Washington's Going to War ... And Chuck Hagel's in Brunei

August 29, 2013
By Reid Cherlin

An intervention in Syria is expected to take over American airwaves any day now, but here on the sun-baked coast of Borneo, all there is to see are the choreographed pleasantries of small-bore diplomacy. Ten American reporters have accompanied U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to the tiny nation of Brunei (anthem: “God Bless the Sultan”), where he is attending a conference of Southeast Asian defense officials, even while back at the Pentagon the wheels of the war machine he commands are beginning to grind in earnest. The morning's plan—what the affable Marine press wrangler calls the scheme of maneuver—is as follows: Reporters will stage on the eastern side of the doorway to capture the arrival of Hagel, who will at any moment now appear at the western end of the hallway. Once he enters the meeting room, the reporters will shift to the western side of the doorway and turn around to capture the Minister of Defense from Japan, who will be approaching from the corridor’s eastern terminus. Secretary Hagel and Minister Onodera will exchange greetings at the door; this may be photographed. Then they will proceed to the meeting table and deliver opening statements. When these statements conclude, the reporters will be yanked from the room, and the tete-a-tete, known in diplo-speak as a bilat, for bilateral, will proceed behind closed doors.

The biannual ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting, or ADMM Plus, is in its first day, playing out in the various marbled enclaves of the Empire Hotel & Country Club, a stunningly out-of-scale and depressingly vacant beach resort complex on the outskirts of the sultanate’s capital. At 6:30 AM, the in-room blinds hiss open automatically; at 8:30, ride-on mowers are snarling in tight turns over grass that is already short as a putting green. At 8:45 on this particular morning, a grey-haired man in shorts and a t-shirt appears hesitantly at the edge of the saltwater pool, a towel draped over his arm. It is Hagel himself, security men in tow, evidently trying to figure out which of the nine swimming pools would be appropriate for his morning laps. He moves along out of sight. When he reappears, an hour and a half later, on the hotel’s fifth floor, he is dressed in a standard-issue navy suit, ready for the first of about ten formal and informal sessions...

Read on at The New Republic ➝