Subscribe to The Informer for monthly expert analysis, and to Events for advance notice of visiting world leaders and distinguished guests.
You may unsubscribe from Lowy Institute newsletters at any time. For information on our privacy practices and how to unsubscribe, see our Privacy Policy.
Subscribe to The Informer for monthly expert analysis, and to Events for advance notice of visiting world leaders and distinguished guests.
You may unsubscribe from Lowy Institute newsletters at any time. For information on our privacy practices and how to unsubscribe, see our Privacy Policy.
In this Analysis, Lowy Institute Research Fellow Aaron L. Connelly examines the role of the US Congress in policy toward the Asia-Pacific region.
Congress and Asia-Pacific policy: Dysfunction and neglect
About the author
Aaron L Connelly
Aaron Connelly was Director of the Lowy Institute’s Southeast Asia Project until 2018.
The Obama administration has undertaken a rebalancing of US attention, efforts, and assets both to the Asia-Pacific region and within that region. Yet congressional dysfunction and inattention have repeatedly undermined the Obama administration’s ability to execute its rebalance strategy.
While partisan gridlock in Congress has hindered the execution of US foreign policy overall, it has disproportionately affected US policy towards the Asia-Pacific because the region has had few champions in either house in recent years. And where key members have sought to protect US engagement in the Middle East and Eastern Europe from the worst effects of congressional dysfunction, there have been far fewer efforts with regard to US engagement in the Asia Pacific. To the extent individual members have claimed to focus on the region, it has often been in pursuit of narrow objectives focused on a single country or issue area.
This Analysis provides some suggestions for greater engagement between US and regional policymakers and Congress. Though there are signs of increased interest in the current Congress, the nature of that interest and whether it can be sustained will depend on efforts by individual members, administration officials, and US allies and partners in the years to come.
When President Barack Obama announced a renewed US focus on the Asia-Pacific region in a landmark address to the Australian Parliament in November 2011, it heralded a gradual but unmistakable rebalancing of US attention, efforts, and assets both to the region and within the region. Yet, while Obama’s speech at Parliament House in Canberra was well received, most of Capitol Hill has never come around to his rebalance strategy. In fact, in several important respects, the US Congress has thwarted its implementation. The gap between the Obama administration and the US Congress on Asia-Pacific policy is a product of both the general decline of Congress as an institution and the specific decline of Asia expertise among its members.
Congress has become increasingly dysfunctional as a result of political polarisation in both houses, a consequence in part of ideologically cohesive districts and increasing political polarisation in the broader population. That dysfunction has disproportionately affected those issues without powerful champions, such as engagement with the Asia-Pacific region. While key members of Congress have sought to shield US engagement in the Middle East or Eastern Europe from the worst effects of congressional gridlock, engagement with the Asia Pacific has lacked such protection. When members have turned their attention to Asia-Pacific issues, it has often been in pursuit of narrow objectives focused on a single country or issue, without reference to a broader regional strategy. Indeed, one risk is that Congress may well replace a lack of interest in Asian affairs with an unhealthy preoccupation with China.
This Analysis first sketches the Obama administration’s policy towards the Asia-Pacific region from 2011 to 2015. Next, it explores the sources of congressional interest in foreign policy and the region, including constituent groups and personal interests. These sources lead most members to focus on other areas of foreign policy rather than the Asia Pacific, or on narrow sets of issues in the Asia Pacific rather than the region as a strategic system where US national interests are at stake. The Analysis then identifies specific episodes of partisan gridlock that have hindered the achievement of foreign policy objectives that otherwise enjoy broad support. Finally, it offers some recommendations for deepening Congress’ engagement with Asia-Pacific issues.
The rebalance has often been misportrayed as an effort to contain China. When the press and members of Congress have made reference to the rebalance, they have frequently argued that the administration’s strategy has failed because it has not been hard enough on Beijing. But that debate misrepresents the goals and strategy behind the rebalance, which is primarily about supporting the norms and institutions that undergird the liberal order in the Asia-Pacific region, and was never intended to be (all) about China.
Within the Obama administration, three assumptions shaped the decision to rebalance to the Asia Pacific. First, it was apparent that the greatest share of the world’s economic dynamism would shift to the emerging economies of East, South, and Southeast Asia over the coming century. Economic engagement with the region was therefore critical to US prosperity. The ability to invest in the development of these economies, and to sell goods and services to their growing middle classes, would power US growth for decades to come. To take advantage of this dynamic, in 2010 the United States joined negotiations to further liberalise regional trade in goods and services, and expand the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) into a large, high-standard trade pact.
