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Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Trump 2.0

January 28, 2025

STANFORD – Nearly 700 million people live in Southeast Asia. Insulting all of them in less than a minute seems an impossible task. But not for Pete Hegseth, the utterly unqualified person Donald Trump wants to be his obedient secretary of defense for the coming four years of Trump’s second stretch as president of the United States.

On Jan. 14 in Washington, D.C., Senator Tammy Duckworth tested Hegseth’s aptitude for the defense secretary job. “Can you,” she asked, “name the importance of at least one of the nations in ASEAN and what type of agreement we have with at least one of those nations? And how many nations are in ASEAN by the way?”

Hegseth dodged the questions and changed the subject: “I couldn’t tell you the exact amount of nations in that but I know we have allies in South Korea, in Japan and in AUKUS with Australia.” As if ASEAN and Southeast Asia did not exist. As if he didn’t know what ASEAN was or what its acronym stood for. As if he hadn’t bothered to learn anything about ASEAN despite the obvious relevance of Southeast Asia to the peace and security of East Asia, the Indo-Pacific and yes, the US. Was he unaware of the US Mission to ASEAN led by Ambassador Yohannes Abraham? And did Hegseth really believe that Australia, Japan and South Korea were ASEAN member countries?

Hegseth’s ignorance implicates his likely future boss. Trump’s first chaotic presidency (2017-2021) ran through six different secretaries of defense. I met one of them, Jim Mattis, at Stanford University. What impressed me about him was that apart from his combat experience he realized the importance of the security-focused diplomacy needed to avoid physical war. That mattered far less to Trump than Mattis’s humorous nickname

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