Biden’s shorter Asia trip casts ‘cloud’ over US strategy in region

The US president will arrive in Hiroshima on Thursday for a meeting with Group of Seven members, but skip planned visits to Papua New Guinea and a Quad summit in Sydney to attend negotiations with Republican opponents on the debt ceiling.

In interviews with This Week in Asia, foreign policy observers largely agreed that the sudden change of plans raised questions about Washington’s long-term commitment to the region, even as they recognised the importance of the debt-limit talks.

“Even if there is recognition that the Biden administration does want to enhance engagement with Asia, people may wonder about the United States’ willingness and ability to do so,” said Chong Ja Ian, a political-science professor at the National University of Singapore.

Ian Hall, professor at Australia’s Griffith University, described the development as an embarrassment for the Biden administration, while Harsh V Pant, an international relations professor at King’s College London, said Washington’s domestic woes “cast a cloud over American strategy in the region”.

Biden’s truncated visit will “serve as an unwelcome reminder of the extent to which the US’ depth of commitment to the Indo-Pacific region is at the mercy of increasingly fickle and idiosyncratic politics on the US home front”, according to Sourabh Gupta, a senior fellow at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington.

Lu Xiang, an expert on US affairs at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, offered a similarly scathing assessment.

“Apart from raising doubts about Biden’s reassurances about the US financial system and its economy, it’s a blow to US efforts to upgrade the Quad grouping and Washington’s battle to reassert itself in the South Pacific to counter China,” Lu said.

Biden’s presence at the G7 summit – involving the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan – was a saving grace of sorts, according to other observers.

Dylan Loh of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University said he believed that ultimately, the plan changes “would not be a major factor in eroding trust” as Biden was still making the effort to be at the G7 table.

Attention at the summit is expected to also focus on whether Biden and other Quad leaders – India, Australia and Japan – would meet separately. The four-nation informal grouping is seen as key to Biden’s hopes of strengthening ties with the Asia-Pacific’s resident powers to counter China’s regional influence.

While next week’s Quad meeting in Sydney has been cancelled, the four leaders proceeding with joint talks in Hiroshima would demonstrate their resolve “to work together to constrain China’s more assertive behaviour within the region”, according to Stephen Nagy, professor of politics and international studies at Tokyo’s International Christian University.

Richard Maude, executive director for policy at Asia Society Australia, said the “effectiveness and value of the Quad won’t be determined by a single meeting”.

Offering a contrary view, Hugh White, emeritus strategic studies professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University in Canberra, said there was no need for hand-wringing over the cancelled Quad meeting.

“The reality is that the Quad has little serious strategic significance, despite the hype, because the four members have much less alignment of their strategic interests and objectives than the hype assumes,” White said.

Some observers said the disappointment from Biden’s change of plans would be most acutely felt by Papua New Guinea and other attendees of the US-Pacific Summit that would have been held at Port Moresby.

Biden’s planned visit – albeit for three hours – would have been the first by a sitting US president to the Pacific nation, amid intensifying efforts by both Washington and Beijing to court countries in the region.

Marc Lanteigne, an associate professor at the University of Tromso in Norway, said “the US may lose the momentum it had built up in trying to restart relations with many key Pacific governments as a means of countering Chinese influence in that region”.

One leader who may inadvertently benefit from the latest turn of events is India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is expected to proceed with plans to meet Pacific leaders in Port Moresby on Sunday and Monday.

Modi will be in Hiroshima for the G7 talks as an invitee of the host, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. He is expected to continue on to Australia for talks with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, even though the Quad meeting has been cancelled.

Rafiq Dossani, director of the US-based RAND Centre for Asia-Pacific Policy, said Biden’s absence was “good for Modi [as] he can keep the spotlight”, though he added that the impact of the Indian leader’s Pacific visit would depend on the socio-economic aid offers pledged during his two days in Port Moresby.