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ASEAN meeting heads online as geopolitical stakes rise
The status quo in Southeast Asia has been shaken up by a flurry of visits from high-ranking US officials, analysts have said, adding urgency to efforts to regulate tensions in the South China Sea.
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Philippine Coast Guard personnel survey ships believed to be Chinese militia vessels in Sabina Shoal in the South China Sea on April 27. (Handout/Philippine Coast Guard via REUTERS)
T
op ASEAN diplomats are to meet starting Monday as COVID-19 cases surge in Southeast Asia and a new chapter of the United States-China rivalry plays out.
The regional status quo has been shaken up by a flurry of visits from high-ranking US officials, analysts have said, adding urgency to efforts to regulate tensions in the South China Sea.
Attention to the issue is likely to be split amid a significant surge of COVID-19 infections, as low regional vaccination rates leave hundreds of millions of people exposed to the highly transmissible Delta variant of the virus.
Brunei, ASEAN’s current chair, is set to virtually host the 54th ASEAN Ministers’ Meeting (AMM) from Aug. 2 to 6, Indonesian diplomats confirmed, and it is possible that other events this year will remain exclusively online.
The shift to online meetings is widely seen as an impediment to diplomacy and a step back from the successful in-person ASEAN summit in Indonesia in April.
And now diplomats worry that an online AMM, the bloc’s premier forum, where it puts together an annual policy document detailing member states’ common positions on various issues, will slow progress on several high-stakes geopolitical disputes.
Sidharto Suryodipuro, the Foreign Ministry’s director general for ASEAN affairs, said that all meetings are set to be conducted online “at this stage”, including talks between ASEAN and China on a code of conduct (COC) for the South China Sea, which were set to be held in-person in Jakarta on July.
