As Biden's presidency wanes, US and Asian nations do a delicate dance

Antony Blinken sought to reassure that the United States was indeed a Pacific power and here to stay, as President Joe Biden has repeatedly asserted.

Ulaanbaatar: Secretary of State Antony Blinken's sprint across Asia last week -- six nations in six days -- ended with a neighbourly gesture in Mongolia.

During a traditional outdoor display of wrestling, archery and equestrianism in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital, the prime minister presented Blinken with a horse.

Blinken named his new companion Frontier, and the prime minister snapped a horse selfie. It appeared to be a sign of the country's unalloyed bond with the United States, which officials in both countries call a "third neighbor" of Mongolia, an alternative to China and Russia next door.

Other US officials have received gifts of horses from Mongolia -- Celtic was given to Vice President Joe Biden, Victory to President Donald Trump and Montana to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And like them, Blinken did not take his horse home across the Pacific; if he had wanted to do so, the logistics were a reminder that the United States does not actually border Mongolia, the way China and Russia do.

Mongolia operates in a multipolar world, not in the triumphalist moment that America briefly enjoyed in the post-Cold War era.

Just weeks before Blinken's visit, the nation in the high steppes of Central Asia held an annual peacekeeping exercise, called Khaan Quest, in which it hosted Chinese soldiers, as well as troops from the United States, Turkey, India, Japan, South Korea and Qatar.

It is a rare venue in which American and Chinese troops train in proximity for a common cause.

While many Asian nations are wary of China's military buildup, and sometimes clash with Chinese forces in disputed waters and territories, they also realize they need to tolerate the People's Liberation Army, whose troops are across the border. Their main hedge is to try to ensure that the United States maintains a strong presence in Asia to counterbalance China. That kind of strategy is what Mongolia calls its third-neighbor policy.

"The United States plays a leading role in Mongolia's third-neighbor policy," the country's foreign minister, Battsetseg Batmunkh, said during a pre-horse news conference with Blinken on Friday. "Fostering our strategic partnership is not hindered by geographical remoteness."

US foreign policy in Asia is especially complex, defined not by wars but by a careful dance involving China and the other nations across the vast continent. There are no Cold War-style blocs here. While many Asian countries seek greater partnerships with the United States as China's military and economic might grow, they also engage with China, the backyard behemoth.

Blinken's trip was aimed at strengthening his country's military alliances with Japan and the Philippines, where he appeared with Lloyd Austin, the US defense secretary. (This week, those two officials met with their Australian counterparts in Annapolis, Maryland.) And he sought to reassure the other four nations that he visited -- Laos, Vietnam, Singapore and Mongolia -- that the United States was indeed a Pacific power and here to stay, as President Joe Biden has repeatedly asserted.

Blinken's trip came as the countries crave comfort from Washington.

The night before Blinken flew to Laos, Biden made a televised speech explaining why he would not run for reelection. The Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, has been a relative cipher on her own foreign policy views, though she is expected to follow the general direction set by Biden.

In an obvious effort to pay respect to a potential President Harris, the prime minister of Mongolia, Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai, told Blinken on Friday that he had a "very good meeting" with Harris in Washington last year and that he wished her the "best of luck for her upcoming elections."

For US allies and partners, Trump, the Republican challenger, brings even more uncertainty. He has criticized US alliances and threatened to pull out of several important ones.

Trump has praised Xi Jinping, China's leader, at recent rallies and expressed skepticism about US support of Taiwan, the democratic island that the Chinese Communist Party aims to rule.

Blinken's trip made clear that the United States in many cases is less concerned about ideology than maintaining its power, despite Biden's emphasis on the value of democracy. Both Laos and Vietnam, like China, are ruled by authoritarian Communist parties. Yet Blinken's efforts to strengthen bonds with both nations even included visiting the widow of the recently deceased longtime party chief of Vietnam at her home and lighting incense sticks there to honor the dead leader, Nguyen Phu Trong.

Likewise, while Vietnam's Communist leaders nurture their party's decades-long ties with its ideological counterpart in China, they know too well the persistent history of Chinese attempts to invade Vietnam, most recently in 1979. Like the Philippines and three other Southeast Asian nations, Vietnam is embroiled in territorial disputes with China over the South China Sea and is aware of the potential for an armed conflict.

At a meeting with Blinken in Hanoi, Vietnam's president and new party chief, To Lam, noted that his predecessor, Nguyen, had "always wanted to elevate the relationship with the United States."

Blinken, alongside Austin, injected some confidence into US military alliances with Japan and the Philippines. The officials announced a new joint-force command in Japan and pledged $500 million to the Philippines to help modernize its military.

However, Blinken had less to offer in terms of new economic engagement in the region. Ever since the United States under Trump backed out of an ambitious regional free trade pact that President Barack Obama had led in shaping, Asian nations have wondered whether Americans are serious about competing economically with China, the top trade partner for many of them.

On a visit to Tokyo in 2022, Biden announced a new regional trade initiative called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, but Asian leaders have been skeptical of how robust that will be. Officials have announced some progress on workforce training, the promotion of green technology and a few other elements, but they are still negotiating over trade.

Asian leaders are all too aware that both the Republican and Democratic parties are distancing themselves from free trade, which had helped bolster the region's economies in recent decades.

In a public conversation with Blinken in the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore, Chan Heng Chee, who served as ambassador to the United States for 16 years, took the Biden administration to task for this.

"You cannot promote democracy if you don't promote trade," she said. "So I get very discouraged when I hear Americans say we can't do trade."

Blinken argued that the United States was the biggest source of foreign direct investment across Southeast Asia and the biggest recipient of foreign direct investment from the region. America is a "great trading nation," he said, but must ensure that "the trade works for our working people, that it works for our companies, that it works for our societies."

He pointed out that state subsidies gave Chinese companies an unfair market advantage in the global system of free trade.

"Certainly," Chan said. "But we hope that the way countries respond would not be through protectionist measures, more protectionist measures."

Blinken and his American colleagues have also struggled to convince their Chinese counterparts that they are not trying to contain China or suppress its rise. His trip along an arc of countries around China and the military talks in Japan and the Philippines have no doubt reinforced the notion of US containment in Beijing.

At the start of his trip, Blinken was already setting off alarm bells among Chinese diplomats. He met one-on-one with Wang Yi, China's top foreign policy official, on July 27 on the sidelines of an annual conference of foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Vientiane, Laos. The meeting was cordial as they talked about potential areas of cooperation, including climate change, countering the fentanyl trade and keeping high-level military communications open.

But according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry summary of the meeting, Wang told Blinken that China would not submit to "pressure and blackmail" and that the United States had intensified "its containment and suppression of China."

Blinken got a warmer reception in Mongolia, his last stop.

The prime minister, Luvsannamsrai, said he valued the partnership with America on reinforcing democratic values, the rule of law and a market economy, as well as on the potential of the United States to help Mongolia move away from its dependence on mineral extraction for wealth.

"Cooperation with the United States is important for ensuring Mongolia's economic diversification and independence," he said.

And then he gave Blinken the horse. For more than a week, Blinken and his colleagues had debated what name to give it -- Secretariat of State, US of Neigh and Pony Blinken were among the contenders -- before settling on Frontier. A horse handler led him away as Blinken left for the airport under storm clouds to fly home.