Need to bring warring super powers for talks
-: R Muthu Kumar :-
The formation of a new multipolar international order is inevitably accompanied by conflict between powers seeking to maintain their status and emerging states as their development goals push them to take a more active role in establishing new rules and customs of interaction on the world stage.
The military-political conflict between Russia and the West, as well as the simmering confrontation between China and the United States, have determined the central position of Greater Eurasia and Asia in international politics.
The year 2023 has shown that Greater Eurasia and Asia are resistant to negative external influences till now. But the United States and its European partners in global affairs are not keen for peace, but prefer crises and conflicts in these regions for keeping their attention away from development strategies.
Asia and Eurasia, as also shown by the main global rumblings of 2023, are not free from certain internal contradictions with the most significant contradiction being the relatively difficult relationship between the two global demographic giants, India and China. The space of confrontation is within a relatively narrow area and hopefully not escalate into an armed conflict since Delhi and Beijing are in close contact, holding parleys quite often at various fora.
Thanks to the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the cooperation between India and China has not hit rock bottom.
Meanwhile the confrontation between China and the United States is going to be a bigger issue than what is going on in Europe as the Ukraine conflict refuses to simmer down.
And for now Asian countries have been raising the bar in their requests during dialogues with Washington and they have been stressing that they do not want to become satellites of the United States.
“The strategic interests that the US and Vietnam share… are about far more than China and how we think about the China relationship,” Lindsey Ford, deputy assistant secretary of defence for South and Southeast Asia, told the meeting held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank.
“We should avoid looking at US-Vietnam security ties through the lens of U.S.-China competition,” said another participant, Bich Tran, postdoctoral fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore (NUS).
Vietnam and the US elevated their bilateral ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership, the highest level in international cooperation, in September 2023 during President Joe Biden’s visit to Hanoi.Whenever a US based expert comments that the strategic alignment between Vietnam and the United States is not all about how Washington deals with Beijing, well it is worrisome for Asian nations!
The tensions prevailing in the South China Sea between China and other countries in the region are pinpricks to peace in the region. US defence official recently commented that ‘some of China’s activities in the maritime domain, including in the South China Sea, were “extremely unsafe and dangerous for us”.
Vietnam is carefully watching recent developments between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea and “drawing lessons” from it.
It is an indicator for India to keep a safe distance from China but not at the cost of totally cutting off relationships with Beijing. Even a superpower such as the US has acknowledged that a good relationship with China is far better than fishing in troubled waters!
Under these conditions, some Asian countries may indeed have concerns that Beijing views them as a territorial base of its main global enemy, or a source of its own potential. This is already complicating internal processes in successful associations such as ASEAN, and has created interest among some countries in intensifying cooperation with the United States, as for example the Philippines is doing.
ASEAN member nations might be small economies, but they have all taken a neutral stand in international relations and this gives them a new status and stature to become credible mediators in key international disputes.
It is pertinent to remember that Austria and Switzerland have also enshrined the principle of neutrality in their Constitution.
Likewise Singapore has declared neutrality as a de facto key foreign policy orientation, most notably with respect to the competitive tensions between the US and China in the South East Asia regions. The Singapore summit held in 2018 is still bright in our memories. On June 12, that year, then US President Donald Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for a bilateral summit in Singapore. They started the summit with a 12-second handshake and then participated in a one-on-one meeting.
It might have been a futile exercise but a much needed one for peace to prevail in the Asian region.
The ASEAN Foreign Ministers have now gathered in Laos for the first time this year to kick start discussions under the theme “ASEAN: Enhancing Connectivity and Resilience” and to chart ASEAN’s work for the rest of the year.
For Laos to be an effective chair, it must balance national and regional interests, ensuring consensus on priority regional issues. It must strive to work with other members for cooperations between bigger economies including China, the US, Russia and India too.