Second, as Asia’s economic transition continued, Asian countries would improve the capacity of their armed forces. For many in the Obama administration, this need not be a cause for concern unless that hard power were to be used to bend the norms and institutions of the international system to the whims of rising illiberal powers. To help shape the future of the regional order, the Obama administration resolved to ensure it was at the table and in a position to shape important norms and institutions when they were discussed and tested, both diplomatically and militarily. The United States joined the East Asia Summit and its associated organs in 2010, and the Pentagon announced that it would deploy 60 per cent of its overseas naval and air assets to the Pacific region by 2020.
Neither of these first two assumptions were particularly different from those of the Obama foreign policy team’s predecessors in the Bush administration. Following Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s announcement at the 2009 ASEAN Regional Forum that the United States was “back in Asia,” former Bush officials protested, not unreasonably, that they had never left Asia. But the Obama administration’s commitment to end two wars in the Middle East offered an opportunity to increase US engagement in a way that the Bush administration, distracted by Iraq and Afghanistan, was unable to do. The attention, energy, and resources that have been thrown into TPP negotiations, regional diplomacy, and military engagement represent a significant increase in tempo from the Bush administration.
But the rebalance was not just about tempo. A third assumption distinguished the Obama administration’s approach from its predecessors. The Bush administration, like most of its predecessors since the Vietnam War, was primarily focused on Northeast Asia. There were several disadvantages to this approach: much of the economic growth in the region was now occurring in Southeast Asia; the concentration of US forces in Northeast Asia made them more vulnerable to attack, and less agile in contingencies elsewhere in the region; and the lion’s share of regional diplomacy was organised and led by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
From this last assumption was born the “rebalance within the rebalance,” through which the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic engagement with Southeast Asia relative to Northeast Asia. While the shift that followed has been perhaps the least appreciated aspect of US policy in the region, it has been among the most important.
The United States improved its attendance record at key Southeast Asian diplomatic conferences and joined several new ones, giving US officials a voice in debates over the future of the regional order. The United States also shifted its military presence south, by deploying 2500 Marines to Australia, sending four Littoral Combat Ships to Singapore, penning a comprehensive partnership with Vietnam, and signing an agreement with Manila that allows US forces to rotate through the Philippines and use the Philippines’ facilities.
This increase in diplomatic engagement with Southeast Asia gave the United States a voice in the most important discussions of regional norms over the ensuing years. But just as importantly, by empowering Southeast Asian nations to take the lead in regional diplomacy and then pledging to back up their autonomy with an increased military presence, the United States indicated that it seeks to create space for the countries of the region to chart their own strategic futures, rather than dictate those futures to them, either alone or in cooperation with Beijing or any other power. That autonomy is a fundamental element of the liberal system the United States seeks to defend.
Though the fundamentals of the rebalance strategy are sound, the communication of the strategy has been problematic. In particular, the rebalance has failed to deliver the high-level attention from some administration principals that the early stages of the strategy led the region to expect. While former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton dedicated significant time and attention to Asia, her successor, John Kerry, has focused on diplomacy in the Middle East and Europe. Where former National Security Adviser Tom Donilon spent a significant period of time on bilateral diplomacy with China, his successor, Susan Rice, has focused greater attention on crises involving Ukraine, the Islamic State, and Ebola.
Greater attention from principals would have been helpful in more effectively communicating the priority the administration places on the Asia-Pacific region, and may have prevented messaging mistakes such as the administration’s initial opposition to the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. But the institutionalisation of the rebalance strategy started in Obama’s first term. By designating larger budgets for the region and establishing a more frequent pattern of diplomatic and military interaction in the region, as well as ongoing negotiations towards the TPP, the administration committed the United States to steadily increasing the time, energy, and money its officials spend on the region, whether its principals’ hearts are in the strategy or not. That increase has not waned.
However, the administration also failed to convince sceptics that the rebalance was not an attempt to contain China. In this, the administration shares some blame. The Pentagon under the Obama administration has occasionally described the rebalance and its increased military engagement with security partners in the region — partnerships that are intended to achieve a broad range of security goals — in terms that suggest it is merely an effort to counter China, rather than a more sophisticated effort to build partnerships and patterns of interaction with the militaries of the region.
