Chinese economic overtures to Southeast Asian countries mask a desire to steamroll the interests of neighboring countries, a senior U.S. diplomat warned in a preview of a high-profile dialogue with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“There’s a choice between those things that are beneficial to the country and those things that may not be so beneficial,” the State Department’s David Stilwell told the United States Institute for Peace.
Stilwell’s remarks offer a preview of Pompeo’s message next week at a virtual meeting of regional diplomats that already has occasioned a bout of shadowboxing between Chinese and American officials.
“The U.S. has become the biggest threat to peace in the South China Sea and the entire region,” Chinese deputy foreign minister Luo Zhaohui said Wednesday. “It is a troublemaker for cooperation, development, and prosperity in the region.”
Those dueling messages continue an intensifying diplomatic contest in Southeast Asia and the broader Indo-Pacific region, especially in the weeks since Pompeo’s team condemned China’s claim to sovereignty over most of the South China Sea as part of a “neo-imperial” project by the Chinese Communist Party. Pompeo plans to participate next week in a virtual meeting of the East Asia Summit, a forum that China typically attends, as well as a meeting with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
“Neither China nor ASEAN wants to turn the sea into an arena for power,” Luo said. “We don’t want it to become a tool for geopolitical competition.”
Pompeo’s outreach will take place just days after the second highest-ranking American diplomat hailed the Quad (a bloc that includes the U.S., India, Australia, and Japan) as a potential foundation for a security network of democratic nations in the region.
“It is a reality that the Indo-Pacific region is actually lacking in strong multilateral structures. They don’t have anything of the fortitude of NATO or the European Union,” Deputy Secretary of State Steve Biegun said Monday. “The strongest institutions in Asia oftentimes are not inclusive enough, and so it is certainly — there is certainly an invitation there at some point to formalize a structure like this.”
Biegun emphasized that such a consortium would have to focus on more than just “responding to the threat of China in and of itself or any potential challenge from China,” but he also downplayed the analogy to NATO.
“I’ve heard loose talk about an Indo-Pacific NATO and so on,” Biegun said. “But remember, even NATO started with relatively modest expectations, and a number of countries chose neutrality over NATO membership in post-World War II Europe. The original NATO North Atlantic alliance only had 12 members relative to its 27 today. So, you can start a little bit smaller and grow into your membership.”
Luo warned regional neighbors that Beijing would oppose such an organization. “Apart from its interference in the South China Sea, the US established the Quad, an anti-China front line also known as the mini-NATO,” he said. “This reflects the Cold War mentality of the U.S.”
Stilwell kept the focus on economic and political disputes with China, identifying Washington as a partner with countries suffering from the construction of Chinese dams on the Mekong River, a major Southeast Asian waterway that originates in China.
“One especially urgent challenge is the PRC’s manipulation of the Mekong River flows for its own profit at great cost to downstream nations,” he said of that controversy, which will be the focus of yet another meeting next week between Pompeo and the ASEAN countries. “Right now, the Mekong River is suffering from [the] lowest water levels ever recorded, which is devastating harvests [and] threatening food and water security throughout the region. All these things have great potential to lead to greater instability.”
