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| Henry Kissinger (Wiki Info - Image: Wiki Commons) |
By Prashanth Parameswaran
Why an ideal approach to resolving the issue might not work so well in practice.
Late last month, media outlets reported that Henry Kissinger, America’s prominent former secretary of state, had said that the U.S. and China should look to the example of Deng Xiaoping when it comes to defusing China’s disputes with other claimants in the South China Sea.
“Deng Xiaoping dealt with some of his problems by saying not every problem needs to be solved in the existing generation,” Kissinger said in Singapore, where he attended Lee Kuan Yew’s funeral. “Let’s perhaps wait for another generation but let’s not make it worse.”
Applied to the South China Sea, that might mean shelving knotty issues surrounding territorial and maritime claims for now and perhaps even focusing on joint development.
Kissinger is hardly the first person to suggest this. Just last month, Kurt Campbell, who was America’s top diplomat in the Asia-Pacific under the Obama administration until 2013, suggested at a keynote address to the Jamestown Foundation’s Fifth Annual Defense and Security Conference that the best we could do in the current environment is “export these problems into the future” and “establish some degree of understanding that the status quo or moderate adjustment of the status quo is in the best interest of all.”
However, while such an approach might be ideal in theory, Campbell himself admitted that in practice, no one is embracing this idea in the South China Sea.
Read the full story at The Diplomat