The West sees Asean as a lost cause in standing up to China, while China wants Asean to maintain its status quo of neutrality, which would mean more space to manoeuvre for China.

In its search for stability, Asean has created a flurry of mechanisms, including the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and the Asean Regional Forum. However, unable to enhance its deterrence capacity, the desired stability has yet to fully materialise.

Asean cannot shed its founding principles. It also cannot afford to antagonise Beijing, nor can it solicit more security assurances from the West.

Years of Asean strategic ambiguity and status quo maintenance have led to a three-pronged result. First, Asean’s inability to come up with credible solutions to long-standing problems makes it weak and more vulnerable to distrust and growth disparities within the bloc.

Second, the West is denied the space it needs to galvanise regional cohesion for credible deterrent defence.

Third, Beijing is given the space to deepen its hard-power postures and build on its divide-and-conquer strategy for the region.

A failure to address the current systemic shortcomings will see Asean fade into irrelevance and fall further under the dictates of Beijing.

Collins Chong Yew Keat, foreign affairs and strategy analyst, Universiti Malaya

No sound justification for cruel kangaroo cull

As the social acceptance of commercially killing wild kangaroos continues to decline globally, the kangaroo industry has launched yet another misinformation campaign. Its narrative of “kill them before they starve” lacks logic.

Misleading the public by falsely portraying wildlife populations as stable or even pests to justify cruelty and exploitation is an age-old tactic employed by commercial industries and governments worldwide, until populations suddenly collapse. Kangaroos may face the same fate, as population estimates tend to be inaccurate and unreliable. Independent experts question the claim of 30 million kangaroos.

Kangaroo populations often collapse in response to climate conditions such as drought and fires, exacerbated by climate change. Contrary to industry claims, populations recover slowly due to the biological limitations of kangaroo reproduction.

Shooters, paid per kilo, target the healthiest individuals, further reducing chances of population recovery. This interferes with ecological processes while inflicting immense cruelty.

Night-time hunting in remote areas, without monitoring at the point of kill, characterises the kangaroo industry. Independent studies show that up to 40 per cent of kangaroos are not shot in the brain, leading to slow and painful deaths. Female kangaroos constitute a third of commercially killed kangaroos, resulting in an estimated 400,000 dependent, healthy, economically worthless joeys being bashed to death by the shooters. If this isn’t cruelty, what is?

Dennis Vink, behavioural ecologist and campaign manager, Kangaroos Alive

West should trade with North Korea, as it did with China

For at least a decade, scholars at the Asia-Pacific Research Centre, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, have promoted economic sanctions to force North Korea to halt its development of nuclear weapons and to relinquish the existing ones. This strategy fed into the policies of two US administrations via two conduits: Condoleezza Rice (secretary of state during the Bush administration) and Michael McFaul (ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration).

Year after year, the strategy produced similar poor results: Pyongyang continues to develop nuclear (or other advanced) weapons and the North Koreans continue to suffer malnutrition.

Let us re-examine the situation in North Korea. Specifically, no foreign power is imposing the current autocratic government on North Korea. This government exists because most Koreans tolerate it.

If Westerners want to change the government of North Korea to a more ethical government, then we must change the mentality of the North Koreans. How can we make this change?

One possibility is to treat North Korea in the same manner that we treated China. We discontinue all economic sanctions which are our response to Pyongyang’s development of nuclear and other advanced weapons. We accept that the North Koreans have a right to develop their military arsenal. We promote economic trade with them. Such trade would open their society to Western ideas.

If the North Koreans develop a Western mentality, then they will voluntarily replace their autocratic government with a democratic one.

There is the risk that they (like the Chinese) may choose to keep their autocratic government, but at least, Pyongyang (like Beijing) will integrate into the world economy and will act more responsibly.

Dwight Sunada, California, US