Opinion | Pompeo’s failure to turn Asia against China should be a wake-up call for US policy hawks

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made his latest and probably last trip in office to Asia – visiting in succession India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Indonesia and, added at the last minute, Vietnam. The face of US foreign policy was on a mission to persuade these countries to join an anti-China coalition under the cover of the US concept of a “free and open Indo-Pacific”.

At every stop, he criticised China’s actions and, in particular, the Chinese Communist Party. To Pompeo and apparently the US, “securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time”. But what he heard in return were refusals to jump on the bandwagon.

The US – and China’s actions in Ladakh and the Indian Ocean – may be nudging India out of its non-aligned status. The US-India Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement signed during Pompeo’s visit will facilitate closer military cooperation. It is not clear if this means India will open its military facilities to US assets, but New Delhi has allowed the US to refuel and obtain logistics support for an armed P-8 Poseidon at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands.

This may have been a one-off or the beginning of a pattern. Given the resurgence of the Quad – a clearly anti-China grouping – it may well be the latter. If so, China is likely to consider that India is, for practical military purposes, no longer “non-aligned”.

In Sri Lanka, when Pompeo raised China’s “debt-trap diplomacy” as a warning against getting too close to China, its president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, denied Sri Lanka was caught in a debt trap. He also stressed that Sri Lanka is non-aligned and will stay that way, tweeting later: “Sri Lanka will always maintain a neutral standing foreign policy and will not get entangled in struggles between power blocs.”

Indonesia must have been a big disappointment as well. Eyeing Indonesia’s disputes with China in the South China Sea, Pompeo must have thought he could convince the de facto leader of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to join US efforts to contain China.