As a result, the rebalance has often been judged by members of the press and members of Congress by how tough administration officials have been on Beijing. But the rebalance was never intended to be all about China. Rather, the rebalance was designed to uphold the liberal order in the region, principally through engagement with the entire region, including China. Moreover, US officials have been careful not to take any actions that would present countries of the region a stark choice between Washington and Beijing, a choice Southeast Asian leaders have repeatedly said they do not want to be asked to make. There has also been a recognition that Chinese actions that disregard international norms and laws are serious challenges to the regional order, and that the United States must seek to deter those actions. But the United States has not attempted to prevent China’s rise, merely those Chinese actions that are inconsistent with international norms and laws.
Despite missteps in communicating the rebalance, it still represents a substantial increase in engagement with the region which understands the importance of third country sensitivities in US–China competition. The United States has been held back, not so much by the Obama administration’s inattention or an unwillingness to be tough on China, but by a Congress so paralysed by partisanship that it can no longer carry out some of its most basic functions.
The US Constitution distinguishes the American system from the parliamentary system common to many of its allies including Australia, by reserving specific foreign policy powers for Congress. These include the power to declare war, raise an army, maintain a navy, and regulate foreign commerce. Most scholars have argued that in the field of foreign policy, the Constitution does not so much decree a separation of powers, as popularly thought, but rather a sharing of powers.
Through its broader power to authorise and appropriate funds and to conduct oversight, Congress has a significant ability to influence foreign policy. In the best circumstances, this can lead to what the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Lee Hamilton, called a “creative tension” between the executive and legislative branches. These tensions between Congress and the administration have grown since the Vietnam War, when scholars generally agree Congress became more actively interventionist in foreign policy.
In recent years, however, “creative tension” has descended into gridlock, with great consequences for Asia-Pacific policy. The polarisation of the US public, and the rise of more ideologically cohesive districts, have led to increasing polarisation in both houses of Congress. The growing ideological chasm between Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill has made even the most basic functions of Congress difficult to achieve. On foreign policy, and particularly on Asia-Pacific policy, the loss in recent electoral cycles of senior leaders who might have once delivered bipartisan protection of important priorities has exacerbated the consequences of this decline, with serious ramifications for US leadership in the world and in the Asia-Pacific region in particular.
Over the past two decades, Democrats and Republicans have become increasingly ideologically orthodox. In 1992, according to Pew Research Center survey data, the median Democrat was to the left of 64 per cent of Republicans. Now the median Democrat is to the left of 92 per cent of Republicans. The median Republican has gone from a position to the right of 70 per cent of Democrats to a position to the right of 94 per cent of Democrats.
Moreover, congressional districts have become increasingly ideologically cohesive, either because many are drawn that way by state legislators — a practice sometimes known as gerrymandering — or because Americans have ‘sorted’ themselves into like-minded communities and districts over the last two decades. Most seats in the House, therefore, are ‘safe seats’, in the sense that they are unlikely to flip from one party to the other. In the 2014 general election, the average margin of victory in the House was more than 35 percentage points. Of 435 seats, only 26 (6 per cent) were decided by a margin of 5 percentage points or less.
But these seats are not necessarily ‘safe’ for the members who hold them. Senators and representatives must worry about a challenge not from the other party, but from within their own party. While primary challenges have always been a feature of the US electoral system, the increase in ideological cohesion has increased the perceived likelihood of success for challengers attacking from the flanks. These challenges produce more hard-line members of Congress, and fear of such a challenge drives many members to adopt more extreme positions once in office.
Even senators — who are elected from states with permanent boundaries and are therefore immune to the effects of gerrymandering — are increasingly vulnerable to primary challenges from constituents who expect their representatives to hew to an ideological orthodoxy. The long-serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Richard Lugar, was defeated by just such a challenge in 2012.
These extreme positions are reflected in measurements of partisan unity within Congress. Since the 1970s, the Republican and Democrat caucuses have become increasingly cohesive, and further and further apart when their votes are scored along an ideological spectrum. As Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein have noted, the parties now demonstrate a level of discipline resembling a parliamentary system. Yet unlike a parliamentary system, the US system of separation of powers requires compromise if anything is to be accomplished. This is particularly true in the Senate, where a supermajority of 60 per cent of votes can be required to pass legislation.
