Hegseth at a bilateral meeting with Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles at the Pentagon. — AFP
NEARLY 700 million people live in South-East Asia. Insulting all of them in less than a minute seems an impossible task. But not for Pete Hegseth, the utterly unqualified person Donald Trump chose to be his obedient secretary of defence for the coming four years of Trump’s second stretch as president of the United States.
On Jan 14 in Washington DC, Senator Tammy Duckworth tested Hegseth’s aptitude for the defence secretary job.
“Can you,” she asked, “name the importance of at least one of the nations in Asean and what type of agreement we have with at least one of those nations? And how many nations are in Asean by the way?”
Hegseth dodged the questions and changed the subject: “I couldn’t tell you the exact amount of nations in that but I know we have allies in South Korea, in Japan and in AUKUS with Australia.”
As if Asean and South-East Asia did not exist. As if he didn’t know what Asean was or what its acronym stood for. As if he hadn’t bothered to learn anything about Asean despite the obvious relevance of South-East Asia to the peace and security of East Asia, the Indo-Pacific and yes, the US.
Was he unaware of the US Mission to Asean led by Ambassador Yohannes Abraham? And did Hegseth really believe that Australia, Japan and South Korea were Asean member countries?
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Hegseth’s ignorance implicates his boss.
Trump’s first chaotic presidency (2017-2021) ran through six different secretaries of defence. I met one of them, Jim Mattis, at Stanford University. What impressed me about him was that apart from his combat experience he realised the importance of the security-focused diplomacy needed to avoid physical war. That mattered far less to Trump than Mattis’s humorous nickname “Mad Dog”, which appealed to Trump’s fascination with violence and masculinity.
Hegseth has catered to Trump’s macho bias by styling himself above all as a “war fighter”. As if in the Pentagon he would replace diplomacy with aggressivity. If Trump as president does copy Putin-style imperialism by threatening to absorb Canada, punish Panama and/or grab Greenland, will Hegseth the “war fighter” object?
Unlikely, despite the overwhelming evidence that Trump is not a war fighter but a war dodger, given the near-certain falsity of Trump’s claim to have been deferred from being drafted to fight in America’s war in Vietnam due to “bone spurs”.
Trump’s pick for secretary of state is less alarming. Marco Rubio, unlike Hegseth, has long been familiar with and active in foreign affairs. In the course of his 14 years of service in the US Senate, his direct experience in Asia was limited to a single week spent visiting Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. But at least he considers the US’ commitments in foreign policy and diplomacy “critically important”, and his strong opposition to Beijing has not precluded engaging China on economic matters.
He rejects isolationism in foreign affairs and favours both agency and prudence by the US abroad. In 2016 he described Trump as “the most vulgar person to ever aspire to the presidency” of the US.
Rubio has since reversed course, praising his would-be future boss. But the “vulgar” charge could come back to haunt Rubio. If he plays too independent a foreign-policy role in the president’s cabinet-to-come, Rubio may wind up listening to his vengeance-obsessed boss repeat Trump’s favourite TV show tagline: “You’re fired!”
As for Indonesia, various issues could impede its relations with the US during Trump 2.0. Trump hates US trade deficits, loves US tariffs and is mostly indifferent if not hostile toward multilateral arrangements including Asean. He and his profit-seeking family are more interested in owning hotels and golf courses in Indonesia than in helping its people reduce poverty while enabling democracy.
President Prabowo Subianto’s Indonesian advisors may advise him to cater to Trump’s insatiable ego, which was standard procedure practiced by leaders who hosted him during his first four-year reign.
But the greater challenge will arise on the middle-to-lower rungs of Trump’s top-down ladder. At those levels Trump’s indifferences and inattentions could even prove constructive by reducing, for a time and up to a point, the risk of disruptive micromanagement from the White House.
Finally, worth noting is the ironic inversion of Indonesian-American relations between B.J. Habibie and Jimmy Carter in the 1990s compared with the imminent interactions of Prabowo and Trump in the 2020s. In the earlier instance, ex-president Carter helped president Habibie legitimate democracy in post-Soeharto Indonesia. In the current case, President Prabowo has inherited a democracy already compromised by his predecessor Joko Widodo.
But the US as it is seen from Jakarta can hardly encourage Indonesia’s democrats.
The prospect that in 2025-2029 Trump will badly damage American democracy, that he will corrupt, weaken or even destroy it, raises an intriguing if thoroughly hypothetical question: The “DeKalb mafia” of Indonesian graduates of Northern Illinois University and other US universities helped democratise Indonesia after Soeharto.
Has the time now come for a young, anti-authoritarian, anti-nepotistic “Indonesian mafia” of reformers to help their American counterparts innovate and nurture reformasi in the US? — The Jakarta Post/ANN
Donald K. Emmerson is a senior fellow emeritus at Stanford University whose South-East Asia Program he founded and headed for many years.
