: it only broke away from the ‘Far East’ in the mid-twentieth century with the encouragement of German academics and Japanese strategists. But while anthropologists such as Robert Heine-Geldern discussed the culture of ‘Sudostasien’ and Japanese generals plotted to invade it, the rest of the world – including ‘Southeast Asia’ itself – remained largely oblivious to its existence. The Japanese authorities coined the term ‘Nanyo’ to describe a region stretching from Taiwan to Papua New Guinea within their ‘Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’. It wasn't until 16 November 1943, however, when the wartime Allies created ‘South East Asia Command’ to fight the Japanese, that the term properly entered the English language.
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But South East Asia Command (SEAC) was responsible for the war only in India, Burma, the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. The Philippines, Borneo, the rest of the Dutch East Indies and Papua New Guinea remained in South West Pacific Command and the position of French Indochina was left vague until the Allies’ conference in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam in July 1945. At that meeting ‘South East Asia’ took on its modern shape: Borneo and Java were transferred to SEAC and, in an eerie precursor of later events, Indochina was partitioned between SEAC in the south and the China Command in the north. South East Asia Command was abolished in November 1946 but the term, or rather the vision of a coherent region called ‘South East Asia’, stuck around – and became a weapon in another kind of war.

Once again it was a military vision – and one imposed from outside. At its foundation in Manila in September 1954, only two of the members of the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) were actually from the region: Thailand and the Philippines. The others – the US, the UK, Australia, France, Pakistan and New Zealand – had other reasons to join. Britain still had colonies in what are now Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore,
and France, although it had withdrawn from northern Vietnam, still had a presence in southern Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The US wanted to create an anti-Communist alliance but SEATO lacked credibility. It slowly withered until 1977 when it was finally put out of its misery following the Communist victories in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Its influence lingers in the security treaties between the United States and Thailand and the Philippines.

By 1958 fear of domestic Communist subversion and of Chinese regional domination were motivating more home-grown initiatives, including an abortive ‘South-East Asia Friendship and Economic Treaty’ (SEAFET) promoted by Malaya. The wreckage of that effort led, in July 1961, to the foundation of the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA), which combined the region's three most dynamic economies: Malaya, Thailand and the Philippines. ASA was publicly ‘non-political’ but, in the context of the Cold War, it clearly had an anti-Communist purpose.

The first challenge facing the members of ASA was to convince sceptics that a regional organisation had any role at all. Indonesia's nationalist government regarded it as a front for American policy: its Foreign Minister Subandrio told visitors the idea was ‘without substance’ and ‘useless’.
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It was also hard to see a coherent regional identity emerging when individual countries were unable to agree where their shared borders lay. Four months after ASA's foundation, a new Filipino president, Diosdado Macapagal, renewed his country's claim to North Borneo – which was due to become the province of Sabah in newly independent Malaysia. In the wake of the claim ASA withered too.

Indonesia was simultaneously asserting its own claim to Sabah, along with the rest of northern Borneo. In 1963 the Sukarno government initiated
konfrontasi
to try to force Malaysia to give up the territory. It took a military coup in Indonesia to reanimate the idea of Southeast Asia. General Suharto deposed Sukarno in March 1966 and a few months later, on 1 June 1966, Indonesia agreed to end
konfrontasi
. It was the turning point. Two days later Malaysia and the Philippines established full diplomatic relations. With the ‘American War’ now raging in Vietnam and Chinese-sponsored Communist movements causing trouble at home, Southeast Asian elites came to the view that closer relations between countries would enhance their ability to rule within them. By banding together they could
promote trade and economic growth to satisfy the needs of growing populations and also keep others out of their domestic affairs and foreign policies. The result was the foundation, in Bangkok on 8 August 1967, of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), bringing together the three members of ASA with Indonesia and Singapore. Southeast Asia finally had a regional organisation worthy of the term.

