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Kuala Lumpur: Ordinarily, you might say ‘blink, and you’ll miss it’. But this is Donald Trump.
His presence in Malaysia, vanishingly brief and engineered squarely at winning his much-coveted Nobel Peace Prize next year, sent the energy at ASEAN to 11.
You knew Airforce One had disgorged the US president by the hooting and clapping from inside the vast press centre, whose 1000-plus occupants, mostly from South-East Asia, watched each swaggering presidential step on the in-house televisions.
Then, when he danced a Trumpian jig opposite the Malaysian dancers on the tarmac, well, that was hilarious - so the voices agreed.
Anthony Albanese didn’t get the convention centre buzzing like this. But he was busy from when he arrived at about 5.30pm on Sunday (8.30pm AEDT) to the waiting Anwar Ibrahim, the Malaysian host, who whisked him into the Asia Zero Emission Community leaders meeting.
The PM’s evening concluded with his first bilateral meeting, a big one, with brand new Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. They talked about defence cooperation, trade and investment.
Trump presiding over the new Thailand-Cambodia peace deal.Credit: Getty Images
Albanese will give his first public speech on Tuesday at the Indo-Pacific forum, telling the leaders that Australia wants “to take the next step”, according to the disseminated draft.
“To move beyond a mindset which says we are on the ‘doorstep’ of South-East Asia and its extraordinary economic transformation, to an approach that gets us in on the ground floor.”
He will also talk-up the report his government released two years ago in Jakarta, called Invested: Australia’s Southeast Economic Strategy to 2040, and claim it is already producing results in part because Australia’s two-way trade with ASEAN has never been higher.
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But every year sets a record because South-East Asia is growing.
Government figures do show, however, that South-East Asia is Australia’s second-biggest two-way trading partner, behind China. And of the ten ASEAN nations – eleven now with Sunday’s accession of Timor-Leste – six of them are in Australia’s top-15 export markets.
So it is important to turn up.
Which brings us back to Trump, whose interest in South-East Asia beyond playing peacemaker is questionable, even though Bloomberg reports that ASEAN is now a larger source of goods for the US than China.
On the sideline of the summit, which he attended for an afternoon, Trump signed a bunch of trade and tariff arrangements, including vague critical minerals pacts with Thailand and Malaysia.
US President Donald Trump speaks with Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s prime minister, after arriving at Kuala Lumpur.Credit: Bloomberg
Baseline tariffs among the ASEAN bloc are generally 19 per cent, though as low as 10 per cent for Singapore and Timor-Leste, and as high as 40 per cent for Laos and the barbarous military regime in Myanmar.
Some nations have won limited product exemption. None have walked away with lower base rates.
But Trump’s chief reason to attend ASEAN for the first time since 2017 was to preside over an expanded peace deal between Thailand and Cambodia, whose five-day border war ended in July with the intervention of Trump, who threatened bad tariff deals, and Anwar.
Trump wants a Nobel Prize, so he made his visit conditional on getting in on the signatures.
Trump lapped up the fanfare and attention.Credit: Bloomberg
This is not to say it was pointless. On the contrary, both sides began withdrawing heavy weapons from the border by 9pm (12am AEDT) that night, according to the Cambodian government.
The new arrangements were particularly significant for the 18 Cambodians prisoners of war who have been in Thailand since the original ceasefire. This masthead spoke to the parents of Vy Chhorvon, one of the POWs, at their modest village home in early August. We saw them again the following day because, like us, they had heard the empty rumours of a release, and thus rushed two hours to the named border crossing.
When it turned out to be bogus, we had means to drive somewhere else for accommodation. Vy’s family did not.
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His father told us on Sunday night that the families of the 18 have all gone to a hotel in the capital of Phnom Penh. While it seemed premature, given the meaty pre-conditions listed in the new peace deal, the father’s information was that the POWs would be released on Monday.
“I don’t need to do it, I guess,” Trump said at Sunday’s signing. “But if I can take time to save millions of lives ... I can’t think of anything better to do.”
The ceremony was a love-in, with Trump regaling the audience about how he had to cancel a round of golf in Scotland for the more worthy goal of peace. He recalled curiously fondly (“I love this work”) those intense conversations with Anwar and the leaders of Thailand and Cambodia when the pressure was on in late July.
As he addressed the trio on the stage, it was unclear if Trump was aware the current leader, Anutin Charnvirakul, has only been in the job since early last month.
Trump also used the stage to discuss the wars his administration has supposedly ended. He said there was one left to solve. Presumably this was Russia and Ukraine.
Even at ASEAN, Trump didn’t seem aware of war in Myanmar, possibly the bloc’s greatest ever humanitarian crisis. Then, he was gone.
With Nara Lon
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