Opinion | For US to regain respect in Southeast Asia, it must learn to listen to Asean

Name: China's foreign minister accuses US of ‘sinister move’ to disrupt regional peace and stability
Uploaded: 2022-03-21T00:45:21.000Z
Duration: 1 min 39 s
Description: China's foreign minister accuses US of ‘sinister move’ to disrupt regional peace and stability

The US knows what it wants – Southeast Asian support for its anti-China agenda – but it doesn’t seem to understand what Asean leaders need: to be masters of their own destiny and not to have to choose sides or worry about proxy wars

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Mark J. Valencia

Published: 8:45am, 21 Mar 2022Updated: 5:37pm, 21 Mar 2022

The special US-Asean summit scheduled for March 28-29 in Washington has been abruptly postponed. According to Cambodia, the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, “some Asean leaders can’t join the meeting as scheduled”. This is not a good sign for US-Asean relations or the goals the US hopes to achieve.

Most realise that Washington’s main reason for holding the summit is to enlist Southeast Asian support for its anti-China agenda. But this is not a one-way street and Asean has some leverage.

Last December, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Asean was “essential to the architecture of the Indo-Pacific region”. He said the summit would discuss routine topics such as the Myanmar crisis, pandemic recovery, climate change, and investment and infrastructure.

But the United States was also likely to raise the “China threat’ and use the Ukraine tragedy to rally Asean into joining its anti-China Indo-Pacific Strategy. The strategy warned that China was “combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological might as it pursues a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and seeks to become the world’s most influential power”.

It predicted that: “Our collective efforts over the next decade will determine whether [China] succeeds in transforming the rules and norms that have benefited the Indo-Pacific and the world.”

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China's foreign minister accuses US of ‘sinister move’ to disrupt regional peace and stability

The strategy aims to prevent China’s hegemony by building greater coordination with US allies and partners “across warfighting domains” to ensure they “can dissuade or defeat aggression”, including attempts to alter the maritime rights or boundaries of other nations. The US promised to “refocus security assistance on the Indo-Pacific, including to build maritime capacity and maritime-domain awareness”.

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