While China’s influence in Southeast Asia is inevitable, the region welcomed Secretary Blinken’s recent trip as a counterweight to Beijing, says USIP’s Brian Harding: “[The region] wants balance, which means they want the United States to be as engaged as possible.”
U.S. Institute of Peace experts discuss the latest foreign policy issues from around the world in On Peace, a brief weekly collaboration with SiriusXM's POTUS Channel 124.
Amid today’s renewed great power competition, the Korean Peninsula has entered a new Cold War winter without having enjoyed the spring of the previous post-Cold War era. During the post-Cold War period, the South Korean and U.S. governments anticipated that the seismic changes occurring in Europe would be replicated on the Korean Peninsula. However, over the past 30 years, none of their main policy goals regarding North Korea — such as reform and opening, denuclearization, peace settlement and unification — were fulfilled due to several factors in Northeast Asian geopolitics that favored the status quo. The enduring nature of these factors means the United States and South Korea should adjust their North Korea strategy and goals to enhance peace and security on the Korean Peninsula more effectively.
Last week, China welcomed more than 50 African leaders to Beijing for the ninth Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), which has met every three years since 2000 to coordinate economic and political relations. FOCAC is China’s main platform for Belt and Road-affiliated projects and Chinese plans for infrastructure development have generally dominated the action plans that come out of the forum. In recent years, exchanges between Chinese and African political parties, legislatures and local governments have also been a focus of the forum. China has also found in FOCAC a source of support for international relations principles it prioritizes, including noninterference and its "one China" principle. While security cooperation has been an element of FOCAC for more than a decade, this year’s forum saw an unprecedented Chinese emphasis on its role in security on the continent.
The July 2024 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in in Astana, Kazakhstan provided China with another platform to highlight its vision for global governance and security. While the SCO has expanded to include states beyond Central Asia, the organization’s focus on fighting terrorism, separatism and extremism — the so-called “three evils” — is particularly relevant for China in Central Asia, where Beijing looks to test and advance its security cooperation strategies. The SCO, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Global Security Initiative (GSI) are key components of China’s ambition to offer an alternative to what it calls “Western hegemony” and to resist external interference in the domestic affairs of SCO states.
Amid warming bilateral ties, India and the United States have steadily built their defense relationship over 20 years. More recently, shared concern over China’s rise and projection of power has motivated a renewed focused on institutionalizing the relationship at the highest levels while building the connective tissue necessary to innovate and collaborate effectively in support of preserving a free and open Indo-Pacific region.