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No one in Southeast Asia batted an eyelid when Gen. Tea Banh, Cambodia’s defense minister, joined Chinese Ambassador Wang Wentian for a dip in the sea earlier this month.
The two were photographed bathing in the Gulf of Thailand after taking part in a ribbon cutting for a naval base, which China is building for Cambodia in Sihanouk province.
U.S. news reports about Phnom Penh being prepared to give Beijing exclusive use of part of the future Ream Naval Base have added to tensions between the United States and China, rival superpowers vying for influence in the region.
As Sino-U.S. frictions become more intense, Phnom Penh seems to have tilted towards its big neighbor, which has been offering cash and assistance to not only Cambodia but other Southeast Asian nations.
“Cambodia and China aren’t good at hiding their relationship,” said Virak Ou, president of Future Forum, a Cambodian think-tank.
“It's obvious that we are choosing sides.”
Yet most Southeast Asian countries so far remain reluctant to pick sides, and analysts say it is crucial that Washington recognize the need to engage the region’s nations in its Indo-Pacific strategy, or risk losing out to Beijing.
At the Shangri-La Dialogue security forum in Singapore that wrapped up on Sunday, Tea Banh lashed out at what he called “baseless and problematic accusations” against the Cambodian government in relation to the naval base that Phnom Penh is building in Ream, with help from Beijing.
The Ream Naval Base would effectively be China’s first naval facility in mainland Southeast Asia and allow its military to expand patrols across the region.
“Unfortunately, Cambodia is constantly accused of giving an exclusive right to a foreign country to use the base,” the minister said, adding that this is “a complete insult” to his country.
Cambodia, he said, is a state that is “independent, sovereign, and has the full right to decide its destiny.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in his speech at the Shangri-La forum on Saturday, stated that “the Indo-Pacific is our center of strategic gravity” and “our priority theater of operations.”
But questions remain on where smaller Southeast Asian nations feature in that grand strategy of the United States.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin (left) and Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe (fourth from right) attend a ministerial roundtable luncheon at the Shangri-La Dialogue meeting in Singapore, June 11, 2022. [AFP]Lopsided cooperation
The region, Indonesian Minister of Defense Prabowo Subianto said in his remarks here, “has been for many centuries the crossroad of imperialism, big power domination and exploitation.”
“We understand the rivalry between the established world power and the rising world power,” he said, referring to the United States and China.
Southeast Asian countries are “the most affected by big powers’ competition,” Prabowo, who joined the military in the thick of the Vietnam War and retired with the rank of Lieutenant General, told the audience at the Shangri-La Dialogue on Saturday.
Despite divisions and differences between member countries, “we’ve come to our own ASEAN way of resolving challenges,” he said.
It may seem that “we’re sitting on the fence,” Prabowo said, but this apparent inaction reflects an effort of preserving neutrality by ASEAN countries.
“Indonesia opted to be not engaged in any military alliance,” the minister said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin (left) stands with Vietnamese Defense Minister Phan Van Giang during a bilateral meeting ahead of the Shangri-La Dialogue forum in Singapore, June 10, 2022. [AFP]
The same stance has been adopted by another ASEAN player – Vietnam– whose White Paper on defense policy stated “three nos” including no military alliances, no basing of foreign troops in the country and no explicit alliances with one country against another.
Yet it’s unlikely that Hanoi will embrace the U.S. to counter Beijing, even though Vietnam often is viewed as anti-China because of its experience with Chinese aggression on many occasions in its history.
“It’s better to nurture a relationship with a close neighbor rather than relying on a distant sibling,” Vietnamese Defense Minister Phan Van Giang explained, quoting a Vietnamese proverb.
Two of ten ASEAN nations – the Philippines and Thailand – are treaty allies with the U.S. But even in Manila and Bangkok, there have been signs of expanded cooperation with China.
“Southeast Asia and China are neighbors thanks to the geography, and their cooperation is natural,” said Collin Koh, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
Koh suggested that in order to maintain the foothold in the region, “the U.S. needs to embrace and appreciate local cultures and not try to force regime changes.”
