Abstract
President Obama’s participation in the East Asia Summit (EAS) for a second consecutive year confirms the United States’ heightened attention to and engagement with Asia. Earlier, many Asian observers had doubted that a U.S. president could remain committed to attending the annual summit, particularly when the 2012 meeting was hosted by Cambodia, a relatively small country in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The fact that Obama kept his commitment to attend the EAS is evidence that the United States is stepping up its rebalancing efforts in Asia. This essay offers a perspective from Thailand—a traditional U.S. ally—on the motivations behind U.S. rebalancing, as well as on the policy’s implications for Thailand and Southeast Asia as a whole.
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