Our guest today is Brigadier General David Stilwell, who served as assistant secretary of state for the bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs under the first Trump administration after a series of other roles as well, including as defense attaché to China and as part of the US Air Force where he started his career back in 1980. We'll start our conversation talking through a number of contemporary developments, including the Trump administration's approach to Southeast Asia and country perspectives on not being forced to choose between China and the United States. Be sure to stay tuned as we go through a range of other subjects, including the future trajectory of US China relations and Washington's approach to flashpoints such as Taiwan and the South China Sea.

To receive full ASEAN Wonk posts and support our work, consider a paid subscription for $5 a month/$50 a year through the button below. For more on pricing for institutions, groups and discounted categories, visit this page.

Note: The transcript that follows the above free clip preview has been lightly edited for clarity and organized into sections for ease of quick browsing. For all ASEAN Wonk Podcast episodes, full video and audio podcasts, along with edited and sectioned transcripts as well as block quotes, will be a premium product for our paying subscribers, but we will include a short free transcript preview and a clip for all readers to maintain accessibility. Paying subscribers can find the rest of the full transcript and the full video podcast right below the paywall. If you have not already, do consider subscribing, and, if you have already done so and like what you see and hear, do consider forwarding this to others as well who may be interested. Thank you for your support as always!

TRUMP II VS TRUMP I POLICY CONTEXTS

ASEAN Wonk: So welcome to the podcast, General Stilwell. I wanted to start, given your experience serving in the first Trump administration, with where you see continuities and changes in Trump I vs. Trump II. Talking to policymakers in the region, there's a sense that in the second Trump administration we're seeing the obvious headline makers like the hardening of tariff policy, some continuity on issues like scam centers, for example, and there's also a category of maybe a little bit too early to say definitively on where we're heading on issues like China policy as we build up to leader-to-leader interactions there. You travel extensively in the region and we've actually been in a few engagements as well over the past year in Southeast Asia. What's your sense of how things are looking on the Asia policy front in Washington, as well as the regional perceptions and responses to that?

General Stilwell: Well, thanks for having me here. And, hopefully, my perspective adds to the conversation and doesn't detract too much. But the focus has been on great powers, big economies like China, and then from there, Northeast Asia, primarily Japan. We can talk about that later, the over under on that. So Southeast Asia, in general, I think has gotten a pretty good treatment on this. The agreement with Vietnam came across fairly quietly without a lot of drama, which says there's interest in shifting markets and development and production centers away from one main aggressive and adversarial center and shifting it to countries that have lower labor costs and have many other advantages that that the PRC has since lost. So I can't speak to all, but I do know that I was fairly happy with how the agreement with Vietnam came out, and we're going to focus primarily on economic sense.

Unlike Trump I, where the action areas were the Defense Department and the State Department, it really seems like there's been a shift away from that more toward Commerce, Treasury and USTR. No criticism there. If you're looking at national debt now at $37.5 trillion dollars, you’ve got to do something to get that under control. And if you do that by pumping up the economy, moving industry back to the US, all the things that we're hearing about, that's a reasonable approach. I would just say it can't come at the cost of those other traditional security centers like Defense and State.

“Unlike Trump I, where the action areas were the Defense Department and the State Department, it really seems like there's been a shift away from that more toward Commerce, Treasury and USTR.”

PLURALISM AND COMPETITION IN US SOUTHEAST ASIA POLICY

ASEAN Wonk: The other aspect I wanted to zoom in a bit on is what we've been hearing since actually a few years ago publicly from Southeast Asian officials about not being forced to choose between the United States and China. My own sense has long been that this is more about the choices that these countries actually make for themselves and how they make them, rather than anything that's imposed by Washington or other countries. And sometimes, as we both know, choices are being made more for shorter-term regime interests, which are not necessarily the same as longer term national interests. You’ve spent a lot of time thinking through the issue of choices. I recall when you were Assistant Secretary, you tried to emphasize the fact that under the first Trump administration, just because there was a greater focus on sovereignty didn't mean that there wasn't room for pluralism and notions of multipolarity.

At the same time, you fast forward a few years to the present, you know, just a few weeks ago we saw China with its Shanghai Cooperation Organization summitry in Tianjin promote more aggressively its own notion of what a world order should look like, and the Global Governance Initiative was rolled out. How much room do you think there is for this kind of pluralism and coexistence of worldviews as these views are competing increasingly between the United States and China and other capitals are adjusting their own approaches to this as well?

General Stilwell: I actually I love the idea of pluralism. We took some heat over that presentation at Brookings when we gave it in 2019. The mighty David Feith wrote that speech. He wrote it at the last minute because he just had this change of heart. And the folks at Brookings were surprised that we went down that path, but think about it. That was my experience everywhere I went is people were very happy when American diplomats did not show up with a non-pluralistic agenda saying, my way or the highway, you're going to do human rights, you're going to do all these things that we demand of you.

I grew up as a fighter pilot, and we're a fairly direct bunch. We don't use a lot of diplomatic language. And one of the first things you learn is you've got two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in those proportions. Well, I suggest our diplomats consider that because I oftentimes would follow one of my colleagues into a capital, and they had just gotten wire brushed and the finger wagged in their face about doing things that were culturally the norm for them. So, one, we have to stop preaching at folks. We need to listen to what they have to say. If we want to guide them; if we want to see change in how things are going, if there's human rights practice, we gently guide them into that without trying to force them. And so it starts off with diplomacy. And we should be teaching these things as we raise our diplomats. On that point, though, the Chinese version of this stuff is unipolar. It's unilateral. It's my way or the highway. You will do these things. And then they go after these countries at the SCO summit. I mean, it's rogue’s gallery. It's countries that really have no accountability with their own populations.

And my first experience with this was at that Shangri-La Dialogue in 2014. I went with the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Marty Dempsey, and Chuck Hagel, a Republican congressman who the Obama administration brought in as secretary of defense. What a great choice. The Japanese made a very strong press for watching out what the PRC is doing with debt traps and all that stuff. It was the first time that there was actually a really strong contentious back and forth between the PRC and, in this case, the US. All the others were hanging back behind the US going: okay, you guys take this one, but we don't want to get splashed. Don't make us choose between the two of you. That's why this headline really got my attention: we want a strong economic relationship with the PRC, but we want the US to provide our security. Now think about the math on that. When you're doing trade – economic interactions and those things – it should be a win-win. Everybody's condition increases. Security is not that way. Security is a bill. It's costly. We're going to spend $850 billion this year on the Defense Department, and that's not even enough. So I've been wrestling with that since 2014. I hadn't come up with a good four syllable response to “don't make us choose.” A very good friend and a former colleague and a former boss came back with “Lee Kuan Yew chose.” I like that one, but maybe a little more something a little less.

“I hadn't come up with a good four syllable response to “don't make us choose.” A very good friend and a former colleague and a former boss came back with “Lee Kuan Yew chose.” I like that one, bu