LOS ANGELES: Tomorrow and on Tuesday, US President Barack Obama will host 10 Asean leaders, as well as the Asean secretary-general at a landmark summit at the historic Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage, California.
Dubbed the “Camp David” of the west coast of the US, Sunnylands is a venue for national and foreign leaders to gather for summit meetings and retreats.
Obama hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping at the estate in June 2013 in a landmark summit that is now hailed as the “shirtsleeves summit” amid expectations that the world’s two most powerful men would forge a friendship.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak arrived here on Thursday ahead of the summit. He will meet Malaysians living here, attend the summit, meet fund managers and industry leaders in San Francisco before leaving for home on Wednesday.
Here are a few facts about the US-Asean Summit and what it means for the Asean and US foreign policy agenda now and the future:
Significance of the summit:
DIPLOMATS and analysts say the summit reflects the importance the Obama administration places on Asia and the Southeast Asian region in Obama’s two four-year terms in office.
Asean is also an emerging economic force. Together, the 10 Asean countries, with a population of 630 million, form the world’s seventh largest economy. Asean is both a major US trading partner and a top investment destination for US companies.
Diplomatically, the most significant outcome of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” foreign policy or rebalancing towards Asia has been the sharper focus on Asean. Some US officials privately term it “the rebalance within the rebalance”.
Aaron Connelly, a researcher at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, wrote this week that the US was right to deal with the entirety of Asean, an institution that “supports the liberal international order”.
ASEAN and US officials expect the two days of summitry to show some visible progress on moving the US-Asean political, security and economic ties forward.
At the Asean-related summit gathering in Kuala Lumpur last November, Obama announced that the US-Asean relationship be elevated to the level of a “strategic partnership” and mapped out a concrete plan of action to implement it.
The Sunnylands retreat is planned in such a way that Obama and Asean leaders will be more informal and engage in frank discussions on at least three main subjects.
The two sides will have two planned retreat sessions on economic, political and security issues, as well as a working dinner.
THE summit offers a real chance for Asean to demonstrate its relevance and growing clout in the international stage by speaking up on global issues such as climate change, cross-border crimes, the European refugee crisis, South China Sea and the threat posed by the Islamic State.
Asean has shown that it is becoming an economic powerhouse. Four of the Asean states — Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam — (along with the US) are in the Club of 12 nations that founded the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade agreement. The Obama administration has finally found a regional trade formula that fits the diversity of Southeast Asian economies.
In Sunnylands, leaders will also talk about new initiatives focusing on innovation and entrepreneurship. There will be a conference organised by the US-Asean Business Council in San Francisco to be held on Feb 17.
WITH Obama leaving office early next year and the US presidential race getting hotter, the Sunnylands summit will set the template for enduring US-Asean ties even after Obama departs from the White House and a signal for his predecessor to support his Asian policy.
Just as his unprecedented hosting of African leaders in the US in 2014, Obama will use the Sunnylands summit to tell US policymakers that they must continue to have high-level engagements with Asia and Asean.
By A. Jalil Hamid in Los Angeles