The 5G Network: Southeast Asia Ignores US War on Huawei

By Joseph Thomas

Global Research, September 07, 2019

The Western media has begun complaining about Southeast Asia’s collective decision to move forward with 5G network technology from Chinese telecom giant Huawei despite US demands that nations ban all Huawei products.

These demands are predicated on clearly fabricated security threats surrounding Huawei technology. The US itself is a global leader of producing hardware with hidden backdoors and other security flaws for the purpose of spying worldwide.

Instead, the US is clearly targeting the telecom giant as part of a wider campaign to cripple China economically and contain its ability to contest US global hegemony.

Media Disinformation Serves the War on Huawei 

Articles like Reuters’ “Thailand launches Huawei 5G test bed, even as U.S. urges allies to bar Chinese gear,” in title alone confounds informed readers.

The article’s author, Patpicha Tanakasempipat, fails to explain in which ways the US is “allies” with any of the nations of Southeast Asia, including Thailand. The history of US activity in Southeast Asia has been one of coercion, interference, intervention, colonisation and protracted war.

As US power has faded, it has resorted to “soft power,” with its most recent “pivot to Asia” being accompanied by several failed attempts to overthrow regional governments and replace them with suitable proxies.

Considering this, and a complete lack of suitable US alternatives to Huawei’s products, there is little mystery as to why the region as a whole has ignored US demands regarding Huawei.

The article claims:

Thailand launched a Huawei Technologies 5G test bed on Friday, even as the United States urges its allies to bar the Chinese telecoms giant from building next-generation mobile networks.

Huawei, the world’s top producer of telecoms equipment and second-biggest maker of smartphones, has been facing mounting international scrutiny amid fears China could use its equipment for espionage, a concern the company says is unfounded.

Patpicha fails categorically to cite any evidence substantiating US claims. She also fails categorically to point out that there is in fact a glaring lack of evidence behind US claims, just as many other articles across the Western media have predictably and purposefully done.

Vietnam, the Outlier 

The one exception in Southeast Asia is Vietnam. It has sidestepped considering Huawei in favour of US-based Qualcomm and Scandinavian companies Nokia and Ericsson. While the Vietnamese government said its decision was based on technical concerns rather than geopolitics, a Bloomberg article quoted the CEO of state-owned telecom concern, Viettel Group, who claimed:

We are not going to work with Huawei right now. It’s a bit sensitive with Huawei now. There were reports that it’s not safe to use Huawei. So Viettel’s stance is that, given all this information, we should just go with the safer ones. So we choose Nokia and Ericsson from Europe.

The same article would also cite supposed experts who claim Vietnam seeks closer ties with the US in countering China’s growing stature upon the global stage, and ultimately folded to US demands because of this.

This however is unlikely. Vietnam – among all of Southeast Asia’s nations – is not an “ally” of Washington.

The US waged a bloody war against Vietnam at the cost of 4 million lives. The nation still bears the burden of chemical warfare through persistent birth defects as well as swaths of land covered in unexploded ordnance. To this day the US maintains a stable of opposition groups it funds to pressure and coerce the Vietnamese government. The US also invests in groups fanning anti-Chinese sentiment inside Vietnam.

Considering this, Vietnam, by spurning Huawei at the moment, is more likely cynically playing the US and China off one another with this particular move aimed at currying leverage over Beijing and favour with Washington, while at other junctures, Vietnam has made moves to gain leverage over Washington while cultivating closer ties with Beijing.

Not Just Thailand

The same Bloomberg article would note:

Vietnam’s decision to shun Huawei appears to make it an outlier in Southeast Asia, where other countries such as the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia are open to deploying Huawei’s technology.

The irony of this is that the Philippines in particular has been touted by Washington as one of its key partners in provoking China over its claims in the South China Sea. Not only has Manila repeatedly sabotaged or undermined Washington’s efforts in the South China Sea deciding to bilaterally deal with Beijing instead and without US help, it is now openly ignoring US demands to dump Huawei technology.

Malaysia has been another target of US political interference. There were hopes in Washington that after the last Malaysian elections, victorious parties backed by Washington would cut growing ties with Beijing. This did not happen. While some Malaysian-Chinese deals were renegotiated, they continued to move forward nonetheless.

