لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
In April 2014, Malaysia and the United States formalised a comprehensive partnership to enhance bilateral relations. This commitment to do more together seemed only natural. After all, the two countries have enjoyed steady and solid political, economic, military and people-to-people ties dating back to the early years of Malaysia’s independence.
This held true even during the diplomatic troughs of the late 1990s and early 2000s. This was a volatile period marked by the Asian financial crisis, the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the truculence of prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. Since then, the partnership has stagnated amid domestic and foreign crises, political neglect and diverging priorities.
For a start, the situational context 10 years ago was very different. The announcement of the comprehensive partnership was made during the fervour of Barack Obama’s trip to Malaysia, the first by a sitting US president in nearly half a century since Lyndon Johnson’s visit in 1966.
The larger context of the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia furnished the strategic opportunity for both states to build on their relationship, but it was the personal appeal of the most Southeast Asian of US presidents that defined the sensibility of the partnership.
In grounding the bilateral relationship in both word and deed, the intention was to buffer the partnership against the political vagaries of both countries. In one respect, that foresight was prescient. The end of the second Obama administration was already in sight and, as it turned out, so was the end of the Asia pivot.
Unsurprisingly, there was considerable roiling when Donald Trump took office. The institution of his Muslim ban might not have affected Malaysia directly, but it certainly put the country’s Muslim-majority population on notice.
The trashing of multilateral instruments, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement which Malaysian leaders had precious political capital riding on, is still bitterly remembered in Putrajaya.
Still, Malaysia-US relations persisted. There was some fanfare when Trump welcomed prime minister Najib Razak to the White House in 2017 as a show of strengthened partnership celebrating the 60th anniversary of bilateral relations. However, there was little of significance beyond cursory official exchanges over the course of the Trump and Najib administrations.
Au contraire, les actions du ministère américain de la Justice contre le fonds souverain malaisien 1MDB , impliquant Najib alors qu'il était au pouvoir, ont constitué une démonstration maladroite des liens officiels. En outre, la rancune croissante des États-Unis envers la Chine a jeté un voile inconfortable sur la Malaisie et une grande partie de l’Asie du Sud-Est, où l’on était réticent à céder aux pressions politiques, économiques et technologiques américaines pour s’aligner sur l’Occident.
Institutionnaliser une relation bilatérale contre les caprices est une chose. Le protéger des exigences intérieures et extérieures qui détournent l’attention politique et les ressources politiques en est une autre. Personne à l’époque n’avait prédit l’apparition d’une pandémie mondiale quelques années plus tard.
