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This article explores perceptions and reactions across Southeast Asia towards the Obama administration's "pivot" or "rebalance" to Asia. The US approach has been dismissed as more rhetorical than substantive grand strategy, its credibility under renewed scrutiny following President Obama's cancelled visit to Southeast Asia in October 2013. Nonetheless, the rebalance has expanded from its origins in 2010-11, acquiring diplomatic and economic "prongs" with a particular focus on Southeast Asia, broadening the bandwidth of US engagement beyond military diplomacy and force realignment. However, the US "pivot" has had to contend with entrenched narratives of the US role in the region oscillating between extremes of neglect or over-militarization. The US-China strategic dynamic weighing over the region, itself central to Washington's strategic calculus across Asia, has also coloured the lens through which Southeast Asians have viewed the re-balance. Varied reactions to the US rebalance at the national level in Southeast Asia are further suggestive of a sub-regional divide between "continental" and "maritime" states that to some extent predisposes their perspectives and orientation towards the Great Powers.
Keywords: Southeast Asia, US foreign policy, defence, geopolitics, perceptions.
President Obama's "no-show" at the October 2013 East Asia Summit (EAS) and US-ASEAN Summit in Bali - compounded by cancelled bilateral visits to Malaysia and the Philippines either side - has added to doubts already being expressed volubly within the region about the durability and commitment of the US "pivot" or "rebalance" to the wider region, particularly given Washington's claims to be pursuing a sub-regional focus on Southeast Asia. There is, however, nothing especially new about alternating swings in regional attitudes towards the United States. As Alice Ba has argued, regional perceptions have tended to cast US policy towards Southeast Asia in binary terms, alternating between the extremes of over-militarization and "systemic neglect".1 The first and second George W. Bush administrations typified this curve, initially sparking concerns that the United States was intent on opening up a "second front" in the so-called "war on terror" in Southeast Asia, yielding to disappointment at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's non-attendance at successive meetings of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF).2
The rebalance3 to Asia - launched two years into Barack Obama's first term - initially re-awakened the over-militarization critique of US policy, given its up-front...