Obama to push trade agenda at summit with Southeast Asia

“It’s a commercial Olympics, as it were”.

Mr Lee will visit the city of San Francisco from Feb 10 to 15 and Sunnylands, California, to attend the Special ASEAN-US Leaders Summit from Feb 15 to 16. Geographically astride the world’s busiest and most strategic shipping lanes, the region is the fulcrum of the administration’s rebalancing toward Asia.

While the Obama administration has been consistent in its commitment to Southeast Asia and ASEAN throughout its two terms in office, this U.S.-ASEAN summit in Sunnylands is historic as it marks the first time that Washington will host Southeast Asian leaders for a standalone summit in the United States.

The meeting comes amid concern in Washington that a rising China will eventually compel the U.S.to cede ground. “It is an open discussion among the leaders”.

Economic and political issues, including the maritime dispute in the South China Sea, are expected to be discussed during the meeting, Dela Vega said.

Alexander Feldman, president and CEO of the Washington-based US-ASEAN Business Council representing American businesses in Southeast Asia, said the addition of Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines would be a substantial boost to the Trans Pacific Partnership. China has been ASEAN’s largest trading partner since 2009, with two-way trade surpassing $366 billion in 2014, according to ASEAN trade data. “Everything that is new and cool that the United States is developing is going to the Asia Pacific”. “Beijing can not deal with Southeast Asia without factoring in the American response”. “Asean is as important as China”, he told the Malaysian media ahead of Najib’s arrival. The U.S., meanwhile, has an interest in maintaining freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, a crucial global trade route.

While the Philippines and Vietnam have protested, other Asean states have been more willing to accommodate China and its economic muscle.

“The risk is that the Sunnylands summit will empower and embolden Asean leaders who have been responsible for jailing journalists, cracking down on peaceful protesters, and dismantling democratic institutions after coups”, said John Sifton, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

On economic issues, she said, more likely to be discussed is how the United States could support the ASEAN integration process. They should rise together with China to ensure the balance of power in the region. The region’s trade with China has been robust.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said the president will reiterate that territorial disputes over the area, where China and several Southeast Asian states have conflicting and overlapping claims, must be handled through negotiations and consistent with worldwide norms. This is through the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which is seen as a rival to a U.S.-dominated system embodied by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. That said, China’s dependability as a trading partner is waning.

Likewise, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Laos have all become pivotal battlegrounds where economic pressure, political meddling, and terrorism have been employed by the West to coerce politicians to abandon strengthening ties with Beijing, and in hopes of hamstringing a growing number of pan-Asian infrastructure projects initiated by China ranging from roads and rail, to dams, ports, and pipelines. The ability of ASEAN’s five founding members – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand – to withstand the communist onslaught during the Cold War owed not a little to American determination to prevent dominoes falling to communism.