Biden’s Absence at ASEAN Summit Seen as Snub to Southeast Asia 

U.S. President Joe Biden is set to travel to Asia for diplomatic meetings in India and Vietnam, but on the trip he’s skipping two major summits in the neighborhood, rankling diplomats in Southeast Asia and potentially undercutting Washington’s ongoing power struggle in the region against China.

Biden is a no-show at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit and coinciding East Asia Summit in Jakarta, Indonesia, which began on Monday and runs through Thursday, sending Vice President Kamala Harris in his place. If from Washington’s point of view the decision has more to do with scheduling than anything else, in the region Biden’s absence is viewed as a glaring diplomatic snub for Indonesian officials and some other Southeast Asian countries, according to three U.S. and Asian diplomats familiar with the matter. 

That perceived snub could set back—though not derail—a concerted yearslong U.S. diplomatic campaign to court more influence and clout in the region to counter China, these officials said. 

“The word to use here is disappointment,” said one senior Asian diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak more candidly about the internal dynamics of the ASEAN summit. “Biden’s absence will be felt throughout, and it is a missed opportunity to cement gains as China grows more unpopular.”

“Diplomatically Biden’s absence will constitute a humiliation for [Indonesian] President [Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo],” Kornelius Purba, senior editor of the Jakarta Post, wrote ahead of the summit. “[T]he U.S. President’s no-show in Jakarta only signals that Indonesia is no longer a top priority of the U.S. administration, which may perceive Jakarta as leaning too much to Washington’s chief competitor Beijing.”

One U.S. and one East Asian official said that Indonesia moved the ASEAN summit, in the past held in November, to September in part to get Biden and other leaders going to a Group of 20 (G-20) summit to attend the meetings in Jakarta, adding to the sting of Biden’s absence. But Indonesia also reportedly moved the summit to deconflict with the country’s upcoming election campaign season, which runs from November through February.

“The Southeast Asian countries and the [East Asia Summit members] believe that they are important centers for discussion and coming up with ideas about regional architecture and solving problems in the region—and that U.S. presidents don’t treat them with the same respect that they would an important European meeting,” said Joshua Kurlantzick, a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The White House National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment. But several administration officials have downplayed these criticisms of Biden’s absence from Jakarta, pointing out that Biden in 2022 hosted the first-ever U.S.-ASEAN summit at the White House in Washington and appointed a U.S. ambassador to the Southeast Asian political bloc, filling a diplomatic post that had gone without a confirmed ambassador for over five years. They also countered by highlighting Biden’s upcoming engagements in India and Vietnam as key to his foreign-policy strategy on Asia. 

They also said Harris’s attendance demonstrates the U.S. commitment to partnership with ASEAN countries. The visit will mark Harris’s fourth visit to the Indo-Pacific and third to Southeast Asia in the past two years. Harris plans to “advance initiatives to promote our shared prosperity and security, including by advancing our work on the climate crisis, maritime security, infrastructure, economic growth, efforts to uphold and strengthen international rules and norms in the region, and other regional and global challenges” while in Jakarta, according to the White House. 

Biden will visit India to attend a major summit of G-20 leaders scheduled for Sept. 9-10, and then travel to Vietnam to roll out a new “strategic partnership” with a country it views as critical to blunting China’s inroads in Southeast Asia. Chinese President Xi Jinping will not attend either the ASEAN summit or the G-20 summit, instead sending the second-ranking official, Premier Li Qiang, to Jakarta in his place.

Whether Biden’s travel plans constitute a calculated snub for Indonesia or simple scheduling matters, the growing fixation on whether U.S. and Chinese leaders attend these types of major diplomatic summits highlights the expanding competition between the rival superpowers for clout and influence on the world stage. 

Gregory Poling, an expert on Southeast Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Washington needs to invest focus and attention on regional powers that aren’t cleanly aligned with either Washington or Beijing as the competition heats up between them. “If we envision the U.S. and China being in a long-term strategic competition in the global south among nonaligned states … Indonesia, alongside India and Vietnam, these are heavy hitters,” he said. 

“These are states that are never going to be U.S. allies. But when our interests align and they’re willing to put their hands up and say actually we like the American version over the Chinese version, that’s how the United States wins this over the next several decades.”

However, Poling said that if the White House had to pick two out of three engagements for Biden to attend, the G-20 in India and Vietnam visit were more important, given the signal that a new and upgraded U.S. partnership with Vietnam, a fellow communist neighbor of China’s and former U.S. foe, will send to Beijing and the region. 

The series of high-level summits in Asia comes as Beijing looks to ramp up its diplomatic outreach and rapidly expand its economic footprint across Southeast Asia. Between 2018 and 2022, a Lowy Institute report found that Beijing has grown increasingly influential in the region in four key sectors—economic ties, defense networks, diplomatic influence, and cultural influence—although the Philippines and Singapore have stayed close to Washington. 

“Already, you have a situation where China is the dominant economic actor, by far,” Kurlantzick said. Even though countries may harbor concerns about their economic ties with Beijing and China’s behavior in the South China Sea and toward Taiwan, he said, “they already view China as the dominant influence in the region.” 

If Biden’s absence at the ASEAN summit will be conspicuous and lead to short-term frustrations in the region, it may not cost the United States in the long run, as the regional bloc’s own power and clout is waning. Diplomats privately concede that ASEAN is hobbled by a lack of strategic vision over directly addressing challenges such as China’s disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea and the war in Ukraine, watering down its geopolitical clout and influence. 

Washington and Beijing have both been accelerating their networks of regional partnerships and alliances to counteract the other’s power in recent years. Washington has made gains in lashing together alliances in Europe and Asia in new ways—such as through Japan and South Korea’s upgraded diplomatic engagements with NATO. 

Top Biden officials have also vowed to push back on growing Chinese influence in the United Nations and other international institutions. China, meanwhile, has countered with its own diplomatic campaigns for influence, including working with Russia to elevate and expand the so-called BRICS bloc of countries not directly aligned with Western powers. 

ASEAN is composed of 10 Southeast Asian countries: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, though Myanmar has been iced out of the bloc after a military junta seized power in 2021. The East Asia Summit is an expanded ASEAN dialogue that includes all 10 ASEAN members as well as Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Russia, and the United States. 

Biden’s absence from the summits in Indonesia comes at a time when Washington could otherwise seize on major diplomatic missteps by Beijing that have eroded its goodwill and support in the neighborhood. 

A Chinese vessel aggressively confronted a Philippine coast guard vessel with a water cannon last month near disputed shoals in the South China Sea, highlighting the roiling tensions over conflicting territorial claims. Beijing further enraged other governments in the region when it unveiled an official map showing it claimed formal sovereignty over vast swaths of disputed territory in the South China Sea, in what many analysts view as a harbinger of more clashes to come between Chinese naval and coast guard vessels and those from neighboring countries. The Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam all filed formal diplomatic protests against the map, a blow to China’s diplomatic standing in the region.