MOSCOW, June 4. /TASS/. The US Central Intelligence Agency and Britain’s intelligence service MI6 are the main masterminds and beneficiaries of destabilization in the Asia-Pacific Region, the program director of the Academy of Political Sciences, Alexander Stepanov, has said in a column devoted to the Shangri-La security forum.

The discussions at this event bore an unmistakable anti-Russian and anti-Chinese flavor, remarks Stepanov, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Latin America of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

“The host of this annual security forum - the British-US International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) - officially positions itself as an ‘independent’ think tank. However, the analysis of publications and events organized on this institution’s platform, including those with the participation of senior MI6 and CIA officials, reveals the IISS’s bias, or rather its full integration into the Western intelligence community. For example, among the IISS trustees is John Brennan, an ex-CIA director, whose deputy was Avril Haines, appointed by US President Joe Biden to head the entire US intelligence community,” Stepanov said.

According to Stepanov, the forum can be regarded as an outpost in the Asia-Pacific Region, held to promote ultra-globalist narratives, and as a lobbying platform for the Western military-industrial complex. Although the forum is held in Singapore, which has to maintain a balance between the geopolitical interests of the US and China, London and Washington have been tightening their grip on regional satellites and pressing for an anti-Chinese and anti-Russian agenda among key Asian actors.

“While trying to embed the Ukrainian issue into the forum’s agenda, Washington is also imposing on the delegates the Swiss negotiation format, despite the fact that almost all of the invited leaders of the global South refused to participate [in the Swiss peace talks] for the simple reason that it would be pointless to discuss a settlement without Russia. This year’s key narrative is public pressure on Beijing and mantra-like calls for “a revision ofpolicy towards Taiwan,” with repeated allusions to the Pentagon-promoted idea of a common US and Asian-Pacific region security configuration,” he added, noting that a summit similar to the Shangri-La Dialogue - the Manama Dialogue - with a focus on the Middle East, was held in Bahrain by the IISS in 2022. Its agenda is largely a replica of the Singaporean one, adapted to a local [Middle Eastern] audience.