Double Standards
What the Whitehouse says, and what the Whitehouse does, are clearly two very different things
UPDATE: The President of the United States, Joseph Biden, and his Vice-president, Kamala Harris, are set for a globe trotting diplomatic tour, with stops in Sharm el-Sheikh, Phnom Penh, Jakarta and Bangkok, on the heels of what is expected to be a major loss during the US mid-term elections on the 8th of October. The first stop is for COP 27 to discuss climate change while the US is pumping expensive and environmentally unfriendly oil and gas and causing major economies to return to coal and delay their COP 26 commitments. The ASEAN meeting is all about centrality, but it is US centrality in ASEAN, not ASEAN centrality, that matters to the Whitehouse. The US is heading towards recession and dragging the Global South further south. Bolsanaro lost the Brazilian presidential elections and Lula will be sure to enliven proceedings at the G20 along with Vladimir Putin. It is the BRICS countries, possibly joined by Saudi Arabia, that are set to dominate the G20 proceedings and push for de-dollarisation. Meanwhile, pressure is mounting for the US to reverse course and attempt to sustain the dollar, being sold by others to prop-up their inflationary wrecked currencies, by purchasing treasuries. Yes, that will be inflationary and emerging economies suffer most, but nothing can stop the industrial output decline of US allies along with their currencies - both the UK and Japan are emerging economies now! And, the EU, led by Germany and France, is thinking twice about a cold NATO winter. It is the developing world, OPEC+ and the BRICS that are the drivers of the real world economy and one week in Africa and Asia will make that very clear to the Biden administration.
Once again the Long Mekong Daily was not daily, but the upcoming round of meetings in Asia has given your faithful editor a load of work he would not normally have. The Long Mekong Daily will be daily again very soon.
Polls Predict Democrats are the Big Losers
Latest polls on the 2022 U.S. midterm election prospects of Democrats versus Republicans as of October 2022. The latest polling for the 2022 United States midterm election generic congressional vote between the Democratic and Republican parties shows a lead for the Republicans, who are now leading Democrats by 2.3 percentage points. Throughout the summer, the Democratic Party had made some inroads with voters, at one point out-polling the Republican Party by multiple percentage points. In recent weeks, Democrats have seen their lead slip away. Statista
US Policy is Accelerating Global Climate Change
On November 11th, World leaders including Jo Biden will attend the 27th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. At COP27, he will be trying hard to lead, but the US is clearly a negative force in the global renewable energy enablers list.
“Four years of U.S. absence from the global climate community — including global climate negotiations and international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — have left a big gap in international leadership and credibility.” Brookings Institute
2021 has the potential to be a year of rapid advancement on climate change. However the US is now a follower. China is the world’s largest renewables enabler and de-facto leader on climate change. The EU, Japan, and South Korea have all announced new and ambitious near- and long-term climate targets, and every member of the Paris Agreement is obliged to update their pledges prior to the November Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting. Non-government actors and sub-national governments around the world are also committing to ambitious long-term goals. Most of these goals focus on reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. As the international community gears up for the COP event, political attention to climate is the highest it has been since the runup to the Paris COP in 2015. Expectations are high for commitments that honor the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Brookings Institute
The US President will be in Phnom Penh, Cambodia from November 12-13 to participate in the annual U.S.-ASEAN Summit and the East Asia Summit. He will reaffirm US centrality in ASEAN, not ASEAN centrality, and attempt to further the Democrats frantic efforts to counter China. While Biden will attempt to underscore the importance of U.S.-ASEAN cooperation in ensuring security and prosperity in the region, and the wellbeing of our combined one billion people, US domestic policies, which are exporting inflation and damaging the economies of the region will guarantee his message falls on deaf ears.
IMF Launches Regional Economic Outlook Report for Asia and Pacific: Sailing into Headwinds
Despite being a relative bright spot in an increasingly dimming global economy, Asia’s growth is expected to slow amid headwinds from global financial tightening, the war in Ukraine, and the sharp and uncharacteristic slowdown in the Chinese economy.
