After Seoul and Washington’s recent announcement of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery in South Korea, Beijing and Moscow staged a strong protest, saying it targets them and “tip the regional strategic balance”, which has fueled concerns over a possible crack in their collaboration on North Korea.
Advertisement
Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se arrives in Vientiane on Sunday for the ASEAN Regional Forum.
On Tuesday, the ministers will meet for the Asean Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit, the first of which will focus on security issues and the latter on economic topics. “But despite this and numerous other security council resolutions, the DPRK chooses to flout its worldwide obligations”, he said.
The chairman’s statement of the ARF, which is adopted based on the opinions of the 27 ARF member countries including ASEAN members and those involved in the six-party talks, covers all the major issues in the region. The general view is that China made a strenuous effort to ensure that the statement summarizing the July 25 meeting of ASEAN foreign ministers does not contain any criticism of China’s territorial claims or any reference to the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s ruling on the South China Sea dispute.
The foreign ministers’ meeting is one of the multi-sectoral meetings being hosted by Laos as per its ASEAN chairmanship in 2016, culminating in the heads-of-government East Asia Summit set for September 6 in Vientiane.
He also mentioned that China and the ASEAN nations issued a joint statement on full and effective implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, which stipulates that disputes should be resolved peacefully through negotiation between the parties directly concerned, and China and ASEAN countries should work together to maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea. This represented a fairly neutral stance.
Before the ARF started, concerns were raised that it would be tougher than last year for South Korea to draw a favorable statement given that Laos, the chair of this year’s event, has close ties with the North.
Advertisement
John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, will also participate along with the Asean ministers and their counterparts from China, India, Russia, Canada, Japan and the European Union on Monday. It is said that China attempted to reflect the THAAD issue in the statement immediately before the closing of the forum and the USA and South Korea were opposed to the attempt. In an attempt to put THAAD in the global spotlight, China and Russian Federation already sent the United Nations a joint statement adopted by their leaders on June 25 that deploying THAAD on the Korean Peninsula harms the strategic balance in Northeast Asia.
