Add new U.S. -Philippine tensions thanks to mercurial new President Rodrigo Duterte, and the region may be in for more turbulence.
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Mr. Hun Sen has stated that Cambodia will not support efforts by Asean countries in disputes with China over territorial claims in the South China Sea to use Asean as a platform to assist their claims.
If the Chinese government confirms the suspicion, the Philippines would lodge an official protest, according to Philippine Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana. One specific commentator, Robert C. O’Brien, a former advisor to not one, not two but three Republican presidential candidates, in multiple essays for various publications, lays out a prophetic body of evidence that China’s economic and military rise combined with unsafe actions that challenge Asia’s peaceful status-quo would have wide global ramifications.
To a question on why Beijing finally agreed to a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea (COC), Najib said China valued its good relations with Asean and the bloc had been persuading the republic to accept the CoC.
Duterte has taken a more conciliatory stance than his predecessor toward China.
However, he expressed alarm after a Philippine surveillance plane recently spotted four Chinese coast guard ships, four suspected barges, including one equipped with what appeared to be a crane, and two people-carrying ferries at the Scarborough Shoal off his country’s northwestern coast.
On the eve of the summit last week China began deploying a large group of ships to Scarborough Shoal, a rock formation it seized from the Philippines in 2012 and may now seek to build into an artificial island.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, better known as the ASEAN, isn’t the most exciting of global groupings.
China and ASEAN members agreed at their meeting to set up hotlines between their foreign ministries to tackle maritime emergencies in the disputed sea, participants said.
China supposedly backed down from developing the Scarborough area after Obama expressed US opposition to their plans in March, in part because thousands of Americans are scheduled for deployment in the Philippines as part of a new defense agreement, and having a Chinese military outpost only 140 miles from Luzon would be disturbing.
China claims most of the South China Sea region through which about $5 trillion worth of maritime trade passes every year.
In a landmark ruling in July, the arbitration tribunal invalidated China’s expansive claims, including in areas where Beijing built its islands, and admonished China for blocking Filipino fishermen at Scarborough, where it said both Chinese and Filipinos could fish.
Also on Wednesday, the Philipppine coast guard announced that United States is giving Manila two used military aircraft, to help expand sea patrols in the face of territorial disputes with China. “They’re changing the operational landscape of the South China Sea”, Harris said in February.
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“We made sure the relationship between Asean and China didn’t break because of the disputes between the countries”.
