Author: Carlyle A Thayer, UNSW Canberra
The Obama Administration’s decision to sell Taiwan an arms package worth $5.85 billion is a carefully calibrated decision designed to meet US legal obligations under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.
It is also a decision that carefully calibrates the impact on Sino–American relations at a time of improved relations not only between Washington and Beijing but between Beijing and Taipei. Read more…
Author: Carlyle A. Thayer, UNSW@ADFA
The South China Sea has re-emerged as a front-burner security issue this year as a result of aggressive Chinese assertiveness.
There have been three major reported incidents involving Chinese civilian ships accosting Vietnamese and Filipino oil exploration vessels operating in their Exclusive Economic Zones.
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Author: Carlyle A. Thayer, UNSW @ ADFA
Australia will face a more complex strategic environment in Southeast Asia over the next decade as at least eight major trends drive strategic change. New patterns of security cooperation and tension will result and pull Australian strategic policy in different and possibly contradictory directions.
There are eight major drivers of strategic change:
1. The global financial crisis (GFC) has accelerated the power shift from North America and Europe to East Asia and reinforced China’s rise in all dimensions of national power. Read more…
Author: Carlyle A. Thayer, UNSW@ADFA
If China has made the running in Southeast Asia on the basis of soft power over the last decade, the tide now seems to be turning and the United States is re-engaging with smart power. The United States has signed the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation; President Obama has attended the first ASEAN-United States leadership summit (and will host the second meeting in the US this year); Secretary Clinton has not only attended two ASEAN Regional Forum meetings in a row, but offered US good offices to help settle diplomatically one of the pressing security issues in Southeast Asia, the South China Sea dispute. In sum, Secretary Clinton has turned the multilateral table on China. The United States is back and engaged in Southeast Asia working with the support of regional states.
Continued Chinese bellicosity and diplomatic pique runs the risk of isolating China diplomatically and eroding the soft power gains of recent years. Read more…
Author: Carlyle A. Thayer, UNSW and ADFA
In a speech delivered to the Shangri-la Dialogue in late May, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd once again advanced his proposal for an Asia Pacific Community this time calling for a one and a half track conference to be held in Australia later this year. There has been widespread academic and diplomatic scepticism of the proposal since it was first promoted in an address to the Asia Society in Sydney in June last year.
Veteran Singaporean diplomat Barry Desker declared the proposal ‘dead in the water’ shortly after Rudd spoke. More recently, the retired ABC foreign correspondent Graeme Dobbell, writing in a Lowy Institute blog, argued that the Prime Minister had cut his losses and ‘moved on’ by demoting the ‘c’ in community from upper to lower case. And, as the East Asia Forum has revealed, The Australian got it wrong when it asserted that Kurt Campbell, in his confirmation hearing for appointment as Assistant Secretary of State, had opposed the idea.
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