Since the 1970s, Congress has also undergone an institutional decentralisation that has diminished the influence of senior members. This shift has been exacerbated by the departure of several former opinion leaders in foreign affairs in both houses since 2010. Junior members are now far less likely to find senior members with foreign affairs leadership experience whom they can rely on for guidance.
The loss is most pronounced in the Senate. Three former chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — Richard Lugar, Joe Biden, and John Kerry — all departed between 2008 and 2012. As a result, the most senior members on foreign policy in the current Congress are not very senior at all. Kerry waited 24 years after his election to the Senate in 1984 to become chairman of the committee. By contrast, his successor, Senator Robert Menendez, waited just six years.
As one senior official in the Clinton administration explained, in the 1990s it was possible to call three senior members of the House Democratic caucus on a foreign policy issue, and each would carry with him 50 votes. As White House defeats in the House on Syria and trade have shown, that is no longer the case. Now, the administration must work much harder to convince many more members to vote with it on foreign policy issues. On the recent vote on the Obama administration’s Iran deal, only a campaign-style effort, costing millions of dollars, was able to win over enough members to prevent Congress from scuttling the deal.
As the parties’ positions have drifted further apart, it has become increasingly difficult for the members of the two parties to find a zone of compromise. This difficulty afflicts not just grand bargains or the most controversial issues, but the basic functions of Congress: authorising and appropriating funds.
The first indication of the new era of congressional dysfunction came seven months after the 112th Congress was sworn in. In August 2011, the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives refused to pass legislation raising the ceiling on the amount of debt that can be issued by the Treasury without major budget cuts in return. The debt ceiling is normally raised by Congress without significant controversy, because Congress has already authorised and appropriated the funds, and because a failure to do so would likely result in a sovereign default. But the increasingly conservative Republican caucus in the House sought the opportunity to achieve greater spending cuts by holding hostage the full faith and credit of the federal government.
Despite intense negotiations between President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner, no grand bargain on spending cuts could be reached. In order to raise the debt ceiling and avert sovereign default, Obama and Boehner agreed to throw further deliberations to an extraordinary ‘supercommittee’ of both houses to hash out a compromise. The supercommittee’s plan would have then gone to the floor of both houses for an up-or-down vote. If the supercommittee did not deliver a plan, the cuts would be carried out indiscriminately, across the board, by ‘sequestering’ appropriations. The prospect of indiscriminate cuts was meant to be so unthinkable that the committee would be forced to return a plan.
Yet the supercommittee still could not compromise. The indiscriminate cuts, which are split evenly between defence and non-defence spending, began to take effect in 2013. Despite efforts to lift sequestration, it remains in place. This presents a serious challenge to the United States’ ability to maintain a high level of diplomatic and military engagement overseas. In particular, it has thrown into doubt whether the Pentagon will be able to continue to increase the number of ships and aircraft deployed to East Asia as part of the rebalance.
A further example of congressional dysfunction was the shutdown of the federal government in October 2013, when a faction of the Republican caucus in the House refused to approve a continuing resolution that would have funded government operations. They objected to provisions funding parts of the Obama administration’s universal healthcare plan. The plan, known as ‘Obamacare’, had already been approved three years earlier but requires Congress to approve further funding annually if it is to run effectively.
Though many (if not a majority) of Republican members did not favour a shutdown, fearing that Americans would blame them for the dysfunction, the shutdown campaign by right-wing members of their caucus put them in a difficult position: vote to fund the government, and risk a primary challenge from a more conservative candidate the following year; vote not to fund the government, and most Americans would view Republicans as responsible for the gridlock on the Hill.
For the Republican leadership, the question was even more acute, with House Speaker John Boehner concerned about a coup by more conservative members of his own caucus if he allowed the funding to pass with mostly Democrat votes. For 16 days, the federal government partially shut down, suspending non-essential functions, before Boehner allowed a vote to fund the government.
The shutdown had foreign policy consequences. The failure revealed the sclerosis of the US political system at a time when many elites worldwide were wondering whether democratic systems could meet the challenges of the 21st century. At a more immediate level, it forced President Obama to stay at home to work on the crisis, rather than travelling during the first week of the shutdown to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Indonesia, where he was to push US trade and economic objectives, and most critically to the East Asia Summit in the Philippines, where he was to address Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea. Southeast Asian leaders, looking for a signal of US commitment to the region, were left wondering whether the United States’ political system would permit it to continue to support the regional order.
