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ASEAN must get back to basics ahead of US summit
Given the current world order's abysmal track record, ASEAN should get to know who it is dealing with to prevent another missed opportunity.
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United States President Joe Biden attends the virtual US-ASEAN Summit on Oct. 26, 2021 from the South Court Auditorium of the White House in Washington, DC. (AFP/Nicholas Kamm)
T
he world order as it is reeks, rather ironically, of a long string of C’s. Perhaps that is the "best" that a "world order" can produce anyway: C’s. Why? No matter how altruistic a country can be, the world just does not appreciate what a country has done. If anything, the world tends to forget amazing gestures of magnanimity.
Take the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in 1994, for example. Under the memorandum, Kyiv actually surrendered 1,700 nuclear warheads to Moscow, an act that was witnessed by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and of course, Ukraine. In exchange, Russia was not to violate the territorial security and sovereignty of its pan-Slavic cousin.
To be sure, this was one of the most momentous acts in world history, as Ukraine was the second largest nuclear power before the fall of Soviet Union on Dec. 26, 1991.
Yet, knowing that it could not maintain such a large nuclear stockpile without undermining its national and international security, Kyiv took the higher moral decision to surrender its nuclear weaponry, backed by the US’ Nuun-Lugar Act that promised assistance in developing the Ukraine economy.
Ukraine did not hold the world to ransom. The economic aid it received then would be equivalent to US$520 million today.
Other than the Marshall Plan, which provided aid to help rebuild war-ravaged Western Europe in 1948-1950, before it was separated from Soviet influence with the construction of the Berlin Wall – which collapsed in 1989 – the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) literally did not do much.
Rather, the world was ostensibly left to drift back and forth between either the market and import substitution, as expounded by Argentinian economist Raul Prebish – who proposed a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the mid-1970s – or a state-based industrial subsidy program.
