The United States and ASEAN

Abstract

This chapter offers an overview of US policies and approaches toward the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as an extension of US Southeast Asia policy across five post-Cold War administrations. It highlights important evolution correspondent to important changes in Asia’s institutional and geopolitical context, with the Obama administration representing the apex of US engagement and the Trump administration representing its most volatile point. Most of all, it gives attention to structural and systemic influences that provide core continuities, as well as defining tensions, in US ASEAN policy across administrations despite their differences. It highlights two tensions, in particular, that have shaped and complicated US approaches to ASEAN in Southeast Asia – namely, the tension between bilateral and regional approaches and the concerns of the United States as a global great power and those of local Southeast Asian powers and how these tensions, in turn, have conditioned US priorities and preferences. The chapter concludes by summarizing common principles and practices found across administrations in their approaches to ASEAN and Southeast Asia.