Bridging the Divide: Aligning & Strengthening US-Mekong Relations through Data Diplomacy

The Need to Form a More Cogent and Effectual US Approach in the MekongUS policy toward the mainland Mekong countries of Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand has vacillated over the last fifteen years between grand initiatives and public diplomacy campaigns designed to promote engagement and selective criticisms and punishments imposed in reaction to the triple rise of burgeoning authoritarianism, illicit crime, and deepening security and economic partnerships between Mekong countries and China. The Janus-faced and mercurial approach, oscillating between lackluster engagement and performative reproach, has failed to enhance US influence with authoritarian regimes that can easily access alternative sources of political and economic support.While there has been renewed bipartisan interest in US engagement in Southeast Asia in response to growing Chinese security and economic presence in the region, especially under the Biden administration, significant long-standing barriers remain which pose challenges to a more robust US re-engagement with regional leaders. For many reasons, the scale of US economic and diplomatic engagement in the Mekong region has been in decline since the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, particularly vis-à-vis the PRC[1]. First, US aid budgets have been flat or declining.[2] Second, domestic legislation such as the Mekong River Protection Act of 2011, has constrained US private sector engagement and US public affairs in the Mekong along values-based lines. Third, despite efforts under the Trump administration to re-organize the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) as the Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to challenge the economic and geographic scale of the PRC’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), Trump’s initiatives laid bare the bureaucratic, financial, and legislative limitations of US efforts to match the PRC’s state policy-bank style approach. Fourth, inside the beltway, the legacies of the US-Vietnam War and Cold War experiences in the Mekong have left policy makers fatigued and pessimistic. This is reflected in a long-term trend towards increased Republican-led isolationism that has downsized US resources to the Mekong and Indo-Pacific while relying heavily on Japan as a regional ally to shoulder the brunt of diplomatic partnership building and development finance in the sub-region[3].[1] For more on this, see Pon Souvannaseng, “Liquidated: US/Japan-Chinese Rivalry, Financial Crises and Explaining Shifts in Hydropower Finance Regimes in the Mekong,” Asian Perspective 46, no. 1 (Winter 2022).[2] See Kim Sunghwan https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/66844/KIM-DOCTORALTHESIS-2021.pdf?sequence=1[3] For more on this, see Pon Souvannaseng, “US-Japan Strategic Dissonance and Southeast Asian Infrastructure Finance,” East-West Center Asia Pacific Bulletin, Asia Pacific Bulletin, no. No. 519 (July 29, 2020), https://www.eastwestcenter.org/publications/us-japanese-strategic-dissonance-and-southeast-asian-infrastructure-finance.