THE United States is on a diplomatic offensive after years of strategic ambiguity, passive engagement and benign neglect for a policy of active engagement with Asean.
In the past, top US officials always skipped Asean meetings and when they did participate, they sent more junior officials to the region.
During his watch, president Donald Trump downgraded Asean. Neither he nor his senior staff members attended any high-level Asean meeting.
Barack Obama was the last US president to attend the Asean Summit in 2016. He is best remembered as the advocate of the policy of pivoting to the Asia Pacific to challenge the emergence of China as an influential power in the region.
There has been a flurry of visits by top American officials to the region in the last two months. Vice-President Kamala Harris just arrived in Singapore on Sunday.
From Singapore, she flew to Vietnam to discuss a range of issues, from a bilateral agreement on the digital economy to what to do with China, which both countries have been at odds with. She is expected to persuade a reluctant Hanoi to join the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue on the South China Sea.
To confront China militarily, President Joe Biden has enlisted the support of some Western allies and like-minded democratic countries from the region. A coalition of military forces from Australia, Japan and India
has teamed up with the US military.
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue started as a joint humanitarian mission in the aftermath of the Indian ocean tsunami in 2004. Today, this informal arrangement has become a military platform for ganging up against China.
Before Harris, Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin visited Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam late last month. Austin gave a talk in Singapore on "Imperative of Partnership", where he hinted that partnership entailed sacrifices from members, while reassuring the region that America would not flinch against its new rival.
In Manila, Austin got President Rodrigo Duterte to renew the Visiting Forces Agreement, a key defence pact that allows US troops access to military bases in the Philippines.
A small achievement considering Duterte was under great pressure at home to push back Chinese activities off the Philippines-occupied Second Thomas Shoal and at Whitsun Reef in March this year.
The US' greater reliance on the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue for security in the Indo-Pacific region can lead to the sidelining of Asean, which, throughout its existence, has shown no interest in getting involved in any military conflict.
The US-China rivalry goes beyond ideology. It is about geopolitics, culture and challenging China's economic ascendancy.
This is the first time in history that the US, a flailing ruling power, is playing a catch-up game with China, a rising power from a different cultural mould.
The region has coexisted with China for thousands of years and learnt to manage its neighbour's tempestuous behaviour. China has never colonised any state in the region, except Vietnam, unlike the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, British, Japanese and the Americans.
The US' unfounded fear of the "red peril" borders on bigotry. I really do not understand why the countries in the region are dragged into this security quagmire between the two rival powers.
While the claimant states in the South China Sea are upset with Beijing for stealing their fish, polluting their waters and occasionally using superior force to intimidate them at sea, none of them want a war with China.
The US-Sino rivalry is also about political posturing and a war of attrition to see who will blink first. A protracted military conflict with China in the South China Sea could well become a new regional conflict, after Afghanistan.
The writer is a keen student of geopolitics