The ASEAN Regional Forum, which brings leading diplomats together, highlights the hotly contested issues of the South China Sea dispute, the war in the Ukraine, and North Korea’s missile programme.
The disputed South China Sea, the war in the Ukraine, and North Korea’s missile programme are the main topics of discussion at a security meeting with foreign ministers from Southeast Asia attended by senior diplomats from the United States, China, and Russia.
The 27-member ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) will serve as a forum for major powers to clash over a variety of issues on Friday, and the closed-door roundtable has historically been a contentious event.
As US-China tensions rise over Taiwan’s independence, Beijing’s close ties with Moscow, and a struggle for sway in the South Pacific, host nation Indonesia issued a warning that the Southeast Asian bloc ASEAN cannot act as a proxy.
Sergey Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, Antony Blinken, the secretary of state of the United States, and Wang Yi are present at the ARF, a body established to discuss security issues that also includes Japan, South Korea, and Australia.
Retno Marsudi, the foreign minister of Indonesia, said to ministers at an earlier summit of 18 East Asian nations, “The Indo-Pacific must not be another battleground.”
We want to keep our region stable because it’s important.
In conversations with Marsudi on Friday, Blinken asserted that Jakarta and Washington have similar goals for an Asia-Pacific region that is “free, open, secure, prosperous, connected, and resilient”.