By ignoring US demands that Huawei products be banned and by moving forward with Huawei technology for national 5G infrastructure, Malaysia affirms again that Asia’s future will be determined in Asia by the nations residing there, not by Washington thousands of miles away.

While the US remains a potent geopolitical hegemon with a powerful military and economy, and the means to inflict punishment on nations opposing its agenda across the globe, it is still a hegemon in decline.

The US is not losing to China because it hasn’t been ruthless enough or because its “allies” are not cooperating. It is not losing to China because of anything in particular China is doing to the US. The US is losing because of fundamental flaws in what is an entirely unsustainable and indefensible foreign policy.

Until it fixes those fundamental flaws and adopts a more appropriate foreign policy, it will continue to lose out to competitors like China. Its tech giants like Apple and Qualcomm will continue to lose out to competitors like Huawei. No amount of coercion, threats or acts of malice can change the fact that at a fundamental level, the US has no competitive edge and its power stems more from momentum than from any remaining driving strength.

While nations bide their time for this momentum to diminish, Beijing, Moscow and the capitals of other developing and emerging global powers continue building an alternative global order based on a multipolar balance of power and the primacy of national sovereignty… a global order where, for example, one nation does not get to decide who the rest of the world works with to build their respective telecom infrastructure.

Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research

“Five Eyes” Intelligence Agencies Behind Drive Against Chinese Telecom Giant Huawei.

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Fear and Loathing Under Modi’s Second Term

Experts debate whether India is being Pakistanized, while protest against the BJP’s corporate and religious pandering spreads

By Asad Ismi

Global Research, September 04, 2019

The Pakistani feminist poet Fahmida Riaz, who moved to India from Pakistan in the 1980s to escape that country’s Islamic fundamentalist military dictatorship, only to encounter growing Hindu funda- mentalism in her new home, captured the experience in a poem (translated and abridged) that has become more prescient over time:

You turned out to be just like us, Equally stupid, wallowing in the past… Your demon of religion dances like a clown,
Whatever you do will be upside down You too will sit deep in thought
Who is Hindu, who is not…

Pakistan was carved out of India in 1947 as a state for Muslims while India remained secular. But since 2014, under the rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the country has become increasingly dominated by religious fundamentalism that is tolerated and openly encouraged by the government. Mob lynching of Muslims and other minorities (80% of Indians are Hindu and 14% are Muslim) is common.

An election in the spring, which many expected to chip away at Modi’s support, in the end produced an even stronger second majority for the BJP, giving the extreme nationalist party 302 out of 542 seats in parliament compared to 282 seats in the 2014 election. The main opposition Congress Party got only 53 seats.

Modi won at the polls in May despite a weakening economy marked by plummeting investment, record unemployment, a crisis in agriculture and a looming environmental disaster, which will see 21 Indian cities run out of water in 2020, affecting 600 million people. Modi’s two main fiscal initiatives in his first term — demonetization and the introduction of a goods and services tax (GST) — were also badly received. Taking 86% of banknotes out of circulation caused massive losses to poor people, damaged economic growth and failed to remove illicit money from the economy as planned. The complexity of the GST led many small businesses to lay off staff.

But such problems were likely far from the minds of hundreds of millions of Modi’s supporters, who are attracted “not through concrete economic policies but through the politics of emotion — negative emotion such as fear, anger, hatred for the neighbour, for minorities and women,” according to Nikita Sud, associate professor of development studies at Oxford University and author of the 2012 book Liberalisation, Hindu Nationalism and the State (Oxford University Press). “During the campaign, the economy was barely mentioned, nor was the agricultural crisis. Modi’s campaign focused mainly on the threat of terrorism and national security and promoted the fear that if you do not elect us, terrorism will increase.”

Modi’s election campaign was helped greatly by the February 14 suicide attack in Kashmir. The Pakistan-based Islamist militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed Isa claimed responsibility for the incident, which killed 40 soldiers and shocked India. The BJP had lost elections in three key states in November 2018 and was leak- ing support to the Congress Party. The killing of Indian soldiers and India’s retaliatory airstrikes into Pakistan reversed this political situation and ensured the BJP a majority.

