Australia can help US under Trump repair Obama’s damage in Asia

Thailand’s PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha has restored stability.

This is a story of failure by Barack Obama in Southeast Asia and the challenge ahead in the region for the administration of Donald Trump, and the critical importance of this effort to Australia.

It should have been a routine operation. The US wanted some of its Osprey helicopters to land in Thailand on the way to deliver aid to Nepal. But no one in the Thai military would answer the US military’s requests, so the US was left without permission.

This was perplexing for the US and would once have been unthinkable. Thailand is a military ally of the US and its oldest diplomatic partner in Asia.

Throughout the Cold War, Thailand was critical to the US position, and to Australian security, in Southeast Asia. It sent troops to the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Its air bases were essential to American operations during the Vietnam War.

Typically, the Thai people have had very positive feelings towards the US, second only to The Philippines. The US and Thai militaries have been intimate collaborators for decades. The idea that on such an innocuous mission the Americans might not even gain access to Thailand would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Finally it took intervention at the highest levels of the Thai government for the Americans to get their landing permission.

How did it come to this? Who lost Thailand? The answer is: Obama lost Thailand and there is a lot more loss to come.

In his first term, Obama was a reasonable president for Asia. With Hillary Clinton at State, Robert Gates at Defence and, above all, Kurt Campbell as assistant secretary of state for East Asia, and with the momentum on the Bush effort in Asia behind him, and with “the Asia pivot” which Campbell conceived, Obama got a passable grade in Asia.

But even in those first four years, Obama never made a significant speech about Asia in the US. He had lovely media moments when he visited Asia — he even announced the pivot in Darwin — but he never generated any significant support at home for the idea that Asia, much less Southeast Asia, represented key strategic interests for the US.

In Thailand there had been years of red shirt/yellow shirt social and political division. This was a complex fissure at the heart of Thai society which, as the years went by, became increasingly bitter and violent. In May 2014 the Thai military took control and General Prayut Chan-o-cha became Prime Minister.

The military government has been successful in restoring order, eliminating civic violence, governing carefully and moderately. It got a new constitution passed and next year is heading to national elections. Thailand is peaceful. Its economy will probably grow at 3.5 per cent this year. It’s not perfect, it’s not disastrous.

But in his second four years, Obama was truly a dreadful president, with certified lightweights in Defence and foreign affairs and all through their respective bureaucracies. The most notable aspect of Obama in those years was the way his administration hurt US friends and allies and helped US enemies.

Thailand was no exception. Instead of showing even a modicum of understanding for Thailand’s distinctive circumstances, the Obama administration condemned the Thai government in a way that it only ever condemned allies. It froze high-level visits. Eventually, in early 2015, it sent Danny Russel, then the assistant secretary of state for East Asia.

Russel was a nice enough guy but he constituted the very embodiment of charisma bypass and cautious bureaucratic blandness. However, presumably on a mission from the White House, he publicly castigated the Thai government in a Bangkok speech.

The Thais were furious. The US charge d’affaires was summoned for a foreign ministry dressing down and relations plummeted. Obama’s vandalism was characteristically insouciant about sacrificing decades of strategic invest­ment. The Thais were coldly furious at Washington’s blatant double standards. A much more violent military coup in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood didn’t get anything like this kind of reaction out of the Americans

What were the Thais to conclude? Either that the US didn’t care much about the relationship, or didn’t value what it had to lose.

Now the quite catastrophic deterioration in the US position in Thailand is set to come to fruition with the Thais likely to purchase three Chinese submarines.

Beijing’s approach to Thailand was of course completely different. The Chinese assured the Thais they had no interest in interfering in internal Thai politics. The Thais looked at the prospect of buying submarines from a Western supplier and concluded that there would be a serious risk of getting limited weapons systems, and being entangled in endless diplomatic squabbles about their internal politics, with the submarine sale always potentially to be withdrawn or delayed as leverage in these squabbles.

The Chinese also became aggressive on price. Basically they offered the Thais three subs for the price of one. This was all part of a concerted effort by Beijing — unlike the Obama administration, paying attention all the time — to gain influence in Thailand. China sends about 10 million tourists a year to Thailand, nearly a third of all Thailand’s tourists.

The Chinese sub sale, if it goes ahead, marks a revolutionary moment in Thailand’s strategic disposition. Thailand is assuredly not ditching its alliance with the US. But the Chinese will gain the most intimate knowledge possible of all of Thailand’s strategic circumstances, including its maritime strategies.

There are deep issues of interoperability to negotiate between the Thai navy and its US ally, and between the Thai Chinese subs and the rest of the Thai military forces. Thailand will become the only nation to operate Chinese and American technology simultaneously at this level.

Beijing has made, overall, big gains in Southeast Asia. It has achieved something like strategic hegemony over Cambodia and Laos. It won’t achieve that in Bangkok, but the Thais will now move between the US and China, and will certainly take on board Chinese concerns in a way they haven’t in the past, and the US will be less able to rely on strategic help from Bangkok.

That’s often what happens if you neglect and insult a friend.

The good news is that the Turmp administration is deeply aware of all this and is already trying to recover the situation. And the early signs are the Chinese are worried about confronting a more muscular Washington, which is why they’ve suddenly gone quiet in the South China Sea.

The day before he was sacked as US national security adviser, Mike Flynn had been on the phone to Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan. Flynn had been planning to visit Thailand. US Pacific commander Admiral Harry Harris was recently in Thailand too.

Flynn’s successor at the NSC, General HR McMaster, is equally seized of the need to get moving on recovering US influence in Southeast Asia. Jim Mattis in Defence and Rex Tillerson at State are both deeply familiar with Southeast Asia and on the job there.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has just returned from high-level consultations in Washington. She sees the advent of the Trump administration as offering significant opportunities for Australia.

Bishop herself as early as 2014 led a review of Australian policy which reversed the destructive, Obama-led instinct to isolate the new Thai government. Instead, we fully re-engaged. Bishop is the only Western foreign minister to visit Thailand since the military took over. Canberra should take this sensible approach further and unapologetically celebrate the 65th anniversary this year of Australian-Thai diplomatic relations.

Yesterday, Bishop told me: “The Trump administration is aware that it has to rebuild in Southeast Asia.” She thinks this is one of many areas of potential co-operation and deep shared interests we will have with the Trump administration.

She says: “I see it (the Trump administration) as a huge opportunity for us. It is a new administration and it is in listening mode. It wants to hear from us, our ideas and what we are doing.”

In Washington, she saw Vice-President Mike Pence, Tillerson and McMaster, among others: “We discussed increasing the engagement of the US in Southeast Asia and I was reassured that the US view aligns with our view.”

This is a much more intelligent understanding of the opportunities offered by the advent of the Trump administration, which is much more than just the President’s tweets, than most of the hysterical Australian commentary.

Washington sources suggest that Tillerson’s deputy at State, a critical position, is likely to be John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky or Jon Hunstman.

All three are very good friends of Australia and know Asia well.

In Thailand, and not only in Thailand, they will have a lot of work to do to repair the wreckage left by Obama. It is overwhelmingly in Australia’s interest that they succeed.