ASEAN had a slow beginning. It was almost killed within a year when the Philippines once again renewed its claim on Sabah and the mutual mistrust lingered. It took the Communist victories in Indochina in 1975 to spur ASEAN into action. Its leaders (anti-Communist strongmen like Suharto, Ferdinand Marcos and Lee Kuan Yew) held their first summit in Bali in February 1976 and signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation – in which they pledged to ‘refrain from the threat or use of force and … settle such disputes among themselves through friendly negotiations’. They pioneered the ‘ASEAN Way’: pledging to work by ‘consensus’ and turning a blind eye to unpleasant events in each other's countries. Two decades of ‘Asian Tiger’ growth followed, but Southeast Asian crony capitalism crashed in the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Since then, the desire to compete in the globalised economy – and also to keep the big powers at arm's length – has obliged the region's ruling elites to form closer ties. ASEAN has doubled in size (from five to ten members) and tripled in aspiration. ASEAN is becoming a ‘community’ modelled on the European Union (EU) and based on three pillars: political-security, economic, and social-cultural. The region has travelled a long way from the days when neighbours threatened to invade each other.

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In early 2008, Derek J. Mitchell was having trouble raising money. His employer, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), is one of Washington's best-funded think- tanks but its usual donors weren't interested in Southeast Asia. Instead Mitchell had to turn to the embassy of Thailand for his programme's core funding. In September 2008, Mitchell organised a conference on ‘The United States and Southeast Asia’ with several contributors from Thailand and a few from elsewhere. All said similar things: Southeast Asia felt ignored by Washington. Professor K.S. Nathan
of the National University of Malaysia complained that the ten ASEAN countries combined received just a tenth of the attention given to Japan. The director of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam called for the United States to be a greater contributor to regional security and the Singaporean ambassador said the Western financial crisis had reinforced the impression that the United States was ‘a distracted power’. Panitan Wattanayagorn, an advisor to the Thai Ministry of Defence, talked of a prevalent sense in the region that ‘China is too near and the United States is too far’.

The delegates complained that the Bush administration just wasn't visible enough in Asia. ‘There was talk of China eating our lunch,’ Mitchell recalls. President Bush had skipped the 2007 ASEAN–US summit and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, had missed two of her three ASEAN Regional Forum meetings. This wasn't an entirely fair picture. While most of the Bush administration were busy with the ‘War on Terror’, some had already begun looking at other priorities. As one former Pentagon policy-maker explains, ‘the work had been done back in 2007–8. The big pivot point was the ASAT test in January 2007.’ The ‘ASAT test’ was an unannounced Chinese missile firing that destroyed a defunct orbiting satellite and startled the American military. The Pentagon began to change tack. In May 2008, Defense Secretary Robert Gates stood up at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore and reminded everyone that the United States was still ‘a resident power in Asia’ and, in a first for a senior American official, mentioned the South China Sea and the importance of freedom of navigation.
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American diplomats were still very active in the region and the US military retained hundreds of thousands of military personnel based around the continent, it was just that, with all the attention given to Iraq and Afghanistan, people had stopped noticing.

Mitchell's final work for CSIS was a report on ‘US Alliances and Emerging Partnerships in Southeast Asia’ with the pointed subtitle: ‘Out of the Shadows’. It made four main recommendations: the US should reinvigorate its alliances, cultivate relationships with emerging powers, develop relationships with regional multilateral bodies and work closely with leading Southeast Asian countries on economic issues. By the time it was published in mid-2009 Mitchell had joined the new Obama administration as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs. Another think-tanker, Kurt Campbell, had just
moved from the Center for a New American Security to become Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Both had worked in the Pentagon's Asia team during Bill Clinton's administration in the 1990s. They took up their new jobs at a time of great pessimism, in the wake of the worst economic crisis for decades. According to Campbell, ‘Most of our assessments suggested that our Chinese friends generally viewed the United States as being in a deep and irreversible decline and that we would be out of Asia over the course of a few decades.’
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Mitchell borrowed a line from Woody Allen to describe his strategy: ‘90 per cent of life is just showing up’. The United States would become more visible in Asia.