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President Xi Conducts High-Level Diplomacy With ASEAN Neighbors
7 October 2013
(EIRNS)—With President Obama "Home Alone," the upcoming APEC meeting on Oct. 8 may reach some positive results, following Chinese President Xi Jinping’s unprecedented personal diplomacy in the region, with major new agreements reached with Indonesia and Malaysia, including offers of greater military cooperation. While the "usual suspects" Japan, Australia, and the U.S. issued another provocative statement on the South China Sea issue, this will not advance to any place in the upcoming discussions at the APEC forum. The economic deals being offered by China to the neighboring countries have underlined the very tangible mutual benefit the nations have in their cooperation, and the broaching of security cooperation, including joint maritime patrols of the countries’ navies, may help to resolve some of the tensions that have arisen as a result of the various maritime border disputes. Some Chinese scholars had criticized President Xi’s "New Silk Road" initiative for Central Asia issued at the SCO summit in Bishkek last month, claiming that it meant "turning the other cheek" on the complicated situation in the Pacific Rim. But the President’s visit to Southeast Asia and the "Maritime Silk Road" proposal shows that the general thrust of the new Chinese economic diplomacy is many-sided and coheres with President Xi’s Nazarbayev University speech in which he clearly called for bringing the SCO Central Asia countries together with the countries of the East Asian Economic Forum in the Pacific into a "great economic space." Here also President Xi is calling for the creation of "an investment and financing platform for infrastructure development" similar to his proposal for an SCO infrastructural development bank. Many of these initiatives will no doubt be made more concrete when Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang makes his visit to the Southeast nations next week in the wake of President Xi’s visit to the region. Much of this has, of course, been the cause of much chagrin for the Obama Administration. But if the U.S. actually dumped Obama and his policies of obstructionism, and adopted a NAWAPA XXI policy to bring to the table, that "economic space" would span the entire Asia-Pacific region. [wcj] |