As I’ve written in the Monitor before (“Modi and the criminalization of Indi- an politics,” September/October 2014), Modi’s hostility toward India’s Muslim population is well-known. In a sworn statement to India’s Supreme Court in 2011, a former senior police chief alleged Modi had “allowed” a bloody religious riot in Gujarat in 2002 when he was chief minister of the state, to let Hindus “vent their anger,” an accusation Modi denies. At least 1,000 people were killed in the mob violence, most of them Muslims.

Sud tells me that Modi and the BJP’s subversion of the media would have played a role in their second election victory. “[P]articular corporate houses close to the Modi government control large parts of the media, which ensures that economic matters that the government has failed at, such as demonetization, are not brought up,” she says.

“There is a similarity in the politics of India and Pakistan now,” she continues, echoing the poet Riaz. “[T]his othering of minorities, blasphemy accusations, sedition charges, and patriotism constantly being stressed. These are the similarities, but the big difference is that the Indian army does not have the kind of power that the Pakistan army does to totally dominate the country.”

Sud says it’s ironic how Modi is using hatred of Pakistan to make India more like Pakistan.

Mujibur Rehman, author of the 2018 book Saffron Power: Reflections on Indian Politics (Routledge) and an assistant professor of politics at Jamia Millia Islamia University in India’s capital city of New Delhi, explains that

“the majority of Indian media appears to be compromised and work as the Modi government’s wing of information and broadcasting.”

If Indian voters gave Modi one more chance, he adds, it was “because they did not find his opponents credible.”

Modi’s main opponent was and is Rahul Gandhi, scion of the Gandhi family that has dominated Indian politics and the Congress Party since India’s independence in 1947. Gandhi’s electoral strategy was to attack Modi for being corrupt, but this had little effect coming from a party with its own history of graft in power. The election result has reduced Congress to its weakest point ever; the party is close to being wiped out in northern India.

“There are some similarities in the ways things are un- folding in India and Pakistan,” says Rehman. “But I would not say India is becoming like Pakistan. Similarities are in the domain of minority rights, religious freedom; we do see lots of violations in India in recent years, which resembles Pakistan’s state of affairs.

“But India still has its constitution and there are dis- senting voices and political forces. Also, India is nowhere close to a situation where we could see [as in Pakistan] the overthrow of its democratically elected regime. I do not see any possibility of a military or dictator takeover of the Pakistan kind in India. India is still a democracy, but a democracy can also see violations, massive violations, which is what we are witnessing.”

The dramatic rise in mob lynching of Muslims, Dalits (also known as “untouchables,” the lowest caste in the Hindu caste system) and other non-Hindus are an example of the violations Rehman is talking about. Alarmed and in response to the violence, 49 Indian celebrities sent an open letter to Prime Minister Modi on July 23 condemning “a definite decline in the percentage of convictions” against hate crimes since his government first took office.

The letter points out that 254 religious identity–based hate crimes were reported between January 1, 2009 and October 29, 2018 “where at least 91 persons were killed and 579 were injured.” Muslims were the victims in 62% of cases and Christians in 2%, according to the Citizen’s Religious Hate-Crime Watch.

“About 90 per cent of these attacks were reported after May 2014 when your government assumed power nationally,” the celebrities write.

Kapil Komireddi, author of the 2019 book Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India (Hurst), has written that Modi’s second term “will take India to a dark place,” and that his party “has unleashed forces that are irreversibly transforming the country,” with Indian democracy “now the chief enabler of Hindu extremism.” In the Guardian (U.K.), Komireddi claimed shortly before the May elections that the normally incorruptible India election commission “functioned during this vote as an arm of Modi’s BJP, too timid even to issue perfunctory censures of the prime minister’s egregious use of religious sloganeering.” According to the writer, India’s military has been politicized, “and the judiciary plunged into the most existential threat to its independence since 1975, when Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution and ruled as a dictator for 21 months.”

Indian and foreign corporations have praised the BJP’s economic and state reforms, which are redistributing wealth upwards. At a cost of 500 billion rupees (about $9.5 billion), the Indian election this year was the most expensive in the country’s — and world — history, topping the 2016 U.S. election by half a billion dollars. Much of this was financed by electoral bonds bought by corporations, with 84% of the money going to the BJP.

“The entire election process has been corporatized and the corporate sector is very much funding political parties,” says Sud, a sign of fascism “which is very worrying.”