Asia’s policymakers face worsening trade-offs but should remain steadfast on monetary tightening to tame rising inflation, fiscal consolidation to stabilize debt, and pre-emptively address emerging stability risks through the full use of its policy toolkit.
Given its strong trade and supply-chain links, Asia has a lot to lose in the event of sharp fragmentation scenarios where the world divides into separate trading blocs.
The US President will be in Bali, Indonesia from November 13th-16th for the G20 Leaders’ Summit. In Bali, President Widodo’s leadership of the G20, invitation to Vladimir Putin, the re-emergence of Brazilian President Lula and Saudi efforts to join BRICS will highlight US vulnerabilities at the world’s premier forum for economic cooperation with countries representing more than 80% of the world’s GDP. The G20 partners will seek to address key challenges such as climate change, the global impact of US intransigence over Ukraine, energy and food security, and the increasingly antagonistic priorities of the US, which are damaging global economic recovery.
Regional leaders, including US VP Kamala Harris, will travel to Bangkok, Thailand to attend the November 18-19 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders Meeting. Her participation demonstrates the contradictions between economic cooperation in Asia and the Pacific and the US security concept of the Indo-Pacific. Harris will engage with Thai leaders and civil society representatives to reaffirm and strengthen the U.S.-Thai Alliance and to discuss issues including US support for three military coups in ten years. In the Philippines Harris will meet with government leaders and civil society representatives and try to explain how the US backed the son of Ferdinand Marcos for the presidency and why the PH should provide military bases to US armed forces. Her visit with re-affirm the early 20th century US colonisation of the Philippines, promote continuing cultural colonisation and the anti-China sentiments of the Whitehouse and US Congress.
The United States is planning to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to an air base in northern Australia, a source familiar with the matter said on Monday, amid heightened tensions with China. Dedicated facilities for the bombers will be set up at the Royal Australian Air Force's remote Tindal base, about 300 km (190 miles) south of Darwin, the capital of Australia's Northern Territory, said the source, who declined to be identified because they are not authorised to speak publicly on the issue. Reuters
Doubts have surfaced over the future of a much-vaunted plan for Australia to buy a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines from the United States and the United Kingdom, a year after the deal was announced. The multibillion-dollar deal reached in September last year was heralded as a key component of the new strategic partnership of Australia, the UK and the US, known as AUKUS. But amid some voices saying the deal would break nuclear nonproliferation rules, it is also not clear in Australia whether the nation has the industrial capacity, or the technical expertise, to build the new submarines, and whether Australia can afford to pay for them. China Daily
ASEAN FOREIGN MINISTERS’ STATEMENT ON DISARMAMENT AND NON-PROLIFERATION
ASEAN Member States welcome the ‘Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races’ on 3 January 2022 in which the five Nuclear-Weapon States (NWS) emphasized the importance of preserving and complying with bilateral and multilateral non-proliferation, disarmament, and arms control agreements and commitments.
We welcome the intention expressed by the five NWS in the above-mentioned statement to avoid military confrontations, to strengthen stability and predictability, and to increase mutual understanding and confidence, to ensure that the world remains peaceful, stable and secure. We, however, remain concerned over the existential threat facing humanity posed by the existence and modernisation of nuclear weapons. We firmly believe that the total elimination of nuclear weapons is the only way to guarantee against their use and threat of use.
We call on the NWS to fulfill their obligations in advancing nuclear disarmament in accordance with the Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and to recognise the need to completely eliminate nuclear weapons, which remains the only way to guarantee that nuclear weapons are never used again under any circumstances.
We reiterate our commitment to preserve the Southeast Asian region as a Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone and free of all other weapons of mass destruction, as enshrined in the Treaty on the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ Treaty) and the ASEAN Charter, and to strengthen the nuclear non-proliferation regime in achieving general and complete nuclear disarmament, as stipulated in Article VI of the Treaty on the NPT.
We reaffirm our commitment to continuously engage the NWS and intensify the ongoing efforts of all parties to resolve all outstanding issues in accordance with the objectives and principles of the SEANWFZ Treaty.
