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David Dodwell

Inside Out | Biden’s blurry Indo-Pacific economic vision brings few new ideas to benefit Asia

  • The US president’s visit to Asia holds symbolic importance, but it is unclear what tangible benefits will emerge
  • Details on the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework are in short supply, and the plan seems to offer little that Asia’s current bilateral and multilateral deals do not

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US President Joe Biden (right) speaks during a meeting with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol at the People’s House inside the Ministry of National Defence in Seoul on May 21. Photo: AP
For those not already suffering “pivot fatigue”, US President Joe Biden’s visit to South Korea and Japan must be seen as significant. It is his first visit to Asia since taking office in January last year. His predecessor Donald Trump’s first visit to Asia also started off with Japan and South Korea, but was followed by a visit to China.
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Whether the meetings succeed in generating any substantive messages, or what those messages might be, remains open to question. Just before flying out on Air Force One, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan did his best. He said the president would be bringing “a message of an affirmative vision of what the world can look like if the democracies and open societies of the world stand together to shape the rules of the road to define the security architecture of the region to reinforce strong, powerful historic alliances”. Clear as mud.

Perhaps the single clearest message might be that the Biden administration has the foreign policy bandwidth to temporarily turn away from Nato, the war in Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s existential threat to the Europe.
Beyond that, the message must surely be that the United States remains in a muddle on how to develop relations across the Asia-Pacific. The “pivot to Asia” might be sincerely intended, but it seems constantly to be distracted by pressing matters elsewhere.

These include the “war on terror” following the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers in New York in 2001, the invasion of Iraq and other Middle Eastern conflicts, and the latest Russian assault on Ukraine. The shape of any strategy to build alliances across Asia remains elusive.

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So there is little doubt Biden’s current visit to Asia – which is built on the foundation of his hosting Southeast Asian leaders in Washington a week ago – is of huge symbolic importance. It might even deliver some substance, but at present that is unclear.
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