The government shutdown was only the most extreme example of partisanship preventing Congress from addressing its regular order of business. For the last half century, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) and House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) have held the responsibility of writing and passing a law authorising spending by the State Department. These authorisations are then funded by an appropriations bill, which is written and passed by the Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the Senate and House appropriations committees.
Yet disagreements over social policy overseas, particularly whether to fund family planning organisations that discuss abortion with their clients, has meant that Congress has not passed an authorisation bill for the State Department since 2002. In this way, the SFRC and HFAC have lost their most important tool for influencing foreign policy. The appropriations committees, through the foreign operations subcommittees, now arguably have more influence over foreign policy than the foreign affairs committees, where the greater subject matter expertise lies.
SFRC and HFAC still hold oversight hearings, and occasionally withhold authorisation for executive departments to spend money on line items through a back-end process of what are known as ‘congressional notifications’. In the Senate, the SFRC also considers ambassadorial nominees and other foreign affairs nominees. These hearings and processes, however, focus the mind of the committee on a single issue or country in isolation, rather than the broader strategy for a region or issue area. That narrow focus often discourages a more strategic approach to regional foreign policy.
Congressional dysfunction has made US policy in a wide range of areas less discerning and less strategic, but its effects have been particularly acute in policy towards the Asia Pacific. While Congress has shielded US engagement in the Middle East or Eastern Europe from the worst effects of congressional dysfunction, members have not made the same effort on East Asia. This neglect has expanded the scope for individual members to push specific concerns with respect to a single country or issue, without regard to how it fits into a broader regional strategy.
The fallout from a particular episode of congressional gridlock is instructive in this regard. In late 2013, Republicans were using the chamber’s requirement for a 60 per cent supermajority to block an unprecedented number of judicial appointees. In response, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to take what had become known in Washington as the “nuclear option,” eliminating four decades of precedent by changing the rules to require only a simple majority to move to a vote on most nominations.
Republicans saw this as an extraordinary violation of the rights of the minority party, and in retaliation availed themselves of other obstructionist tactics unique to the US Senate, including forcing the chamber to take days to approve any administration nominee. Among these nominees were dozens of individuals recently nominated for ambassadorial positions by the Obama administration. The dispute continued for around ten months, at one point leaving vacant nearly a quarter of all ambassadorial posts overseas.
The dispute did not affect all regions equally, however. When Russian forces annexed Crimea, Republicans in the Senate relented and allowed the new ambassador to Russia to be confirmed. In the Middle East, the Senate quickly allowed ambassadors to Iraq, Egypt, and Kuwait to be confirmed. But nominees for Asia Pacific did not receive special dispensation until the Republicans relented en masse. The nominee for ambassador to Vietnam, a country eagerly seeking reassurance from the United States due to tensions in the South China Sea, waited five months. The US Permanent Representative to ASEAN waited nine months, thus missing several important meetings on the tensions in the South China Sea.
Few members in recent Congresses are focused on Asia-Pacific policy. The region has still not captured the attention of the American public or the media, as there are few votes and few appearances on Meet the Press to be won through work on the region. The press still focuses disproportionately on Europe and the Middle East. When President Obama travelled to China, Myanmar, and Australia for a series of summits in November 2014, the press plane chartered for the trip was half full. As one staffer on the Hill explained:
“You need a position on the Middle East peace process to run for office in this country. You don’t need one on the South China Sea.”
It is not surprising, then, that interest in the region has waned. With Senators Bond and Webb departing at the end of 2012, there are few senators with an interest in or experience with Southeast Asia issues in particular. The Asia-Pacific Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is among the least coveted committee assignments. In 2015, after presidential contender Senator Marco Rubio turned down the chairmanship of the subcommittee, it went to a freshman, Colorado Senator Cory Gardner.
Hyperpartisanship, the loss of leadership and the lack of congressional interest in Asia have all contributed to one of the more damaging decisions taken by Congress in the last few years in terms of US interests in the Asia Pacific: the refusal to consent to the ratification of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Though the failure to ratify the convention diminishes US leadership in the world more broadly, because the debate over rules and norms is strongly contested between the United States and China, it had particularly grave consequences for US leadership in the Asia Pacific.
The United States, concerned about Chinese flouting of international norms in the Asia-Pacific region, has argued that all countries in the region should embrace UNCLOS, which affirms freedom of navigation and lays out mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of maritime disputes. Yet this advocacy has been made somewhat self-consciously, because the United States itself has never ratified the convention. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan refused to sign UNCLOS because he took issue with the way it divided and taxed seabed resources. These concerns were resolved through a 1994 renegotiation of the convention, allowing President Bill Clinton to sign the treaty. But opposition remains on the conservative wing of the Republican Party, where extreme scepticism towards any international organisation seems to animate suspicions that the treaty will encroach to an unacceptable degree on US sovereignty.