US Put All Its Chips on the Table
As if the stakes in the ongoing US–China geopolitical competition weren’t high enough already, on 7 October the United States banned the transfer of key microchip technologies to Chinese entities. With the chip ban the United States has signalled — despite the Biden administration’s denials — that it is committed to a strategy of containment not only in military, but now also in economic terms. This begins with thwarting China’s ambitions to dominate the development and production of high-end computing chips that will be central to strategically important industries like AI.
The chip ban may well achieve its intended effects in the short run: China’s chip manufacturing industry is still very dependent on US-developed hardware and software, and the local chip industry is in crisis as firms are cut off from key materials and personnel. The longer-term effects of the policy are much less certain. China will continue to specialise where it can. Cutting China off from US technology gives Beijing extra incentive to keep throwing money at its own chip R&D, with a view to building an isolated tech supply chain that is even more geared towards state — and especially military — goals. What’s certain is that the chip ban will be disruptive far beyond the semiconductor industry, as global tech supply chains come to be driven less by the economics of comparative advantage than by the geopolitics of the world’s two biggest economies.
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has described these strategies as surrounding a small yard with a high fence. Extraterritorial unilateral sanctions that hurt American tech firms, allies and partner economies are locking others into a larger American yard that may not look so attractive. In tech just as in other industries, it’s pointless to try and build supply chains delinked from China — most of the region’s critical production chains geared for manufactured exports destined for outside the region run through China, driven by the enduring competitive advantage China has as a manufacturing base, despite rising costs and the recent COVID-zero policy.
Indeed, the Asia Pacific economy is not bound by a distinction between the United States and China — it’s an interdependent system in which China is an integral part.Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong made this point during a recent visit to Australia where he remarked that, notwithstanding the principle that certain economic exchange is subject to national security concerns, the chip ban could lead to ‘less economic cooperation, less interdependency, less trust, and possibly, ultimately a less stable world’.
At the very least, decoupling threatens to disturb a pan-regional system of trade and investment that is absolutely crucial to the prosperity not only of established, incumbent players — among them US allies like South Korea and Japan — but the development of relative newcomers to international tech production networks like Indonesia and Vietnam, important partners of the United States who would rather not be forced to choose between participation in rival US- and China-centric tech production chains that decoupling would inevitably create.
The chip ban is of a piece with an emergent US Indo-Pacific strategy that seeks to write China out of American attempts to shape multilateral rules and institutions across the region. That has obvious impacts on the interests of US allies across Asia, but more importantly, as Paul Heer warns in this week’s lead article, the impulse to premise US engagement and institution-building in the region on the goal of excluding China undermines US influence over the long run.
In US policy rhetoric, China is increasingly ‘framed in terms of the central threat it poses to openness, security and prosperity in the region. There appears to be little consideration of the possibility that Beijing might share some of its neighbours’ goals or other elements of Washington’s regional agenda.’ This inhibits cooperation between the two great powers on myriad issues in which the rest of the region has a stake — from climate change and energy to debt relief and rehabilitating the WTO.
Heer calls for a small-r realism about China that would open the door for such re-engagement beyond zero-sum geopolitical rivalry. ‘There is no doubt that cooperation would be complicated, given the inevitable rivalry and strategic mistrust between Beijing and Washington. But the alternative of a region divided between hostile camps would almost certainly be worse’.
Not only would such a divided region be a poorer one — it would probably be bad for the US economy. Opting out of economic interconnectedness in the name of sovereignty isn’t cost-free: in 2016 a majority of British voters decided that the bargain between prosperity and national autonomy that sustained the UK’s participation in the European Union was no longer worth it. As former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has pointed out, at Brexit the UK economy was roughly 90 per cent the size of Germany’s; it’s now 70 per cent.
Just like Britain, American economic prosperity and political influence will be most enduringly embedded in functional multilateral institutions and an integrated global economy in which small and middle powers friendly to the United States, especially in Asia, can freely pursue prosperity through economic exchange with both China and the West. Such a system is also one in which the US economy — energised by free markets and free thought and backed up by immigration from all around the world — is best-placed to compete with a China that under Xi Jinping has subordinated economic liberalisation to the party-state’s political interests. East Asia Forum