Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, is preparing to leave to meet with ASEAN leaders, on the day that news about him has spread around the world. As revealed in the Washington Post, unidentified individuals impersonated Rubio on the Signal messaging app, sending fake audio messages with a voice generated using artificial intelligence, with the aim of obtaining confidential information from foreign ministers, a US governor and a member of Congress.
But in addition to the understandable embarrassment caused by this incident, Rubio will have to face the challenge of meeting with heads of state with whom Washington is in openly confrontational trade negotiations.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, founded in 1967, now has ten members: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia. A few hours after the State Department’s announcement on Monday about Rubio’s trip, Trump declared that six of the ten ASEAN members will be subject to steep tariffs on their goods entering the US: Malaysia, the host country, will be subject to 25% tariffs, Laos and Myanmar 40%, Cambodia and Thailand 36%, and Indonesia 32%.
It remains to be seen whether Trump made the announcement to give his cabinet official more bargaining power, which appears to be the case, or whether there was no strategy behind it. In any case, Rubio’s visit reflects US interests in reconnecting with Asian countries and shake off Middle Eastern issues as much as possible, in order to try to refocus on the major challenge of containing China.
“Top topics that he’s going to want to hit, obviously, are to reaffirm our commitment to East Asia, to ASEAN, to the Indo-Pacific, and not just … for its own sake,” a senior State Department official told Reuters. The allusion is to Rubio, who, according to the official, should not travel to Malaysia solely for electoral and media purposes, but must also give real attention to his counterparts in return. “I think a key message that the secretary likes to deliver is that we’re committed, and we prioritize it because it is in America’s interests, right? It promotes American prosperity and it promotes American security,” he added.
For their part, as stated by the director of the Southeast Asia Programme at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, ASEAN countries have “a desire to be reassured that the United States does indeed consider the Indo-Pacific to be the main theatre of US interests, fundamental to US national security.”
The challenge for Rubio and Trump’s America is now to reconnect with Asia in order to return to the primary anti-Beijing objective, even as conflicts continue in the Middle East and Ukraine.
