Singapore summit: Putin’s pivot and US anti-China drive leaves Asean in the middle
- External influences will pull Asean in different directions when it meets in Singapore
- Putin is pivoting to Asia and a US-led group is pushing an agenda based on containing China
The funny thing about this annual summit is that, after it is concluded, pundits tend to have a hard time remembering what exactly all those meetings were about. Instead, all their attention tends to be centred on who it was that turned up.
One reason for this is that Putin has traditionally attended Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum meetings that have been held back-to-back with the EAS and included many of the same participants. Typically, the Russian president has delegated the summit to the prime minister or even the minister of foreign affairs.
If all goes well, we may see an increased interest on behalf of Russia towards the EAS and Asean-centred formats and perhaps more presidential visits in the future. This is even more likely if interest in Apec continues to wane among Russian foreign-policy makers. Right now, Russia’s flagship initiative in the EAS is a working-level dialogue on a regional security architecture, but there has been little traction so far. The end goal, however, is rather ambitious – to repackage and streamline the various security-themed dialogues in the EAS, Asean Regional Forum and Asean Defence Ministers’ Meeting – so that the same people would not be discussing the same issues on different platforms.
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The EAS is always where two distinct worlds intersect and – more often than not – collide. The first is one of Asian multilateralism and the second is one of hard core realist geopolitics. The upcoming summit in Singapore will be no less interesting to watch in this regard.
With Trump absent, Australian and Japanese Prime Ministers Scott Morrison and Abe will be the ones in charge of convincing Asean leaders that the US-Japan-Australia-India quadrilateral dialogue (the Quad) is something that is not only harmless to the principle of “Asean centrality”, but can also be extended to individual Southeast Asian countries via partnerships.
Ever since the four states relaunched the security dialogue on the sidelines of last year’s EAS, observers have seen risks for the renewed Quad. Not the least of which is that the appearance of this “minilateral” security arrangement in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region could be taken as a testament to the failure of Asean-centred institutions to maintain a balance of power in the region and uphold a rules-based order.
As a result of these concerns, Quad member-state officials have spent quite a lot of effort to assure Asean that the bloc’s centrality is not at risk (the June 7, 2018 meeting statements, for example, were basically made for the sake of the Asean centrality clause).
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We can assume a similar logic would work for smaller countries. It is one thing to build and strengthen defence and security relationships with each of the four Quad countries (as Vietnam does quite successfully), quite another to join a clearly anti-China, US-led grouping. The closer a security arrangement is to a network and the further it is from a hub-and-spoke quasi-alliance, the more likely it is such a mechanism will reassure Southeast Asian countries while not adding too much fuel to the fire of China’s “besieged fortress” mentality. ■
Anton Tsvetov is an expert at the Centre for Strategic Research, a Moscow-based think tank.