As Trump looms, Blinken aims to reassure allies on U.S. commitment to Asia

LUANG PRABANG, Laos — For three and a half years, President Joe Biden and his aides have insisted that the United States is a Pacific power, and that its allies and partners in the region need not worry about Washington’s commitments.

For U.S. officials, underscoring that message has become increasingly important as China’s power has grown. Now Secretary of State Antony Blinken plans to deliver assurances in person across six nations, his most ambitious trip in the region.

When Blinken lands in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, on Saturday, he will face a barrage of questions about what dramatic shifts in U.S. policy might or might not occur next year, given the upcoming change in the presidency.

Biden’s announcement last Sunday that he is no longer running for reelection sent shock waves around the world. Many of America’s allies are especially concerned about a second Trump presidency, given that former President Donald Trump has constantly declared that those allies are conning the United States into providing military support. They are uncertain if Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, can beat him in November.

Regardless, Blinken’s core message will be one of American resolve.

“I think the message that the secretary is going to be conveying to the region is that America is all in on the Indo-Pacific,” Daniel Kritenbrink, assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, told reporters Monday. “I think from Day One of this administration, we have significantly and dramatically stepped up our engagement.”

But the talking point does not answer in concrete terms the main question from allies: Starting next year, will the United States invest significantly in Asia — in both economic and military terms? Blinken could argue that Harris’ foreign policy would be a continuation of Biden’s, but in no way can he speak for Trump.

“Honestly, it will be a challenging task because countries in the region, including China, are looking beyond the Biden administration and thinking of the future,” said Yun Sun, a director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a research group in Washington.

Biden, Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, have spoken about China as the greatest long-term challenge to American power. They have tried to shape U.S. foreign policy around that but have often been forced to address crises elsewhere in the world.

Even for this trip, Blinken left Washington one day later than initially planned after Biden agreed to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, at the White House on Thursday.

Yet, there has been a constant in Biden’s approach to Asia: He has bolstered military alliances, to the consternation of Xi Jinping, China’s leader. Along those lines, he has signed new agreements with Japan, the Philippines, Australia and South Korea. The United States is sending Tomahawk cruise missiles to Japan and nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, and it has obtained greater access to military bases in the Philippines.

Biden has also, for the first time, used presidential authority to send weapons to Taiwan, the de facto independent island that the Chinese Communist Party aims to rule.

But Biden has also been constrained by domestic U.S. politics, to the chagrin of Asian allies. He has not tried to revive American involvement in the regional free trade pact that President Barack Obama had helped to forge, and his economic policies have not given allies anything near the levels of access to U.S. markets they crave. China is the largest trading partner for many of the countries, and a common refrain across Asia is: How can the United States hope to compete with China when its economic commitment is so lackluster?

After Trump’s victory in 2016, Biden read the room on economic populism among American voters, both among isolationist Republicans and progressive Democrats as well as in American unions. He rarely talks about free trade, though he was once a champion of it.

Kritenbrink pointed out that the United States and Asian nations did $2 trillion worth of annual trade. But some of those countries have been caught in the crossfire of Biden’s economic policies. South Korean officials and car company executives were irate when it became clear that under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, Korean cars did not qualify for tax credits for customers buying electric vehicles. And in Japan, some officials are worried about the Biden administration’s push to force Japanese companies to avoid selling some semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.

At the same time, Asian officials know economic relations could worsen. Trump has talked about imposing high tariffs on a wide range of goods from many countries if he becomes president again. Asian officials will pepper Blinken about the future of trade as he hits the six countries: Laos, Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore and Mongolia.

Meanwhile, Trump has consistently said that countries that rely on the U.S. military to help with security should pay more to the United States. He has little strategic regard for U.S. military presence overseas, even as some Republican lawmakers have argued that the United States must engage in a rapid military buildup in the Asia-Pacific region to deter China from invading Taiwan or making other aggressive moves in the region.

In a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Trump criticized Taiwan, saying it “doesn’t give us anything.” And at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he called Xi “brilliant” and mentioned a “beautiful note” he had received from the Chinese leader after a recent assassination attempt on Trump. He added that he “got along very well” with Xi until the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020.

His words sent a signal to China even as it stirred anxiety among officials in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia.

“For China, the anticipation of Trump’s policy toward the region is much more important than the trip by Blinken,” Yun said.

In Vientiane, Blinken might meet one on one with Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official. The two have had some calm discussions and some volatile ones, including in February 2023, when Blinken told Wang that the United States suspected China was on the verge of sending arms to Russia for the war in Ukraine.

“Wang Yi will be disciplined about not making news that could be construed as supporting or opposing any presidential candidate,” said Ryan Hass, the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.

Wang and other Chinese officials no doubt will watch closely as Blinken flies to Tokyo and Manila in tandem with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. In each capital, they will meet together with their counterparts. In Tokyo, Blinken also plans to attend a meeting of top diplomats from the so-called Quad countries: India, Japan, Australia and the United States.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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