By Patrick M. Cronin and Cecilia Zhou
At the ASEAN Regional Forum, America and China’s contrasting narratives for the region may be on full display.
China-U.S. relations retain a high degree of stability and do not operate within a zero-sum game. They do, however, operate against the background music of dueling narratives about the future regional Asian-Pacific security architecture.
Those competing visions may be on display in Myanmar, as 10 Southeast Asian member states’ and the 17 additional members’ foreign ministers and other senior officials gather in a country struggling to emerge from the yoke of military dictatorship. Indeed, in some ways Myanmar captures one facet of these contrasting visions for the heart of the region.
To see Myanmar as a confident and well-regarded chair and host of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) process is a milestone that seemed out of reach just a few years ago. An objective reading of Myanmar’s sharp turn to democratic rule finds benefits multiple approaches: ASEAN and other Asian countries’ engagement incentives and American and European cost-imposing sanctions.
President Thein Sein’s ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) opening address this week in the capital of Naypyitaw struck a lofty note, reminding all assembled that the “ultimate aims” must be prosperity, peace and “the promotion of human dignity.” The United States and China, and indeed the region, is divided over the priority of those aims and even more so the means of achieving them.
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