Biden Is Missing Another East Asia Summit. So What

Commentary by Gregory B. Poling

Published October 9, 2024

Laos is hosting a bevy of summits this week capping off the annual calendar of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The most prominent of these will be the ASEAN Summit, the U.S.-ASEAN leaders meeting (alongside summits between ASEAN and its other dialogue partners), and the East Asia Summit. The paramount leaders from the 10 ASEAN member states, along with future member Timor-Leste, will be there. So will the heads of state from most of the eight dialogue partners. But not President Joe Biden, who will be missing for the second year in a row. As disappointing as it may be to colleagues in Southeast Asia, the U.S. government should signal this as the new norm.

Hyperbolic opinion pieces and more measured policy blogs will declare the president's absence a sign of wavering U.S. commitment to the region. But tellingly, most will say nothing of Chinese president Xi Jinping or Russian president Vladimir Putin skipping the meetings, as they do every year. Their absence will not harm perceptions of Chinese or Russian credibility because no one expected them to come. There is a lesson in that, one of very few the next U.S. administration should learn from Beijing or Moscow. The uncomfortable truth is that no U.S. president, regardless of commitment, will attend every U.S.-ASEAN or East Asia Summit during their time in office. Biden managed to attend half of them; former president Donald Trump only attended one and left early; even former president Barack Obama, who put ASEAN at the heart of his "pivot to Asia," missed out because of the realities of presidential schedules and government shutdowns.

This year, the United States will be represented in Laos by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. That is a step down from last year's attendance by Vice President Kamala Harris, but an understandable one given her candidacy for president. In general, the United States should set vice presidential representation as the baseline at the U.S.-ASEAN and East Asia Summits. There are both logistical and substantive reasons for this.

The reality is that the U.S. president is expected to attend more summits, in addition to important bilateral visits, than any other world leader, all while running a rather large country. From NATO and the G7 to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and G20 summits, the president is expected to meet counterparts across Europe, Asia, and Latin America at a bruising pace. Sometimes the realities of space and time come into play. Washington is farther from Southeast Asia than any of ASEAN's other major dialogue partners. There is a reason that Obama, Trump, and Biden all did a better job attending ASEAN and East Asia Summits during years when Southeast Asian countries also happened to be hosting APEC or the G20-it allowed for doubling or tripling up. But next month, APEC will take place in Peru and the G20 in Brazil. This is not a problem for Xi Jinping, who can travel to Latin America for those meetings while Premier Li Qiang handles the ASEAN Summit this month.

And then there are the realities of the job. The U.S. president is elected first and foremost to govern the United States. President Obama's most famous ASEAN no-show was due to a government shutdown in Washington. President Biden was expected to travel to Germany next week for a summit of countries aiding Ukraine and then on to Africa. Both of those trips have been postponed as Florida braces for one of the most powerful hurricanes on record. Even if Biden had planned to attend the ASEAN and East Asia Summits this week, he would undoubtedly have been forced to cancel.

Given these constraints, the U.S. president must prioritize. This begs the question, are the U.S.-ASEAN and East Asia Summits more important to U.S. national interests than others, even within the Indo-Pacific? On substance, certainly not. No one expects that this week's meetings in Laos will grapple with the most important issues facing Southeast Asia. Earlier this month, the Chinese coast guard severely injured a group of Vietnamese fishers, but that will not convince most other Southeast Asian states to do more than recycle canned language about the South China Sea. Nor will they map out a path to save the Mekong River, come up with a creative approach to the civil war in Myanmar, or stake out an ambitious agenda on the digital economy or artificial intelligence. ASEAN is still a vital grouping for regional economic integration and diplomatic discussion (albeit not solutions), but it is hard to argue that it should take priority over APEC or the Quad when it comes to the president's schedule.

The reality is that over the last decade, the greatest value of attending the ASEAN Summit for the United States and most other dialogue partners has been the ability to hold sideline meetings in bilateral or minilateral formats. But even there, ASEAN is not the only or even necessarily the best option. To take the most obvious example, APEC has proven a more reliable vehicle for such leader-level meetings with nearly all the East Asia Summit members, except Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and India (the last of which has frequent meetings with the U.S. president through the G20, Quad, and regular state visits).

None of this is to say that ASEAN doesn't matter to U.S. national interests or that Southeast Asia shouldn't receive significant attention from the U.S. president. But the two are not the same. Despite attending only half of the ASEAN summits, it will be hard to argue that President Biden didn't prioritize the region during his time in office. He hosted four Southeast Asian leaders at the White House-from Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines (twice if counting the first-ever U.S.-Philippines-Japan trilateral), and Indonesia. He visited the region for important summits and bilateral visits, including a historic stop in Hanoi last fall to elevate the U.S.-Vietnam relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership. He dispatched cabinet secretaries and the vice president (who visited Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) on a regular cycle of visits to Southeast Asia. And he hosted the second U.S.-ASEAN Special Summit in Washington in 2022, during which the U.S.-ASEAN relationship was formally elevated to a comprehensive strategic partnership. Those are exactly the kinds of special occasions at which the president should be the face of U.S. engagement with ASEAN as an institution. But for the rest, Washington should manage expectations and send the vice president.

Gregory B. Poling is a senior fellow and director for the Southeast Asia Program and the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

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