Why AUKUS Alarms ASEAN
As a loose organisation without a clear strategic vision of its own, ASEAN is floundering as individual members break ranks and realign in the new U.S.-China rivalry. Read More Here
Category: Asia
Good Optics, Shallow Vows For Harris In South East Asia
The Joe Biden administration has rarely missed an opportunity to stress the critical importance of Southeast Asia to its Indo-Pacific agenda of containing China’s influence and rise. But until a string of recent high-level visits to the strategic region, observers noted that little had been done to match its words with deeds. Read More Here
Myanmar’s Strongman Outlines A Manifesto Of Madness
As a policy pronouncement marking six months since the February 1 coup d’etat, Myanmar’s military chief and head of the State Administration Council (SAC) Senior General Min Aung Hlaing exhibited the same strained relationship with the real world since he seized power. Read More Here
How The Milk Tea Alliance Is Remaking Myanmar
By virtue of its highly formalized institutional structure, ASEAN is designed to make radical change hard to come by, and is thus ill-equipped to implement it in Myanmar, let alone articulate a vision for what the country’s future might look like. Read More Here
The Quad Is A Delusion
The Quad’s emergence shouldn’t surprise Beijing. Rising powers routinely evoke countervailing coalitions, and shared anxiety about an adversary can contribute to their cohesion—but that’s just a starting point. The Quad’s problem is it doesn’t have much else to run on and hence will ultimately amount to U.S. power with a multilateral veneer. Read More Here
Suga’s Olympic-Sized Gamble
Japanese politicians are often driven to act by gaiatsu—the Japanese word for “external pressure”—and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga got a welcome dose of it in Cornwall, England, last week when his fellow G-7 summiteers endorsed holding the Olympic Games in Tokyo next month. Read More Here
Myanmar’s Coming Revolution
Myanmar is at a point of no return. The army’s February coup, meant to surgically shift power within the existing constitutional framework, has instead unleashed a revolutionary energy that will be nearly impossible to contain. Over the past four months, protests and strikes have continued despite the killing of more than 800 people and the […]
China’s Hold On Cambodia Hard For Biden To Break
By allowing Beijing more control over the strategically situated naval base, which could provide China a new southern flank in the contested South China Sea, the US perceives Phnom Penh is dangerously close to adopting a full-fledged pro-China foreign policy. Read More Here
Benign Neglect: Why Biden Prefers The Quad To ASEAN
The Biden administration held its first summit-level meeting with Quad allies in March but is only now stepping up its ASEAN-related diplomacy, notably with less robust senior-level engagement. Washington has paid lip service to “ASEAN centrality” in recent statements, but in practice is it really aiming for “Quad centrality?” Read More Here
Biden Leaves ASEAN In The Diplomatic Cold
Despite placing Asia at the center of his foreign policy agenda, as part of a grand bid to constrain China’s ambitions, US President Joseph Biden has been playing catch-up in building relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Read Here
looking beyond borders 