In 2012, with tensions rising over Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, a bipartisan push was made by Senators Kerry and McCain to persuade their colleagues to consent to the ratification of UNCLOS. Yet, as the end of the session approached, a right wing political action committee began pressuring moderate Republican senators who had not yet declared their opposition. Under pressure, Senators Rob Portman and Kelly Ayotte, both known to be champions of international engagement, became the 33rd and 34th senators to declare their opposition. Because the 100-member US Senate requires a two-thirds majority to ratify any treaty, Portman and Ayotte’s decision sunk the effort to ratify the treaty.
In a less partisan atmosphere, moderate Republicans would have been free to vote for the treaty. Moreover, if more leaders in the Senate had experience with Asia-Pacific issues, McCain would have likely been joined by other senior members of his party in seeking to convince fellow members of his caucus to join him in supporting UNCLOS. It is difficult for the United States to advocate for the liberal international order, and to pressure rising powers like China to accept and obey international law, when the US Senate rejects the concept outright.
One potential response to the argument that congressional dysfunction has become an obstacle to deeper US engagement in the Asia Pacific was the recent passage of the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), which gives the president the right to submit a trade agreement like the TPP for an up-or-down vote. But, in fact, the very tight vote in favour of TPA underlined many of the problems referred to above.
Among policymakers in the Obama administration and in the foreign policy community of both parties in Washington, the TPP is seen as the linchpin of the rebalance strategy. On the Hill, however, it is seen very differently. When Obama delivered his State of the Union Address to Congress in January 2015, he seemed to recognise this in putting a harder, even mercantilist, edge on the administration’s talking points about economic engagement when he exclaimed:
“China wants to write the rules for the world’s fastest-growing region. That would put our workers and our businesses at a disadvantage. Why would we let that happen? We should write those rules. We should level the playing field.”
Though the president’s remarks referred to a debate over rules, as the rest of his rebalance strategy does, the context and underlying tone suggested this was primarily about seeking to divert the benefits of trade to the United States.
The leadership of both the Senate and House trade committees pushed for passage of the measure, and the measure eventually passed with support from Republicans and moderate Democrats. But the debate in Congress focused on issues such as tariffs, labour protections, and the perception that the TPP would be a handout to big business. Sophisticated arguments about TPP’s importance to the US position in Asia played little role in swaying the 28 Democrats in the House and 13 Democrats in the Senate who voted for the bill.
In an earlier era, members who otherwise nursed lingering concerns about the specific costs of free trade could be convinced by colleagues concerned about geopolitical issues in East Asia to support agreements that were in the broader national interest. As that era has ended, members of Congress have increasingly prevailed upon trade negotiators to commit to the defence of narrow interests in order to receive authorisation to make a deal, tying negotiators’ hands and making trade agreements like the TPP much more difficult to conclude.
While few members of Congress are interested in Asia-Pacific policy, there are a number of members, particularly in the House, who are interested in specific countries or issues in the Asia Pacific. Their interest is often driven by a large immigrant or ethnic population in their district, or personal background with an issue. These drivers are not unique to the Asia-Pacific region. In the absence of concern for the broader regional picture, however, there is the risk that where members of Congress develop or show an interest in the Asia Pacific, it will be a narrow interest.
For example, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce, represents a large number of ethnic Korean constituents in his southern California district. Royce has taken a particular interest in North Korea issues, and has spoken out in favour of South Korea’s claim in its territorial dispute with Japan, despite longstanding US government policy to never take sides in third-party territorial disputes. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Washington in April 2015, Royce delayed approval for Abe’s landmark speech to a joint meeting of Congress over concerns, often expressed by Korean-Americans, about Abe’s view of Japan’s wartime history. Regardless of the merit of his positions, Royce’s advocacy on behalf of one US ally at the expense of another makes it more difficult for the State Department to balance the interests of its two Northeast Asian allies and encourage cooperation between them.
