Ahead of President Biden’s upcoming May 24 trip to South Korea and Japan, the two-day Special ASEAN Leaders Summit began today in Washington, with the White House hosting eight of ASEAN’s ten member nations. (The Philippines couldn’t attend, due to its just-concluded presidential elections; Myanmar [Burma] was not invited.) According to the briefing given by a Senior Administration Official May 10, the schedule is jam-packed, with meetings at the Congress today with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Congressional leaders, with business leaders and CEOs to discuss strengthening economic cooperation, culminating with an “intimate” dinner with President Joe Biden tonight. Tomorrow will be followed by another flurry of meetings with various administration officials—Commerce Secretary Raimondo, U.S. Trade Representative Tai—followed by another group meeting with Biden, who says he wants to hear about the leaders’ “aspirations"—but he will have no bilateral meetings at all with the guests.
Amidst all the hoopla, there is a lurking suspicion that the ulterior motive here is to rope at least some of the ASEAN nations into the U.S. part of a Global NATO deployment into the Indo-Pacific aimed at China—telling them they should “choose sides.” As the administration briefer put it, hosting the ASEAN summit is intended to show that “our engagement in the region is broad-based and sustained,” because “there is a deep recognition that fundamental long-term challenges are playing out in the Indo-Pacific.” The secretive soon-to-be-published Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) is expected to lay out the framework for a geopolitical security alliance disguised as expanded U.S. economic engagement.
