Biden Seeks to Keep China in Focus by Welcoming ASEAN Leaders

President Joe Biden will host Southeast Asian leaders in Washington this week, seeking to show his administration remains focused on the Indo-Pacific and the long-term challenge of China despite the Ukraine crisis.

A two-day summit with the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) begins with a White House dinner on Thursday before talks at the State Department on Friday.

It will be the first time leaders of ASEAN, created in some of the darkest days of the Cold War, gather as a group at the White House. President Barack Obama was the last US leader to host them, at Sunnylands in California in 2016.

Up to eight ASEAN leaders are expected. Myanmar's leader has been excluded over a coup last year and the Philippines is in transition after an election.

The summit takes place ahead of Biden's May 20-24 visit to South Korea and Japan, which includes a plan to meet fellow leaders of the Quad countries - Australia, India and Japan - who share US concerns about China's ambitions to expand its influence in the region and globally.

Biden's Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell spoke at a think tank on Wednesday of a deep sense in the administration of the need not to be distracted from the Indo-Pacific, and said it would seek to increase US investment and engagement in ASEAN countries.

He said China, Myanmar, Taiwan and Ukraine would be among the issues discussed.

"We believe it's critical for other countries to both publicly and privately underscore that what has taken place in Ukraine must never happen in Asia," he said, referring to China's threats to retake Taiwan by force if necessary.

Campbell acknowledged critiques that US engagement with ASEAN had waned in many important areas.

"We have to send a signal that the United States will be a steady partner, and that our strategic interests push us and point us into playing a larger role over time," he said.

Campbell said on Monday there would be "substantial" discussions with ASEAN on technology, education, infrastructure, and that Washington would soon announce plans to better battle illegal fishing in the Pacific.

Kate Rebholz, acting US ambassador to ASEAN said the summit would bring "an ambitious and forward-looking US-ASEAN vision statement" and new initiatives, including partnerships in public health, climate and economic growth.

Even if the summit is largely symbolic and no dramatic advances are to be expected, analysts and diplomats said the fact it was taking place aimed to show that China remains a leading US long-term foreign policy challenge, regardless of Russia's actions in Ukraine.

They said it would likely elevate the current U.S.-ASEAN "strategic partnership" by adding a word to make it a "comprehensive" strategic partnership, bringing it into line with the description of ASEAN's ties with Australia and China.

"The meeting is the message ... that the US is in fact capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, and it's not distracted," Bilahari Kausikan, a former permanent secretary of Singapore's foreign ministry, told the Stimson Center think tank on Monday.

US 'Falls Flat' on Economics
ASEAN countries also share concerns about China and are broadly keen to boost ties with Washington, but they have been frustrated by a US delay in detailing plans for economic engagement since former President Donald Trump quit a regional trade pact in 2017.

At a virtual summit with ASEAN last October, Biden said Washington would start talks about developing a regional economic framework, but diplomats say this is likely to feature only peripherally this week.

Japan's Washington ambassador said Biden's Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) is likely to be formally launched in Japan, but its details were still under discussion.

Analysts and diplomats say only two of the 10 ASEAN countries - Singapore and the Philippines - are expected to be among the initial group of counties to sign up for the negotiations under IPEF, which does not currently offer the expanded market access Asian countries crave, given Biden's concern for American jobs.

There has also been some frustration that ASEAN leaders will get little personal time with Biden, with no bilateral meetings announced.

An adviser to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, in office since 1985 but making his first White House visit, told Reuters Biden should spend more time with leaders if serious about elevating ties with the region.

The adviser, Kao Kim Hourn, said Cambodia, which has close economic ties to China, would not "choose sides" between Washington and Beijing although US investment in his country was growing. ASEAN, likewise, worked with both under its principle of "inclusiveness," he said.

Analysts say that even though ASEAN countries share US concerns about China, they remain cautious about siding more firmly with Washington, given their predominant economic ties with Beijing and limited US economic incentives.

"The US does a pretty solid job on politics and security, but it falls flat on economics," said Gregory Poling of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"It cannot effectively compete with China If it only brings guns and diplomacy to the table. It has to bring cash to put it bluntly, and we've not been good at doing that."

Russia's point man for arms control cautioned Donald Trump's incoming administration on Friday against resuming nuclear testing, saying Moscow would keep its own options open amid what he said was Washington's "extremely hostile" stance.

The resumption of testing by the world's two biggest nuclear powers would usher in a new and precarious era nearly 80 years since the United States tested the first nuclear bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico in July 1945.

Russia, the United States and China are all undertaking major modernizations of their nuclear arsenals just as the arms control treaties of the Cold War era between the Soviet Union and the United States crumble.

In an explicit signal to Washington, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who oversees arms control, said Trump had taken a radical position on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) during his first term.

"The international situation is extremely difficult at the moment, the American policy in its various aspects is extremely hostile to us today," Ryabkov was quoted as saying in an interview with Russia's Kommersant newspaper.

"So, the options for us to act in the interests of ensuring security and the potential measures and actions we have to do this - and to send politically appropriate signals... does not rule anything out."

During Trump's first 2017-2021 term as president, his administration discussed whether or not to conduct the first US nuclear test since 1992, the Washington Post reported in 2020.

In 2023 President Vladimir Putin formally revoked Russia's ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), bringing his country into line with the United States.

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed by Russia in 1996 and ratified in 2000. The United States signed the treaty in 1996 but has not ratified it.

NUCLEAR TEST?

There are fears among some arms control experts that the United States is moving towards a return to testing as a way to develop new weapons and at the same time send a signal to rivals such as Russia and China.

Russia, with 5,580 warheads, and the United States, with 5,044, are by far the world's biggest nuclear powers, holding about 88% of the world's nuclear weapons, according to the Federation of American Scientists. China has about 500 warheads.

In the five decades between 1945 and the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, over 2,000 nuclear tests were carried out, 1,032 of them by the United States and 715 of them by the Soviet Union, according to the United Nations.

Post-Soviet Russia has not carried out a nuclear test. The Soviet Union last tested in 1990.

Putin has said Russia would consider testing a nuclear weapon if the United States did. Last month Putin lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks, and after Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with US-made ATACMS missiles.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, only a few countries have tested nuclear weapons, according to the Arms Control Association: the United States last tested in 1992, China and France in 1996, India and Pakistan in 1998, and North Korea in 2017.

Biden Seeks to Keep China in Focus by Welcoming ASEAN Leaders