FOR two days next week Barack Obama will lay on a party for an unlikely club at Sunnylands, a Californian estate used for bigwig retreats. Among his guests are: a recent coup leader; Asia’s longest-serving autocrat; a prime minister who thinks there is nothing untoward in having several hundred million dollars paid into his bank accounts; two superannuated communist leaders; and a hereditary sultan with 420,000 loyal subjects and 257 bathrooms. Oh, and there are even a couple of democrats. The club is ASEAN, the ten-member Association of South-East Asian Nations. It is the first time an American president has played host to all South-East Asia’s leaders at once.
Why the summit? Businesswise, ASEAN matters to America. Taken together, which increasingly it wants to be, its members would be the world’s seventh-biggest economy. American foreign investment in ASEAN was $226 billion in 2014, more than in China, South Korea and Japan combined. South-East Asia is young and economically vibrant.
Second, democracy in South-East Asia needs the kind of boost Mr Obama’s attentions will provide. Myanmar’s extraordinary democratic transition...Continue reading
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