By Anit Mukherjee
The forum has potential, but it needs to be prepared to take on the difficult issues.
Towards the end of August the Kingdom of Brunei will host top defense officials from the ASEAN member states and eight “plus” countries under the aegis of the Asian Defense Minister Meeting Plus (ADMM Plus). Ordinarily, on the crowded Asian-Pacific geopolitical calendar, such a gathering would not attract much attention. But that would be a mistake, for the ADMM-Plus represents what is possibly the last, and best, opportunity in the region's long quest for creating a functional security architecture. Paradoxically, the manner in which it is currently imagined runs the risk that it will be irrelevant in the near future.
The inaugural meeting of the ADMM-Plus (comprising ten ASEAN countries plus eight others: Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Russia and the United States) was held in 2010 in Hanoi. The meeting in Brunei is only the second time that the ADMM-Plus will convene but, indicative of its importance, henceforth it will meet every two years instead of three years as originally planned.
At the first meeting it was resolved that the ADMM-Plus would focus on five priority areas of cooperation: humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR), medicine, maritime security, peacekeeping and counter-terrorism. In fact, the main focus over the last few years has been on HADR and military medicine, which led, in June 2013, to a unique military exercise in Brunei involving seven ships, 15 helicopters and around 3200 personnel from 18 different countries. The fact that ships and forces from countries like Japan, China, Singapore, the U.S., Vietnam and India, among others were working together was no small feat, prompting Admiral Locklear, the Chief of the US Pacific Command, to call it a “substantial” achievement. Indeed, this highlighted the potential for ADMM-Plus to emerge as the forum where militaries of the extended region get to know each other and engage in confidence-building measures. This has been a dream, especially for the ASEAN countries that have been keen to induct extra-regional powers into the “ASEAN-way (PDF).”
Read the full 2 page story at The Diplomat