The East Asia Summit (EAS), which was held in parallel with last week’s Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in the Laotian capital of Vientiane, failed to agree on a joint statement. The EAS brings together the ASEAN states, Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea, and the US. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov elaborated on what went wrong in a press conference after the event where he accused the pro-Western group of sabotaging this effort.

He said that Australia, Japan, and New Zealand echoed US rhetoric on his country and China with regard to Ukraine and the South China Sea respectively. He also criticized that group for trying to create closed blocs that divide Southeast Asia, pointing to the emerging trilateral US-Japan-Philippines platform as one example among others. He added that “Washington is actively wooing the Philippines now”, which implied that it’s the proverbial weak link within ASEAN that’s facilitating the West’s regional plans there.

China and the Philippines are involved in a tense dispute over the South China Sea, which also involves other countries like Vietnam, but the Socialist Republic isn’t relying on the US for help like Manila is. Washington has exploited this issue to accelerate the military dimension of its so-called ‘Pivot to Asia’. That policy took a backseat over the past two and a half years as the US led NATO’s proxy war on Russia in Ukraine but it’s gradually returning to the forefront as that Eastern European conflict winds down.

Just like the US has sought to contain Russia in Europe through NATO and Ukraine, so too is it seeking to contain China in Asia through an incipient NATO-like network and the Philippines, with both Ukraine and the Philippines having territorial disputes with Russia and China that are taken advantage of to this end. The US’ British and Polish mutual defense allies in Europe also play important roles in aiding Ukraine against Russia right now just like its Japanese one in Asia is poised to play a similar role in the Philippines.

Likewise, just as the US manipulated the Russian-Ukrainian security dilemma (which was always just a subsect of the larger Russian-NATO one) to provoke a hot war in Europe, so too is it planning to manipulate the Sino-Philippine security dilemma (that’s also just a subsect of the larger Sino-US one). The outbreak of conventional hostilities in Europe enabled the US to reassert its hitherto declining unipolar hegemony there just like their outbreak in Asia is expected by its policymakers to do the same.

In furtherance of this goal, the US and its closest regional allies wanted to include provocative language in the EAS joint statement for preconditioning the world into drawing a comparison between these two, hence why Russia and China blocked it. Reuters claimed to have seen the draft and reported that it would have mentioned the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and that “the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula, Myanmar, Ukraine and the Middle East … present challenges for the region.”

China and the Philippines have different interpretations of UNCLOS’ relevance to their dispute, while referencing unrelated problems in the Korean Peninsula, Myanmar, Ukraine, and the Middle East was meant to make it seem like there’s a commonality between them, albeit one unconnected to America. Given the context and the way in which they’ve been reported by the Mainstream Media, the impression would have been that they’re all caused by non-Western challenges to the so-called ‘rules-based order’.

Lavrov mentioned during his press conference how this concept is meant to replace the current global security architecture in the event that the latter collapses as a result of the US’ actions. He specified that Japan’s US-backed remilitarization and the trend of creating closed blocs in Asia are heightening the risk that this might one day happen. He also mocked the complementary concept of a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ as “a paradoxical slogan” due to the US’ efforts to shut Russia and China out of the region.

What the US and its closest regional allies wanted to do was slyly insert language alluding to the ‘rules-based order’ and ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ concepts for complicating their Russian and Chinese rivals’ relations with ASEAN. As for this collection of countries, they generally want to maintain their hard-earned strategic autonomy that was described more in detail by the Valdai Club in their report last week about “The World Majority and Its Interests”, with the exception being the Philippines of course.

The authors referenced India’s multi-alignment strategy of balancing between competing power centers as the guiding principle behind the ASEAN countries’ foreign policy. They also warned, however, that “All, without exception, multilateral formats created in the past are going through a rough patch, even the successful ones such as ASEAN”, which they said is “currently facing serious challenges as it has to decide on its future.” This was a prescient allusion to the New Cold War tensions that spoiled the latest EAS.

Their insight is important because it helps observers better understand the dynamics that led to the US sabotaging the joint statement. The ASEAN states as a whole are considered to be pioneers in the World Majority/Global South since they put aside their problems to focus on apolitical cooperation, with mutual trade and development being the priority. They then leveraged their regional integration platform as a means for collectively interfacing with the Great Powers, including through the EAS.

ASEAN was successful insofar as it improved previously strained relations between its members, liberalized trade within the group, and thus made their geostrategically positioned region a very attractive place for foreign investments. No serious challenges emerged until the Western-led globalization model that took over the world upon the end of the Old Cold War began to weaken after the 2008 financial crisis, Trump’s Sino-US trade war, COVID-19, and then the Ukrainian Conflict.

These developments led to varying geo-economic and geopolitical changes that combined to weaken ASEAN as a whole upon it becoming the object of Great Power competition, particularly between China and the US, though with other players like EU, India, Japan, and Russia getting more involved too. The preexisting but hitherto largely frozen Sino-Philippine territorial dispute thawed as a result of US meddling and became the primary catalyst for dividing ASEAN by introducing bloc politics to the group.

Its members then tried to retain their unity but struggled since they didn’t want to take the Philippines side against China, which has been their top trade partner since 2009, but they also didn’t want to abandon it either since ASEAN would risk dissolution if that happens. The consequent dilemma proved impossible to resolve, and the balancing acts that the group as a whole and its individual members resorted to inadvertently exacerbated centrifugal trends by making them easier to divide-and-rule.

As everything stands, the EAS’ failure to agree on a joint statement might be a sign of things to come with regard to ASEAN as a whole continuing to lose its institutional centrality in the Asia-Pacific despite wishful rhetoric to the contrary. The US is replicating its anti-Russian containment model in Europe against China in Asia, with the Philippines serving as its Ukrainian-like vanguard state in this respect, and ASEAN is powerless to stop it despite the risk of being embroiled in the hot war that might soon follow.