Press focus has begun to shift from Taipei to Phnom Penh, which is hosting three days of multiple ASEAN-centric meetings involving in-person meetings of lots of foreign ministers through all the major stakeholders of the Indo-Pacific area.
Starting with the 55th ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, these also include the ASEAN+3 Ministerial Meeting and the East Asian countries Summit Foreign Ministers Meeting, as well as individual dialogue partner nations’ meetings with the Association of Southeast Hard anodized cookware Nations – almost all culminating on Friday with the 29th Ministerial Meeting of the 27-member ASEAN Region Forum (ARF).
In the midst of the four-month-old Ukraine crisis and more recently Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit and the worsening of US relations with both Moscow plus Beijing, dozens of zwei staaten betreffend meetings among center powers in Phnom Penh are expected to bring up some fascinating new prognoses.
At least, these are likely to reinforce the impact associated with ASEAN “centrality” as the key to stability and peace in the Indo-Pacific region, which is currently getting vulnerable to contested equations among major forces resulting in increased volatility in the region.
Nevertheless , how enduring this particular unanimous refrain meant for ASEAN “centrality” within Phnom Penh may prove in building consensus remains to be seen.
In fact , ASEAN cementing its equations amongst European and other growing economies perhaps many aptly showcases this drift toward conditioning of middle powers’ synergies.
For instance, these meetings in Phnom Penh also include celebrations associated with 45 years of EU-ASEAN partnership and hosting of the annual EU-ASEAN Ministerial Meeting. Among others, that will meeting is likely to adopt a Plan of Action for 2023-2027 and finalize details of a Commemorative Summit involving most of 27 European Union users to be held within Brussels in December.
Only this past year the EU upgraded its Mission in order to ASEAN as a full-fledged EU Delegation plus issued the “EU Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific” last Sept, both underlining the “centrality” of ASEAN. Indeed, ASEAN centrality has come to be the refrain that conjoins this particular region’s friends plus foes alike and may be seen in various strategy reports issued by these countries.
India this year is celebrating 30 years of dialogue partnership along with ASEAN with a series of events including the international ministers’ meeting that was held in 06 and a summit conference scheduled for October. India has also maintained that ASEAN-driven efforts in the Indo-Pacific region should focus on local issues and avoid getting distracted into great-power geopolitics.
The initial reflection of the shift toward strengthening ASEAN centrality can be seen in regional problems gaining traction more than major powers’ geopolitics.
While each of these meetings within Phnom Penh will discover participants pushing their very own priorities, collectively these parleys are expected to seek ASEAN-driven consensus upon specific issues, since was underlined during the preparatory Senior Officials Meeting last week, where they tried building consensus upon challenges flowing through the Covid-19 pandemic, and situations in Myanmar, the Korean Peninsula and the South China Sea.
Power politics persists
In reality, nevertheless , all of these regional problems remain entangled with major powers’ contestations, making norm-building an extremely difficult enterprise.
Russian International Minister Sergey Lavrov’s visit to Myanmar, for example, has made headlines emphasizing how he described the military junta as Russia’s “friendly and long-standing partner” underlining simply no change in Moscow’s Myanmar policy even while the military offers used Russian Yak-130 aircraft within attacks on the civilian population.
Reports about Pyongyang’s following nuclear test also have triggered scary scenarios in media. Certainly, the ARF has been the only forum in which North Korea provides always participated since 2000. It was in the Bangkok ARF of that year that then-US secretary of state Madeleine Albright first met with North Korean representative Paek Nam Sun. That has been the first such conference since the Korean War of 1950-53 plus was soon accompanied by her historic visit to Pyongyang.
But even though ARF meetings in the past may have facilitated talks between US and Northern Korea, there are simply no expectations this time of any such encounter within Phnom Penh leading to a revival of dialogue involving the Kim Jong Un regime and ALL OF US President Joe Biden’s administration.
In fact, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken only last 30 days met with China’s Wang Yi on the Group of Twenty International Ministers’ Meeting in Bali. Likewise, Blinken had this year’s first phone conversation with Lavrov just last week.
The recent Biden-Xi Jinping online conversation likewise was no more than verbose posturing. Nonetheless, instead of focusing on ASEAN-driven outcomes, speculations continue to engage in juicy situations of a “potentially awkward encounter” that Lavrov or Wang Yi may have with Blinken and what could transpire in such conferences.
This particular, in spite of the fact that Chinese experts already see “no need for Wang Yi to fulfill and talk with Blinken any more, ” underlining the dangerous ramifications of Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit. Also scheduled meetings among Blinken and web host Prime Minister Hun Sen and his international minister are being look at in the light of US security concerns regarding Cambodia’s gradual drift toward Beijing.
Prioritizing Myanmar
ASEAN has too many severe issues at hand to deal with instead of being sidetracked by great-power politics. To begin with, intensifying attempts to put a stop to escalating violence in Myanmar remains the best priority for the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting. In the end, Myanmar has openly rebelled against acknowledging the ASEAN general opinion, which has serious ramifications for the association’s reliability.
In February last year, Myanmar’s military junta ousted the popularly elected federal government of Aung San Suu Kyi, and all the torchbearers associated with democracy have did not stave off the visible drift toward the civil war.
Already, the military junta’s heavy-handed policies have resulted in some two, 100 deaths, whilst 15, 000 others have been imprisoned and tens of thousands have fled to neighboring countries. This must be a highly regarded priority for ASEAN and its friends plus allies who have buy-ins in an ASEAN-led Indo-Pacific region.
Up to now in dealings with Myanmar, all the initiatives of ASEAN possess failed to fructify. Within April 2021, it asked the army leaders in Myanmar to stop sending representatives to ASEAN meetings until it has complied with the bloc’s Five-Point Consensus for Serenity.
ASEAN also appointed Cambodia’s Kung Phoak as the ASEAN Chair’s special envoy pertaining to Myanmar to ensure that the particular junta complied along with benchmarks set by ASEAN. But the zirkel has shown little interest in complying and last week resumed judicial executions by hanging four political prisoners.
It has retaliated simply by announcing its refusal to send representatives to ASEAN meetings and refused access to the ASEAN special charge to Myanmar, developing a stalemate of a kind.
Before dealing with other equally immediate issues, this ongoing defiance by the Myanmar junta remains the particular weakest link for ASEAN reclaiming the centrality in the Indo-Pacific region. For additional stakeholders as well, this remains the critical prerequisite for all ASEAN-led initiatives for local stability and peacefulness.
Follow Swaran Singh on Twitter @SwaranSinghJNU .