At first look, the latest overseas ministers assembly of the Affiliation of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, was singularly disappointing. The gathering in late July in Vientiane—the capital of Laos—did handle to convey collectively representatives of all the key powers, together with Japan, India, the European Union and Russia, whereas additionally providing the chance for essential bilateral talks between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Chinese language counterpart, Wang Yi. However on essentially the most contentious geopolitical challenges dealing with the area, the confab was all sizzle, no substance.
Particularly, the festering disputes within the South China Sea, which have seen a number of clashes and confrontations between Chinese language and Philippine maritime forces, was solely generically mentioned on web page 32 of the unusually prolonged joint assertion that emerged from the assembly. The doc expressed consensus on the “significance of sustaining and selling peace, safety, stability, security, and freedom of navigation in and overflight above the South China Sea,” but offered no concrete steps towards managing, not to mention resolving, the disputes that threaten all of these targets.
Nor was there any signal of collective strain on China to cease dragging its toes on the decades-long, open-ended negotiations over a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea. ASEAN diplomats solely agreed on the necessity to construct on the notoriously imprecise roadmap to realize the elusive code, for which a draft negotiating textual content was agreed upon final 12 months. And but, there was no point out of China’s illegal, aggressive and unilateral actions towards ASEAN member states, which had culminated within the harm of a Philippine naval servicemen simply weeks earlier.
