With ‘assertive transparency’, the Philippines has shown the limits of China’s ‘grey-zone’ coercion – and provided a strategy other Southeast Asian claimant states could emulate.
The bloc needs to unambiguously and collectively articulate its concerns on the disputed waterway, whether it names and shames Beijing or otherwise, or it risks sliding into irrelevance.
Chinese president’s two-day trip comes as nations mark 70 years of diplomatic ties.
Multiple exercises involving marines and navy come amid rising tensions in region and spiralling disputes between Washington and Beijing, Collin Koh writes.
Scope of the Asean-US Maritime Exercise next week will be limited, to avoid giving Beijing any wrong idea about Southeast Asian countries joining a US-led China-containment scheme.
How nations react to ‘grey zone’ encounters with foreign aggressors can have a significant impact on their future interactions, says Collin Koh.
Defence chiefs Patrick Shanahan and Wei Fenghe tamped down the rhetoric and used a side meeting to further mutual understanding. But with neither Washington nor Beijing prepared to cede ground on security priorities, their strategic stalemate will continue to shape regional diplomacy.
Collin Koh writes that military operations in the Asia-Pacific region and elsewhere plausibly will have to do more with less in the coming years.
Collin Koh writes that a political solution is the way to win trust in the disputed maritime region as China’s naval force grows more powerful and modern.
The PLA of the future will be ‘more capable of projecting its power to secure China’s national interests in the region and globally’, writes Collin Koh.
Talks between Beijing and Asean about agreeing a code of conduct will continue, but while they do it may be well be business as usual for many interested parties.
Li Keqiang may be right to warn that a code of conduct for the sea could take three years: it is effectively an arms control mechanism, though not the classical type and its 11 parties have much to resolve.
A close encounter between a Chinese destroyer and the USS Decatur may have been an attempt by Beijing to keep tensions from crossing into an outright armed confrontation for which neither side is ready.
