US-China rivalry forcing Southeast Asia to pick sides, congressional panel hears
Southeast Asian countries now recognise they may have no choice but to take sides in the Sino-American rivalry, at least in certain sectors, even as they seek to avoid that dilemma, a US congressional advisory panel heard on Thursday.
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Moreover, this reality should prompt Washington to adopt a sector-by-sector approach to the region and shape its choices before Beijing does, according to testimony given at the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission.
'Increasingly, they are accepting that, even though they don't like it … they might have to choose on specific issues,' said Lynn Kuok of the Washington-based Brookings Institution, referring to Southeast Asian countries.
With that in mind, the US should view competition in the region in terms of 'swing sectors' and not 'swing states' as other observers have suggested, said Prashanth Parameswaran of the Wilson Centre, also a Washington think tank.
Swing states are countries that possess clout but are not firmly aligned with either the US or China.
Jon Finer, US deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration, advocated prioritising ties with Southeast Asian heavyweights like Indonesia. Photo: White House
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Albert Hirschman wrote that everyone has three options to deal with features of their society that they don't like. You can do nothing and simply endure ('loyalty'), you can fight to change things ('voice'), or you can leave and go somewhere else ('exit'). The ructions of the 60s and 70s were a form of 'voice', but riots and protests and constant arguments about Watergate were no fun. Because Americans had cars and money, many of them could take a more attractive option: exit. In the red-blue America that emerged after the 60s, Blue Americans could move to blue states and blue cities, and Red Americans could do the opposite. Back in the 1990s and 2000s, this became a cliche. If you complained about politics in your state, people would tell you 'Go move to California, hippie!' or 'Go move to Texas, redneck!'. It was a joke, but lots of people did exactly that. It wasn't just red states and blue states, either. The sorting was along urban-rural and educational lines as well. 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But although we worried about political bubbles, this system seemed to work just fine. A hippie in Oakland and a redneck in the suburbs of Houston both fundamentally felt that they were part of the same unified nation; that nation looked very different to people in each place. Californians thought America was California, and Texans thought America was Texas, and this generally allowed America to function. In fact, there's some research showing that bubbles actually reduce polarization. Bail et al. (2018) found that when people are forcibly exposed to opposing views, they become more polarized against those views: We surveyed a large sample of Democrats and Republicans who visit Twitter at least three times each week about a range of social policy issues. One week later, we randomly assigned respondents to…follow a Twitter bot for 1 month that exposed them to messages from those with opposing political ideologies (e.g., elected officials, opinion leaders, media organizations, and nonprofit groups)…We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative…Democrats exhibited slight increases in liberal attitudes after following a conservative Twitter bot, although these effects are not statistically significant. Red America and Blue America became echo chambers that helped to contain America's rising cultural and social polarization. They helped us live with our ideological diversity, by forgetting — except during presidential elections — that the people who disagreed with us still existed. It was a big country. We could spread out, there was room for everyone. As the man says in Robert Frost's poem: 'Good fences make good neighbors.' And then that all came crashing down. In the 2010s, everyone got a smartphone, and everyone got social media on that smartphone, and everyone started checking that social media many times a day. Twitter was a dedicated universal chat app where everyone could discuss public affairs with everyone else in one big scrum; for a few years, Facebook structured its main feed so that everyone could see their friends and family posting political links and commentary. Like some kind of forcible hive mind out of science fiction, social media suddenly threw every American in one small room with every other American.1 Decades of hard work spent running away from each other and creating our ideologically fragmented patchwork of geographies went up in smoke overnight, as geography suddenly ceased to mediate the everyday discussion of politics and culture. The sudden collapse of geographic sorting in political discussion threw all Americans in the same room with each other — and like the characters in Sartre's ' No Exit', they discovered that 'Hell is other people.' Conservatives suddenly discovered that a lot of Americans despise Christianity or resent White people over the legacy of discrimination. Liberals suddenly remembered that a lot of their countrymen frown on their lifestyles. Every progressive college kid got to see every piece of right-wing fake news that their grandparents were sharing on Facebook (whereas before, these would have been quietly confined to chain emails). Every conservative in a small town got to see Twitter activists denouncing White people. And so on. This was hard on everyone, but perhaps it was hardest on educated liberals, who had used the knowledge industry clusters of superstar cities as a lifeline to escape the conservative towns they grew up in. Many liberals became intensely unhappy in the smartphone age: Source: Zach Goldberg And I think young liberal women in particular bore the brunt: Source: Pew via Jonathan Haidt Social media made exit impossible, and so Americans abruptly went back to voice. Thrown into one small room with each other, they began to complain and fight. And despite Facebook's turn away from political feeds and Twitter's fragmentation, Americans still spend much of their waking life online and get most of their political news there. No physical-world geographic sorting can solve this. People still move to Texas to escape California's progressive culture, but the people who move are all still on the same apps. Driving immigrants out of the US wouldn't even remove them from English-language conversational networks; they'd be right there yelling in conservatives' faces from other countries. America's unique strengths were always its size and its freedom; it was a great big country, and everyone could spread out and do their own thing and find their people. Social media collapsed that great big country into a small town — or a handful of small towns — full of busybodies and scolds and disreputable characters and people who disagree with each other's values. And we haven't yet learned how to deal with that. 1 And with foreigners, too. Because English is more or less a universal language, extremists and agitators from every country on the planet are now able to jump into American social media discussions. In fact, a number of prominent political influencers are openly tweeting from foreign lands. But this is dwarfed by the number of foreign people who simply tweet pseudonymously, and whom Americans probably assume are other Americans. This is a problem in and of itself, because it distorts American political discourse; Americans' idea of 'what everyone thinks' is heavily influenced by what foreigners think. That's fine for dealing with global issues, but it can heavily distort our perceptions of what our fellow countrymen want. This article was first published on Noah Smith's Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.
