KUALA LUMPUR – Malaysia last week urged US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to attend a Southeast Asian security meeting in Laos later this month.

The United States has said Rice will skip the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the post-ministerial conference of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations annual meeting in Vientiane.

“I’m sure if she attends for one or two days, it will not divert her agenda on trying to find a resolution to the various problems in the Middle East because these are long-term problems,” Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar said on July 12.

“Just deciding not to attend, I don’t think it sends a good signal,” he was quoted as saying by the Bernama news agency.

Syed Hamid had earlier said Rice’s decision to skip the meeting was “regrettable” and indicated Washington was losing interest in the region.
“They have given us the reason that they are very occupied with the Middle East,” he said. “It has sent a very uneasy signal. This is the first time – it is unusual.”

Asked if Rice’s decision not to attend could be viewed as a US snub to ASEAN, Syed Hamid said: “You cannot help such perception to be considered because it has never happened before”.

The meeting in the Laotian capital includes a July 28-29 dialogue among ASEAN and its key trading partners, notably the United States, the European Union, China, Japan and Russia, as well as the ARF, the only official security meeting in the Asia-Pacific region.

It will be the first time in about two decades that a US secretary of state has not attended the annual ASEAN foreign ministers’ summit and the ARF.
US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick will represent Washington at the talks.

Analysts have warned that Rice’s non-attendance could hurt US credentials in the region and deepen doubts over Southeast Asia’s importance to US foreign policy-makers.

Amitav Acharya, an analyst with the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS) in Singapore, said some Southeast Asian countries will view Rice’s absence as a US snub.

“It will send concerns on the level of US engagement, especially in the US support for the war on terror in Southeast Asia,” Acharya told AFP on July 8.
“After all, the US called Southeast Asia the second front in the war on terror. If you call something the second front and you don’t show up to defend it, then you are sending a different signal.”

Southeast Asia is the operations base for Jemaah Islamiyah, an Al-Qaeda affiliate blamed for a series of bloody attacks in Indonesia and believed to have training bases in the southern Philippines.

Ernest Bower, a partner with Washington-based consultancy BrooksBowerAsia and a former US-ASEAN Business Council president, said Rice’s absence was bad diplomacy.

“The Americans suffer from bad public relations – and having the deputy secretary of state attend the ARF and PMC (post-ministerial conference) will add to that perception problem,” he said.

Sadly, not having the secretary of state attend the... meetings will be perceived as a lack of top level US engagement in Southeast Asia.

IDSS security analyst Andrew Tan said Rice’s absence should not come as a surprise because President George Bush’s unilateral-focused administration had downgraded the importance of multilateral forums like the ARF.

“It’s more reflective of the preferences of the current administration in Washington which is, after all, not seeing multilateral institutions in very high regard,” Tan told AFP.

But Tan also noted that the United States had “many friends” in Southeast Asia, and Rice’s absence at the ARF was unlikely to leave Washington alienated in a major way.

Some regional governments have said they would have liked Rice to attend the meeting, but sought to downplay any ramifications. Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo said he was “disappointed” but understood Rice’s reasons.