“The cooperation between the U.S. and the region has been too one-dimensional and lopsided, too security focused, and needs to expand,” he said.
Gen. Wei Fenghe, China’s defense minister, attends the opening reception at the Shangri-La
“Southeast Asia is a difficult region for the U.S. to grasp,” said Blake Herzinger, a Singapore-based defense policy specialist.
“The region needs to foster ties with China and Washington needs to accept and work with that,” Herzinger said, adding it’s time to recognize that “U.S. leverage is limited in a competitive region where the opposite number is China.”
According to Southeast Asia analyst Koh, “it’s not too late for the U.S. to adjust its policy towards Southeast Asia.”
“There are still demands for an American presence here and a reservoir of goodwill that the U.S. has built over the past,” Koh said.
But, he warned, “this may risk running dry if Washington doesn’t truly recognize the importance of engagement in the region.”
The U.S. and allies should also bear in mind regional geopolitical calculations, he said.
“Southeast Asian countries don’t want to pick sides but they find themselves being sucked into the super power competition and being pragmatic as they are, some of them are making efforts to try to benefit from it,” Koh said.
“I think the Biden administration has done a good job in relation to Southeast Asia in the last six months. Before, not so good because they had a lot on their plate,” said Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
In her opinion, “to try benefitting from U.S.-China competition is short-sighted.”
“Countries in the region should consider a long-term strategy to hold up a rules-based world order where smaller countries also have rights to speak as they don’t want China to dictate to them what to do,” Glaser said.
https://www.benarnews.org/english/news/ ... 05531.html
Thaiger News used this piece as source material for an article with this header:
News Forum - China opens naval base in Cambodia, officials go swimming together to celebrate
By Thaiger,
22 hours ago in Thaiger News From "Thaiager news: Despite experts predicting that ASEAN nations would not pick sides between the US and China, Cambodia seems to be cozying up to its powerful Chinese neighbour, with officials even going for a dip in the sea together. Cambodia’s Minister of Defense Tea Banh and Chinese Ambassador Wang Wentian were spotted bathing in the sea together after the opening ceremony of a naval base built by China in Cambodia’s Sihanoukville province earlier this month. The Ream Naval Base is China’s first naval facility in mainland Southeast Asia. Ream Naval Base is considered to be a way for China to expand its […]
https://thethaiger.com/talk/topic/15066 ... celebrate/ Some serious shite attempts at Journalisim by these 2 alleged news sources, especially Thaiager"news".
From Future Forum's site in Phnom Penh: Most notably, the waters off Cambodia’s coasts are not deep enough to be useful to a powerful navy. These waters, in the Gulf of Thailand, are on average about 50 meters deep. Where this base is allegedly to be situated, on the bay of Kampong Som, the water is only five to 10 meters deep.
These depths would not permit China to undertake major naval actions in the Gulf, and the use of submarines, among the most powerful weapons in any naval operation, would be rendered impractical. To assure a strike capability, a submarine must create low noise and electromagnetic waves in order to avoid radar, something that would be challenging in shallow waters like those found in the Gulf of Thailand.
In this specific case, the geography of Cambodia suggests that China does not stand to gain much strategic advantage by equipping military facilities on the Kingdom’s shores.
In addition to the logistical limitations caused by these shallow waters, there is the question of its location, which is simply not that important in relation to international sea lanes of communication.
Some commentators have attempted to explain the Ream Naval Base’s geographical significance by pointing out that it could serve as a stopover point for China to protect and control its shipping lanes in the Malacca Strait – a piracy-infested choke-point which is strategically significant for China, given its reliance on energy imports through the strait.
This explanation, however, is not convincing. Does China need access to Ream Naval Base for this purpose when it already has access to an outpost at Fiery Cross Reef in the Spratly Islands? Existing Chinese facilities are more than capable enough of supplying this support without the use of Cambodian territory.
Additionally, the establishment of a Chinese base in Cambodia stands to provoke a security escalation by Cambodia’s neighbors while offering relatively scant strategic advantage to China. The best way to understand this is to assess the security developments of Cambodia’s neighboring countries, and their links to the United States.
https://www.futureforum.asia/post/op-ed ... efit-china
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