By Trefor Moss
Something has snapped in the workings of our multilateral institutions. And there seem to be too many problems in too many places for this to be entirely coincidental.
If the late 20th century was an age of coming together, the early 21st century looks like being an age of drifting apart. Some countries won’t mind that. China, for example, has always instinctively favoured bilateral negotiation over the many competing voices of the multilateral roundtable.
ASEAN’s problems over how to handle territorial disputes in the South China Sea have been well publicized: the association is now effectively split into pro- and anti-China camps. Less widely covered was last week’s move by Uzbekistan to suspend its membership of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
While ASEAN and the CSTO are quite different groups that aim to do quite different things, they essentially have the same problem: their members have fundamentally conflicting visions of how their region’s strategic landscape ought to develop. And when the members of a club can’t agree on basic issues, the club ceases to work.
Read the full story at The Diplomat