Why China and the US cannot afford to ignore Asean

The US public rarely gives Indonesia, the most populous country in Southeast Asia, more than passing thought, and even then might be thinking about nothing more than a vacation in Bali. Yet, the world’s fourth most populous nation, home to more Muslims than any other country, more than in the entire Arab world, is one huge growing deal.

Trust me: my suntan-lotion caricature is only a slight libel on America’s grasp of global reality. Save rare exceptions – late diplomat Richard Holbrooke and former US secretary of state Colin Powell come to mind – even foreign-policy potentates tend to psychologically lock their gaze across the Atlantic, in the fashion of France’s famously ­narrow-minded Maginot Line. Even our vaunted pivot to Asia turned into little more than a China pit-stop.

Big power snubs and missteps in Southeast Asian diplomacy are ­recounted with professional polish – and a splash of relish – by Kishore Mahbubani in The Asean Miracle (his latest, written with diplomat/writer Jeffrey Sng). The book lays out almost everything important about the current state of Southeast Asia, especially a well-documented portrait of major-power geopolitical myopia, in China but especially in the US, even in the supposedly well-informed academic community: “Many American social scientists on Southeast Asia who seem to rely primarily on New York Times press clippings for raw information on the region,” they write, “do not really know well the societies of Southeast Asia.”