“Ukraine today may be East Asia tomorrow,” Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida recently told an international security gathering in Singapore, a catchphrase that speaks to the harsh lessons learnt over the past few months. Better deterrence and response capabilities, he told a room packed with defense officials and diplomats, will be “absolutely essential if Japan
When Cambodia’s Minister of National Defense General Tea Banh was seen taking a leisurely dip in the Gulf of Thailand with Chinese Ambassador Wang Wentian after a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a Cambodian naval base being built with China’s help earlier this month, no one in the region batted an eyelid. As U.S.-China friction is getting
Myanmar’s 15-month-old military junta is suffering a diplomatic downgrade as Western and some Southeast Asian neighbors are withholding ambassadorial appointments to the country and increasingly meeting with elected officials overthrown by the army early last year, diplomats said. The trend of posting a number two in missions comes as the junta has been shunned by
Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen blasted a man who threw a shoe at him last week in Washington, saying that if the U.S. fails to condemn him, then similar attacks against his political opponents in Cambodia would be justified. “If the U.S considers shoe-throwing as freedom of expression, it is encouraging [the practice] in other
China and countries from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will conduct face-to-face consultations on a Code of Conduct (COC) in the disputed South China Sea later this month in Cambodia, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has said. Spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters in Beijing that the consultations will be done in person “in the
Beijing has slammed the U.S.-proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), calling it an attempt by Washington to lure Southeast Asian countries to “decouple from China.” U.S. President Joe Biden has been hosting a special two-day summit with leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that ends Friday. At the summit, it’s expected that the
UPDATED at 7:00 P.M. EDT on 2022-05-13 U.S. President Joe Biden declared to Southeast Asian leaders on Friday that “our relationship with you is the future,” as he wound up a summit with the ASEAN bloc of nations aimed at shoring up trans-Pacific ties and countering China’s heavy influence in the region. Biden’s remarks to
The ongoing upheaval in Myanmar took center stage on the first day of a U.S.-ASEAN Summit in Washington, as fellow bloc member Malaysia slammed the junta for refusing to engage with the country’s shadow government. Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders held a lunch meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers at
The United States is highlighting its commitment to Southeast Asia by holding a leader-level summit with ASEAN members this week in Washington despite being in the midst of dealing with the Ukraine turmoil, analysts said. But Washington is not likely to present a coherent economic strategy to reduce Southeast Asia’s overreliance on China and that
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida underscored the importance of upholding the rules-based international order amid China’s growing assertiveness and the Russian invasion of Ukraine as he met Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo on Friday on the first stop of his trip to Southeast Asia and Europe. Japan views Indonesia, this year’s host of the Group of
