United States Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin is in the region to drum up support for Washington to confront China militarily. He was the guest of the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies office in Singapore, where he delivered the 40th IISS Fullerton lecture on Tuesday evening.
He began the lecture by reaffirming the enduring American commitment to the region and the need to work together to meet the challenges posed by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and to keep Chinese aggression at bay and to deter grey zone coercion.
Of course, he was referring to the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy policy of intimidation and harassment of fishermen in the disputed South China Sea (SCS). Austin thinks China's claim to the SCS is illegal under international law.
Austin focussed on the need to forge a more resilient regional order by working with the US to prevent conflicts in the region by insisting that Washington and its allies are not looking for trouble.
He said the US policy in the region was not to seek confrontation but rather to pursue a stable and peaceful relations with China, especially in areas of common interest like mitigating climate change. He praised Asean for its stability.
However, he condemned the regime in Myanmar for its human rights violations.
He urged Myanmar to implement the Five-Point Consensus agreed at the Asean Summit in April. He also talked of the dangers of nuclear weapons in the Korean Peninsula and other forms of emerging threats, like cyber activities, that could undermine the stability of the free and open Indo Pacific region.
Incidentally, two days ago, a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's UK-led Carrier Strike Group (CSG21), centred around the HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, entered the SCS.
Escorting Elizabeth are six Royal Navy ships, a Royal Navy submarine, a US Navy destroyer and a frigate from the Netherlands.
Following this, a series of exercises will be held in the Philippine Sea with the US, Australia, France, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea. The presence of the strike group is likely to raise tensions in the SCS.
The timing of the visit could not have come at a worse time as the region struggles to roll back Covid-19 pandemic. Southeast Asia (SEA) governments are concerned with matters of life and death associated with Covid-19. The challenge to public health, economy, and the social fabric of the society is unprecedented. There is no country in SEA today which is not worried Covid-19 as a health issue mutating into a political crisis as more people get infected by the deadly transmissible Delta variant in the thousands.
The region is further troubled by the adverse impact of climate change. At time of writing, there is flooding in parts of China, Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines. Failure to deal with these concerns are slowly taking a toll on regime stability.
With so many domestic things on the plates of many Asean member states, geopolitics has taken a back seat for now.
This is not the time to push for a geopolitical agenda like building a coalition against China. Of course, out of politeness, and as a matter of diplomatic courtesy bordering on political expediency, the leaders in the region have lent an ear to the visiting US defence secretary.
There is a presumption in Washington that the countries in Southeast Asia are supportive of the US anti-China policy. Austin's choice of stopover in three Asean capitals suggests a US long-term policy of engaging with states in the region that Washington believes will carry the US can.
After years of neglect the region, in my view, no regime in Asean, not even Singapore, will be willing to get entangled in a US-led military confrontation with China.
Asean countries should stay out of any effort by those who want to wage war against China. We, in Asean, should not get caught in the crosshairs. Their war is not our war.
Fighting a US war against China is not an option for Asean that maintains strong cultural and economic ties with China.
However, China must not take Asean friendship for granted. It cannot continue with its hostile policies in the SCS and hope all the claimant states will keep quiet.
There is a limit to Asean patience. The minimum China can do is to stop using force in its relations with all stakeholders in the SCS as a matter of national policy.
The writer is a keen student of geopolitics