Southern China Morning Post - ASEAN Diplomacy

Vietnam’s president and Communist Party chief travels to Russia and France this week, on a trip analysts say is designed to do double duty: shore up support for Hanoi’s claims in the South China Sea and help bankroll its bid to become a high-income economy by 2045. To Lam’s itinerary encompasses talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow before flying to Paris to meet...

As India prepares for the Brics summit less than two weeks away, relations with China are warming up. On July 22, Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi during the East Asia Summit; five days later, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri visited China. Last week, Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval also visited Beijing, for b...

Seven words, spoken almost in passing on a recent afternoon in Srinagar, have set off a diplomatic tremor across South Asia. “This is an important part of India,” Sergio Gor told reporters on August 19, during the first visit by a US ambassador to Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir in six years. Within hours, Pakistan had summoned the top American diplomat in Islamabad, Natal...

In arguably his most important foreign trip, Elbridge Colby, US undersecretary for defence policy, visited key Southeast Asian capitals this month. In a speech in Manila, the Pentagon policy chief extolled America’s “flexible realism”, which he said serves “the practical, concrete interests of regular Americans” and echoes Southeast Asian nations’ commitment to “pragmatism, an o...

Forty years ago, the Stockholm Document turned the political promise of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act into a more practical system of confidence-building. Amid the Cold War, Europe’s East and West did not disarm, abandon deterrence or begin to trust one another. Instead, they agreed that military competition could be made safer through prior notification, observation, information ...