Other members have a long history of advocacy on a particular issue, and view the region through the prism of that issue. This is particularly true of human rights advocates on the Hill, many of whom question engagement with any country in the region with a record of human rights abuses, and discount efforts by US officials to work to improve the human rights records of all Asian countries as part of a broader regional strategy. For example, in 2014, 70 per cent of the hearings concerning the Asia Pacific held by the House Foreign Affairs Committee and its subcommittees focused on issues of human rights and democracy. Only 9 per cent of hearings on the Middle East and 14 per cent of the hearings on Europe focused on human rights and democracy.
Advocacy for democracy, human rights, and fair labour practices is a long-time feature of US foreign policy, and there is no suggestion here that it should not be. But members of Congress often seem to neglect the need to incorporate that advocacy into a broader approach that recognises other US interests in the region, if for no other reason than such an approach is required to make progress on any issue at all, including human rights. This has been less of a problem in the Senate, where, for example, Senator McCain has used his considerable credibility, as a victim of Vietnamese torture when he was a prisoner of war, to argue for an approach that deepens engagement with Hanoi while still advancing US advocacy for human rights there.
But the loss of other senior leaders who can frame an issue more strategically, and the relative lack of interest in the broader region, allow individual members to define the US relationship with a particular country through the prism of a single issue. This is clearly unhelpful in the conduct of diplomacy in the region.
The Senate and House Armed Services Committees’ approach to the region can differ significantly from their counterparts on the Foreign Affairs and Foreign Relations Committees. The Armed Services committees, primarily concerned with US–China competition when it comes to the Asia Pacific, often see the rest of the region in the context of that competition. Because the Armed Services committees write the annual National Defense Authorization Act — which, unlike the SFRC and HFAC State Department authorisation bill, passes every year — the Armed Services committees can wield significant influence over security-related areas of foreign policy. The example of US relations with Myanmar is instructive.
In 2014, members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee from both parties sought to place restrictions on the Pentagon’s ability to conduct military-to-military diplomatic activities with Myanmar’s military. The bills emerged at a time when there were legitimate concerns that Myanmar’s reform process had stalled, with several prominent instances of human rights abuses, some committed by the military, receiving attention on Capitol Hill. But they also came at a time of increased concern that the military, dissatisfied with the prospect of instability in Myanmar, might seek to take back some of the powers it forfeited in the handover to quasi-civilian control in 2011.
The administration and reformers in Myanmar argued that the cause of reform would be set back by taking military-to-military diplomacy off the table, because military men in Myanmar are more likely to meet with and be persuaded by fellow uniformed officers. Some members of the Armed Services committees found these arguments persuasive. But more importantly, key members feared that keeping Myanmar’s armed forces at a distance would merely benefit Beijing. Determined not to lose Myanmar, the House Armed Services Committee used its muscle to work out a compromise. Rather than broadly restricting engagement with Myanmar’s Armed Forces, it specifically authorised engagement on human rights, civilian control, disaster relief, and military medicine, as well as aid in the event of a natural disaster.
The compromise reached on engagement with Myanmar’s military is one indication that attitudes toward Asia-Pacific policy may be undergoing a slight shift in Congress. While human rights activists might have won the day in previous sessions, by late last year concern about Chinese regional ambitions held greater sway. As concern about the expansion of Chinese influence carries greater and greater purchase with members of Congress, the likelihood increases that they will view individual countries and issues in East Asia in a broader regional context.
But the adoption of a single-minded focus on US–China competition is to trade one narrow prism for another. There must be a more sophisticated understanding of the politics of the region, particularly the concern of most regional states (other than Japan) that they not be made to choose between the United States and China. US efforts to shape Chinese behaviour that are seen as overly confrontational may backfire. Getting this balance right is difficult enough for US officials at the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon. Anti-Chinese activism in Congress, as it has at various points in the past, will make it more difficult still.
In an increasingly polarised Congress, increased congressional interest in the Asia-Pacific region can be a powerful boon for the administration and US partners in the region. But unless the administration and US partners can successfully shape that activism in the years to come, it could also scuttle otherwise effective diplomatic initiatives. Following are some suggestions for enhanced engagement between US and partner policymakers and Congress.
To cultivate a more nuanced understanding of the region, the administration should energise and streamline communication with congressional committees. While the Pentagon gets high marks in this regard, staffers and members on the Hill regularly complain that the State Department has stonewalled them on requests for more information about administration policies. While the congressional relations staff at the State Department tries hard to obtain answers to questions from the Hill, the much-maligned clearance process at State, which gives multiple officials the opportunity to revise any response, prevents quick action and produces least common denominator answers. Frustrated with the lag time, members often find the only way to extract answers from the administration is to require a report in statute. The administration is now required to produce thousands of reports every year, some of them on questions that have long been rendered irrelevant by events, further slowing down the bureaucracy.