Indian activist Xavier Dias, who has worked in support of the rights of Adivasi [Indigenous] communities in Jharkhand state for 45 years, tells me that the “fascist new liberalization” of India is being resisted on a significant scale.

“Despite a very heavy powerful state, in every corner of India the resistance movements are growing. The working class through their unions are on strike all over the country, resisting privatization and regressive changes in labour laws. Farmers are resisting also and demanding more help from the government. Women in villages are up in arms and Adivasis now too are better organized,” he says.

“But the damage to the country is so deep and wide- spread that even if the BJP is defeated, India will take at least 20 years to recover from the damage. The soul of India is drenched in blood.”

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This article was originally published on the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (page 44).

Asad Ismi is an award-winning writer and radio documentary-maker. He covers international politics for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Monitor (CCPA Monitor), Canada’s biggest leftist magazine (by circulation) where this article was originally published. Asad has written on the politics of 64 countries and is a regular contributer to Global Research. For his publications visit www.asadismi.info.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Preparing for “Tomorrow’s Wars,” India Shoots Down Satellite

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GOP Hardliners Want China Sanctioned

By Stephen Lendman

Global Research, August 31, 2019

Time and again, the US, its key NATO allies and Israel blame their victims for wrongdoing committed against them.

According to the Daily Beast, Republicans are pushing for sanctions on China over how Hong Kong authorities are handling months of protests — US dirty hands all over them the website failed to explain.

Trump regime and congressional hardliners are discussing ways “to officially punish China” over what’s going on in the city, said the Daily Beast (DB) — despite restraint shown by Hong Kong and mainland authorities, toughness used only in response to violence no governments tolerate.

Sino/US relations are already badly strained over Trump regime-initiated trade war. Upping the stakes further will make resolution all the harder.

According to an unnamed White House official,

“China (is) a national security concern (sic). The protests in Hong Kong are just another example of why we should be focusing our attention on finding ways to push back against Beijing,” adding:

“We’ve been taking other routes to confront China, especially economically. This would be another step in the game plan. The draft legislation is in a lot of ways going to look like some of the sanctions we implemented with Russia.”

Washington is threat to China and all other nations it doesn’t control — not the other way around.

The US uses illegal sanctions as weapons of war by other means. What’s going on in Hong Kong is a US color revolution attempt on China’s soft underbelly, aiming to destabilize the country.

On Monday, Beijing’s official People’s Daily slammed “(a)nti–China forces in the US (not only involved in) openly cheer(ing) the violent protesters on…but provid(ing) money, benefits, and advice to the rioters” — from the hostile to democracy National Endowment for Democracy, CIA dirty hands likely involved as well.

“(D)ata released by NED in 2018 revealed that of all the countries (it) allocated funds to, China topped the list at $6.5 million,” said the broadsheet, adding:

“These figures are just the tip of the iceberg, as it’s believed that most NED spending was not disclosed due to its ‘sensitivity.’ ”

“(T)he US (is) fanning the flames of the confrontation with advice, action and money.”

Earlier I explained that China’s emergence as a world power threatens Washington’s aim to control planet earth, its resources and populations.

Beijing’s successful economic model, producing sustained growth, embarrasses the US-led unfair, exploitive Western “free market” system.

The US eliminated the Japanese economic threat in the 1980s, a similar one from the Asian Tiger economies in the 1990s, and now it’s China’s turn to be taken down.

That’s what Trump’s war on the country by other means is all about, understood in Beijing, countering hostile US tactics its own way, taking a longterm approach to achieve its objectives.

Separately an “exclusive” DB report said elements involved in Hong Kong protests “flew to Montana last week for an under-the-radar meeting with US lawmakers…according to sources familiar with the meeting.”

Earlier they met with a US consulate official in Hong Kong, notably with US officials in Washington as well.

Orchestrated protests gripped Hong Kong since last March, turning violent weeks earlier, creating intolerable conditions for majority city residents wanting none of it.

On Thursday, an annual change of the guard occurred in Hong Kong. According to state-run Xinhua:

“The Hong Kong Garrison of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army conducted the 22nd rotation of its members in the wee hours of Thursday since it began garrisoning Hong Kong in 1997,” adding:

“Approved by the Central Military Commission, the move is normal routine annual rotation in line with the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Garrisoning the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, which stipulates that ‘the Hong Kong Garrison shall practice a system of rotation of its members.’ ”

Troops underwent special training related to ongoing protests in Hong Kong so they’re able to defend the city and national sovereignty if needed.

