By Julio Amador III
The regional body will need to work hard, if it is to maintain its position at the center of Asia-Pacific power relations.
President Barack Obama’s upcoming participation in the East Asia, APEC, and the ASEAN-U.S. confabs in Southeast Asia during his October trip to the region will highlight important challenges that the region faces, particularly the role that small states play in great power relations. While analysts and scholars are still debating the relationship between the United States and rising China, the countries of Southeast Asia, independently and as ASEAN, already understand that the ultimate nature of relations between the two great powers will directly affect them. For that reason, they do not want to wait passively for the result, but are actively engaging the U.S., China and other external stakeholders to help shape the evolving regional order.
China seeks a new type of great power relationship with the U.S. that would give it almost-equal status to the latter in the global arena. Beijing is seeking assurances from Washington that U.S. policy will take Chinese interests into account. In Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, this would mean that China will have unspoken primacy in the same way that the U.S. enjoys an unchallenged role in the Western hemisphere.
Thus, China’s actions such as disputing Japan’s administrative control over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands by regularly dispatching maritime surveillance vessels to the surrounding area, taking over the Philippines’Scarborough Shoal and attempting to take over Second Thomas Shoal, and maintaining a long-running dispute with Vietnam over the Paracels are alarming indications that it is willing to do what it takes to prevent violations of what it considers its sovereign territory.
Read the full 2 page story at The Diplomat