Fifty years after Vietnam, Donald Trump policies leave US ‘missing in action’ in Southeast Asia

Half a century after North Vietnamese troops marched on Saigon, the US is vanishing from the diplomatic landscape of Southeast Asia as the White House’s erratic policies undermine regional stability.

Vietnamese women in traditional dress with a motif of a Vietnamese flag walk past Ho Chi Minh City Hall on Tuesday. Picture: AP

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Half a century after North Vietnamese troops marched on Saigon, ending a devastating proxy battle between Cold War powers, Vietnam will mark the occasion on Wednesday with parades, air shows and banquets featuring senior envoys from across the globe.

Whether the US ambassador will be allowed to attend was still a matter of conjecture on Tuesday after reports the Trump administration had banned senior officials and withheld support for US veterans hoping to participate. Could an edict better encapsulate the self-defeating incoherence of US foreign policy under the Trump administration, which on April 30 also marks 100 days in power?

That the US and Vietnam have a relationship at all – let alone the close defence ties and strategic partnership forged through years of painstaking relationship-building – is evidence of America’s once extraordinary diplomatic powers and Vietnam’s regenerative resilience.

Yet across Southeast and South Asia, the US is vanishing from the diplomatic landscape as the White House’s erratic policies continue to undermine regional stability.

Top envoys are being recalled or gagged, tens of thousands of local and American workers are losing their jobs while hundreds of millions of dollars in base funding for public health and education initiatives has been cut with the closure of USAID – a bedrock of post-war international assistance.

“It has been a total wipeout,” says Phil Robertson, a veteran Southeast Asia human rights activist and former deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, citing the response to March’s catastrophic Myanmar earthquake as an example of what is to come.

Previously USAID would have immediately dispatched a huge disaster relief team. “Instead, you got three guys bringing in $US3m ($4.6m) a week after the fact, and they got their termination notices while they were on the ground,” Mr Robertson said.

“The US was the leading force in international assistance and they have literally disappeared. Donald Trump and (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio have set off a bomb in the middle of US foreign assistance and the State Department and we’re going to be picking up the pieces for a decade.”

Vaccination schemes, mine clearance operations, disaster funding, refugee food programs, support for independent media, energy transition, child and mat­ernal health, HIV prevention – the list of lifesaving programs shuttered or gutted by the move is long.

USAID also supported important post-war clarions such as Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. They are gone, as are research agencies such as the US Institute of Peace, whose work was instrumental in Afghanistan and more recently on the scourge of Southeast Asian online scam centres.

Even that list of casualties barely touches the surface of likely damage to a region so heavily dependent on manufacturing and exports to drive economic growth should Mr Trump reinstate steep tariffs on some closest allies after his 90-day pause ends in July.

“Everybody will have to struggle to try and rethink their markets,” says Huong Le Thu, Crisis Group Southeast Asia deputy director. “It’s not like Southeast Asian nations can just turn to Europe or other markets because everyone is scrambling.”

Vietnam, Cambodia and Bangla­desh, all with large garment manufacturing sectors dominated by poor working women, were targeted for some of the steepest imposts (46, 49 and 36 per cent respectively). They will be first to face mass layoffs – even under Mr Trump’s baseline 10 per cent – forcing millions back into poverty.

Alive to the opportunities Washington’s new isolationism presents, China has upped its courtship of neighbouring countries, all of them well attuned to the dangers of closer ties with Beijing and braced for a possible flood of cheap Chinese products.

A region that has for decades supported US economic growth through trade and investment is having to adjust to a “new level of disdain” from the US administration, Asia Link’s Rob Law said.

The best ASEAN nations can hope for is Mr Trump gets bogged down in his struggle with China and leaves it alone, says Singapore diplomat Kishore Mahbubani: “When US supermarket shelves begin to empty out, they will discover it was all a big mistake.”