China rotates troops in Macau the same way. The South China Morning Post said announcements of previous Hong Kong rotations were made after they occurred, this year in advance because of ongoing disruptive/violent protests.

NYT disinformation headlined: “Chinese Military Sends New Troops Into Hong Kong,” suggesting it was something other than a normal rotation.

The Times and other US establishment media ignore US dirty hands behind what’s going on.

In mid-August, Times editors falsely claimed “protesters in Hong Kong are not…pro-Western troublemakers,” adding:

“They are young people, a great many of them, who ardently don’t want to come further under the repressive rule of the Chinese Communists.”

So-called “Chinese Communists” have been capitalists for decades, their model superior to the Western one.

The US wants China transformed into a client state, the country exploited, its development as a world power checked, what Trump’s trade war aims to achieve, what Beijing is challenging to prevent.

The Times and other Western media fail to explain that Hong Kong residents are freer under Chinese rule since its 1997 takeover than as a UK crown colony from 1843 until that time.

Britain and France fought two opium wars against China — from 1839-1842 preceding UK annexation of Hong Kong, and from 1856 – 1860, exploiting the Chinese for profit-making.

A Final Comment

Sputnik International reported that US troops are training in Poland under harsh conditions for “possible war” against China or Russia — the only nations able to challenge US rage for global dominance.

According to US Col. Donn Yates, Pentagon forces are enduring (combat) field-like conditions — claiming “(t)he more it sucks out here…the higher the morale is.”

Having experienced a week of similar conditions in the 1950s during army training, I and others with me yearned for the ordeal to end.

There was nothing remotely related to morale uplifting about living in the field, sleeping on the ground, eating awful food, being pushed hard, and using slit trenches we dug to relieve ourselves.

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His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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Civil Disobedience in Hong Kong or US Color Revolution Attempt?

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US Walks Away from Southeast Asia Summit Empty-Handed

By Joseph Thomas

Global Research, August 13, 2019

New Eastern Outlook 12 August 2019

A recent meeting of the 10 member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) convened in Bangkok, Thailand and attended by representatives from China, Russia and even the United States, provides us with a clear indicator of how power and influence are being shaped across wider Asia and even globally.

Headlines like the Associated Press’, “Pompeo ends frustrating Bangkok visit,” gives a good feel for how, at least for Washington, the meeting went and how the region responded to Washington’s “plans” for it.

The article would note:

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left Thailand on Saturday with his hopes for resuming nuclear talks with North Korea dashed, while facing an escalating trade war with China and a potentially devastating breakdown in relations between key American allies Japan and South Korea.

Another article published just ahead of the meetings would better frame US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s (and Washington’s) agenda. The LA Times’, “Pompeo seeks to restore U.S. influence in Southeast Asia amid China’s rise,” would report:

Against a backdrop of China’s rising economic and military power, Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo arrived in the Thai capital of Bangkok this week with a difficult mission: Try to win back lost ground in Southeast Asia, a region once dominated by the U.S.

The article would continue:

Pompeo is also attempting to solidify another initiative of his tenure: creation of the so-called Indo-Pacific region, which portends to redraw boundaries to stretch from the U.S. West Coast to Japan, down through Southeast Asia to Australia and west across another ocean to India. It is replacing the familiar Asia-Pacific region and incorporates India (while sidelining Pakistan) to expand U.S. heft against China. 

China has not been shy about pouring tens of billions of dollars into infrastructure projects as part of its mammoth Belt and Road initiative, promising to boost transport systems and connectivity to help drive a sustained period of growth and stepping in where the U.S. often isn’t. 

Thanks in part to China’s investment, the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, has posted a combined economic-output growth of 50% in the last decade. 

The LA Times would then attempt to cite “backlash” across the region, but upon closer examination, things like Malaysia “cancelling” One Belt, One Road (OBOR) projects with China were more about negotiating better agreements rather than cancelling them.

The Diplomat in an article from April this year titled, “Malaysia: Revised China Deal Shows Costs Were Inflated,” helps explain how the Chinese-Malaysian “row” was blown out of proportion by many in the Western media and how the project is once again moving forward.