While others have suggested reforming the clearance process more broadly, the State Department should take action now to streamline the clearance process for response to congressional inquiries. These reforms could then be applied more broadly later. Although streamlining the process might expose a difference of opinion among various bureaus at State, members are already well aware that these differences of opinion exist through regular meetings with representatives of those bureaus. A reformed clearance process would remove a major source of congressional animus toward administration officials when they are called upon to explain US policy.
Both the administration and US partners should also invest greater time and resources reaching out to promising new leaders on Asia-Pacific issues in the House and Senate. The new chairman of the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Representative Matt Salmon, has shown a keen interest in Asia issues since his days as a young man living in Taiwan. Unlike previous chairmen who ‘settled’ for the subcommittee chairmanship, Salmon has sought it from his first day in Congress. Since taking the gavel, he has demonstrated a sophisticated grasp of regional politics. He has energised the work of the committee, holding a flurry of hearings on a range of subjects in his first few months in office.
A number of more junior members of both chambers have also evinced an interest in Asia-Pacific affairs, which should be cultivated by the administration and US partners. Some of them, such as Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and Representative Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, are veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and thus speak with particular credibility on foreign policy issues. The freshman senator from Alaska, Dan Sullivan, a Marine Reserve infantry officer who served in the Middle East and as an assistant secretary of state in the Bush administration, has turned his attention to Asia-Pacific policy at the encouragement of Senator McCain.
Greater efforts to consult with these members should be made by the Department of State, in particular. (The Department of Defense’s large congressional relations staff needs no encouragement in this respect.) US partners in the region should seek to attract these members to travel to the region for consultations during congressional recesses. The State Department should also seek to grow its Pearson Fellows Program, which places Foreign Service officers in congressional offices for one-year assignments. The program is currently dwarfed by the equivalent program for military officers: the State Department sends 10–12 Foreign Service officers, while the military sends around 100.
American allies and security partners with high-calibre public servants, such as Australia and Singapore, should similarly seek arrangements to place their civil servants in US congressional offices. Though Australian public servants occasionally serve in congressional offices on irregular fellowship or exchange programs, the Australian Government should establish a program of regular exchanges that would see multiple Australians serving in key offices at any given time. Although there may be some sensitivities about foreign government employees working on the Hill, these exchanges occur regularly in the armed services and the rest of the executive branch. Budgetary concerns should likewise be considered in that context. If foreign exchange programs into US executive agencies are considered worth the budget, surely programs on Capitol Hill are at least as worthwhile. Most members, always hungry for additional, high-quality staff, would welcome the assistance.
Finally, both the administration and friendly foreign governments should take the opportunity to go directly to members’ supervisors: the American people. Ignorance or a lack of interest in the region among the electorate is a major reason that members are not as engaged on Asia-Pacific policy in a strategic way. Members of the president’s cabinet should also speak about Asia-Pacific policy, not in Washington, but around the country. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s speech in Arizona in April 2014 was a good step in this direction. Australian and Southeast Asian leaders should also seek out audiences far from Washington to explain their region’s importance to America.
Moreover, if President Obama truly views an increased US commitment to Asia as a major part of his legacy, he should speak about that commitment to the American people himself. The importance of the US commitment to Asia, and the role it plays in his biography and legacy, should be a major theme of the valedictory address that Obama will give as he prepares to leave office in January 2017. Such speeches can be influential, as Eisenhower’s farewell address famously showed. An Obama speech highlighting his legacy on Asia could do the same.
The US Congress shows few signs of emerging from its deepening partisanship and institutional paralysis, but there are recent signs of increased interest in the Asia-Pacific region in the current Congress. The nature of that interest and whether it can be sustained will depend on efforts by individual members, administration officials, and US allies and partners in the years to come.
In this new environment, US policymakers and partners in the region must ask how they can most effectively advocate for an adroit US engagement in the region in their new circumstances. This Analysis provides only a few suggestions, mainly in the way of more responsive and more active engagement with members. It is incumbent on all US policymakers and partners in the region with an interest in an engaged United States to continue to look for new ways to work with Congress to ensure that it is a partner, rather than an obstacle, to the maintenance of the liberal order in the region.
