Mike Pence’s November Asia Tour

November has long been the banner season for pan-Asian diplomacy. It is around this time that, in recent years, the chair of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) hosts a leaders' summit and the East Asia Summit (EAS). These meetings bring with them an unparalleled opportunity for heads of state and government to hobnob on the sidelines. Aside from the ASEAN meetings, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum usually holds its annual summit in November too, providing yet another opportunity for states with stakes in the regional economic order to have their perspectives and concerns heard.

Every year, this November potpourri of summitry and sideline meetings is what many Asia policy staffers in the United States look forward to. Since the United States’ 2011 decision to join the East Asia Summit under then-President Barack Obama, November became the moment the United States would offer an annual appraisal of its place in Asia and outline its priorities – strategic and economic – for the entire region. In 2013, when Obama had to suspend his scheduled November trip to Asia amid a U.S. government shutdown, he was criticized for his absence at these meetings. At the time, the move was viewed as an unfortunate manifestation of why, despite all the talk of a “pivot” to Asia, the administration would likely fall short. There was good reason to believe that the ultimate currency in American diplomacy – presidential attention – needed to be put in play for the administration's grand plans for Asia to take shape in any real way.

In 2018, the game has changed. Months before the ASEAN, EAS, and APEC summits, the Trump administration made it clear that the president of the United States would not be making the rounds this year. Donald Trump, who is notorious for his dislike of long-distance presidential travel, didn’t have a particularly good experience during his Asia tour in November 2017. The president held summits with allies Japan and South Korea before moving on to China, Vietnam, and finally the Philippines, another ally that happened to be chairing ASEAN in 2017 and hosting the 31st ASEAN summit and the East Asia Summit as a result. After having spent nine days in the region, Trump grew impatient and left before the EAS plenary, leaving his prepared policy address for the region undelivered. He did manage to deliver a significant policy address on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Vietnam around the then-new theme of a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” but his performance in Asia suggested disinterest and disengagement more than anything.

The Trump administration sought to deal with this problem in a straightforward way in 2018: Trump wouldn’t go to Asia at all. Instead, Mike Pence, the former governor of Indiana and now vice president to the “America First” president, would represent U.S. interests at these summits. As a matter of symbolism, Pence’s attendance in lieu of Trump belied a lack of sustained U.S. interest in the regional architecture in Asia, even as the trade war with China continued to intensify with Trump’s blessing. But in the foreign policy bureaucracy in the United States, there was also a sense of relief. Pence, though Trump’s deputy, would serve as a reliable messenger of the Asia policy that was taking shape within the various agencies of the Trump administration. This strategy was revealed to the world in the 2017 National Security Strategy and the 2018 National Defense Strategy documents, both of which identified China as a great power competitor to the United States.

Before he arrived in Asia, Pence provided a preview of the tone he would adopt. In early October, at the right-leaning Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., Pence delivered one of the more significant senior U.S. official addresses on China in a while. He outlined a long list of U.S. grievances with Chinese behavior, covering the gamut from intellectual property theft to the South China Sea to Taiwan to cyber intrusions and Uyghur human rights in Xinjiang. While Pence didn’t conclude his speech by articulating a strategy, his outlining of grievances aired openly the administration’s perspective on the U.S. relationship with China: apprehensive cooperation was now open competition. If there was a strategy embedded in the vice president’s speech, it was containment.

Given this context, Pence’s performance at the EAS and APEC this year was predictable. The message he sought to bring to the region was one that the administration has been working on for more than a year now. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has come under stress over the past year. Changes in democratically elected leaders in Pakistan, Malaysia, the Maldives, and elsewhere have led countries to re-evaluate the consequences of China-backed projects. Pence, seizing on this momentum, pointed out at the EAS that “empire and aggression” – code for China's debt trap diplomacy – had no place in Asia. “We don’t drown our partners in a sea of debt. We don’t coerce or compromise your independence. We do not offer a constricting belt or a one-way road,” Pence said later at the APEC summit. “Let me say to all the nations across this wider region, and the world: Do not accept foreign debt that could compromise your sovereignty.”

On trade, Pence insisted that the United States would not budge in the ongoing trade war. (He was speaking just days after U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer had both indicated that plans to move forward with a tariff expansion on $200 billion in Chinese exports in early 2019 were still on.) “The United States, though, will not change course until China changes its ways,” Pence said. The U.S. vice president stuck to the administration’s line on trade, offering regional states – many of whom abhor Washington's protectionist turn – little hope of a reversal ahead of a planned Trump-Xi meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit.

But the real twist to Pence’s Asia trip came at the conclusion of the APEC summit, when the gathered parties couldn’t agree to language in a joint communique. More precisely, it was China versus the rest of APEC. The irksome sentence? “We agreed to fight protectionism including all unfair trade practices.” According to reports citing senior U.S. administration officials, that sentence, while acceptable to the United States and 19 other APEC member states, was not acceptable to China – a telling sign of Beijing’s anxieties about being targeted for its own trade practices.

Amid the BRI’s recent doldrums and the trade war, Chinese President Xi Jinping has found himself more insecure than appearances might suggest. Since his appearance at the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2017, Xi has tried to position China as the guardian of liberalized trading regimes – all this despite Beijing’s well-documented protectionist policies. In 2018, including at the China-hosted Boao Forum for Asia, and now at APEC, Xi sought to make clear that Beijing’s international economic policies were not being motivated by ulterior geopolitical interests. If the Trump administration’s more direct line against the Belt and Road has had any effect, it has been to push Xi toward a direct reckoning – at least rhetorically – with perceived criticisms of the BRI.

The APEC 2018 impasse presents a tremendous opportunity for the Trump administration if it seeks to counter China. For once since the January 2017 inauguration of Trump, it was China that very publicly set itself apart from the region’s major economies as an outlier. The United States might have abandoned its older commitment to liberalized trade, but regional concerns about China present an opening to forge unity. While Pence sought to emphasize to regional states the advantages of seeking financing from the United States during his APEC address, that is precisely the wrong competitive approach. Washington is doomed to fail if it attempts to go dollar-for-dollar with Beijing in meeting regional financing requirements as a way to sustain relevance and influence in Asia. Instead, the United States can work to set higher standards – on labor, the environment, and human rights.

This prescription, however, requires an honest reckoning with the fact that the Trump administration – even as it seeks to compete with China – is hamstrung by its own limitations on these issues. What is necessary today is an exemplary and value-driven U.S. strategic and economic approach to Asia. That would set Washington and Beijing apart and offer a clear alternative to the Chinese practices that clearly have left many regional states wary. Ultimately, Pence’s efforts will go without reward and Washington will continue to navigate the current moment astrategically, pushing back against China without a plan to win over the rest of Asia.