The Quad: US Searches Edge of Asia for Allies to Contain Beijing

Despite this renegotiating having long-since taken place, the LA Times and other media outlets are still trying to portray various countries in Southeast Asia as “opposed” to China or having cancelled deals that are still very much moving forward.

The LA Times also tries to cite disputes in the South China Sea, another area of conflict cultivated by Washington with even the nations it is supposedly “defending” dragging their feet on initiatives Washington had hoped would divide the region and isolate Beijing.

The LA Times does finally admit:

Many Southeast Asian governments have also recoiled at what they see as U.S. efforts to force them to take sides in the trade dispute with China. 

Apart from Vietnam, no country in the region has agreed to join the U.S. boycott of Huawei, despite the Trump administration’s warnings that the U.S. could cease sharing sensitive information with countries that use the company’s technology. 

Not only has ASEAN rejected US demands regarding Huawei and other coercive polices designed to divide the region and set back joint development, the LA Times quotes Western policymakers who have no choice but to admit the US has no alternatives to offer the region.

From Coercion to Pan-Handling 

Thailand in particular has suffered years of coercion from Washington in a bid to roll back Thai-Chinese relations.

Thailand is currently in the process of replacing the vast majority of its aging US military hardware with new Chinese systems including main battle tanks, armoured personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles and even the nation’s first modern submarine.

Thailand is also currently in the process of building a joint Thai-Chinese high-speed rail network connecting Thai cities and also connecting Thailand to its neighbours.

Despite US coercion and multiple attempts to politically subvert Thailand’s current political order, Thailand continues moving forward undaunted. Not only did it ignore US demands to boycott Huawei, the Chinese tech-giant has been contracted to build the nation’s 5G telecommunications network.

In light of this reality, the US has been forced to back off (at least publicly) from its various threats and preconditions.

The South China Morning Post in an article titled, “Mike Pompeo set for first visit to Thailand as US looks to renew ties despite junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha retaining grip on power,” would claim:

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will begin his first visit to Thailand on Thursday as part of a week-long tour of the Indo-Pacific that will include stops in Australia and Micronesia. 

His visit comes as the country emerges from five years of military rule, with coup leader Prayuth Chan-ocha retaining power after being voted prime minister by his ruling coalition following March’s disputed election. His new cabinet was confirmed after being approved by Thailand’s king earlier this month.

The article would continue by claiming:

The United States condemned Prayuth’s 2014 coup and subsequently downgraded defence ties, raising questions over whether Washington will be satisfied by Thailand’s return to democracy – especially amid allegations of electoral fraud and a vote that was widely considered to be rigged in the junta’s favour. 

But as Bangkok has leaned ever closer to China in the years since the army seized power – with increased arms deals, investments and economic cooperation – the US has expressed readiness to work with Thailand again, and support the country as it assumes the role of chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) this year.

The SCMP never mentions that the regime the Thai military ousted from power in 2014 was the recipient of extensive US and European support. It was also headed by a fugitive, Thaksin Shinawatra, who did not even reside in the country at the time.

Instead, we see the Western media’s familiar tactic of condemning any election that delivers results unfavourable to Washington’s interests. We also see how the US has been left with no choice but to either make concessions and work with Thailand where it can, or be left behind indefinitely.

Considering the trail of broken treaties, political meddling and the destructive trade war the US has initiated against China at Asia’s collective expense, it is difficult to see where Thailand or other ASEAN members can find common ground, mutual interests or any activity at all with the US that is mutually beneficial. Much of ASEAN’s current ties with the US are designed merely to buy time and avoid more aggressive tactics by Washington until the window closes on US hegemony for good.

The real shame of it is that ASEAN could use a counterbalance to China’s rise, ensuring Beijing is never even so much as tempted to simply trade places with the US as the next abusive regional hegemon. It is a counterbalance the US could serve as had it anything genuine to offer potential partners. Instead, ASEAN must look within itself and to other nations across Eurasia, including Russia.

It is ironically not China’s rise that has prompted America’s decline around the globe or in Asia-Pacific specifically, but rather its own unsustainable policies it seems incapable of reforming. Until Washington can approach the Southeast Asia as a region populated by sovereign nations to do business with, rather than a fiefdom to exploit, US representatives will continue to leave regional meetings empty-handed.

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