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US-ASEAN summit became ‘major missed opportunity,’ experts say

ASEAN leaders did not receive from Biden any answers to the most pertinent issues for them, Joanne Lin, lead researcher of the ISEAS Yusof-Ishak Institute's Asean Studies Centre, said

SINGAPORE, May 15. /TASS/. The US-ASEAN summit became a "major missed opportunity" where US President Joe Biden could not offer to the leaders of the regional bloc any specific directions of cooperation. This expert opinion was published by the Straits Times newspaper on Sunday.

The American leader promised to earmark $150 mln for the initiatives on developing cooperation with ASEAN, including $60 mln for maritime programs under the guidance of the US Coast Guard which will send ships and personnel to provide aid to regional law enforcement. "What the priority seems to point to, is China. These are all things to counter China's maritime assertion and of course the Belt and Road Initiative," said Joanne Lin, lead researcher of the ISEAS Yusof-Ishak Institute's Asean Studies Centre. According to the newspaper, ASEAN leaders did not receive from Biden any answers to the most pertinent issues for them, particularly which projects the US intends to propose to the region in order to recover its economy following the coronavirus pandemic as well as under the conditions of the Ukrainian crisis. Additionally, the association could not understand whether the US’ Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) will become a more substantive strategy than the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) which the US left in 2017. The expert noted that the IPEF was "really what the region has been looking forward to, a lot more than this long list of initiatives," which do not include anything substantive in terms of trade.

Derek Grossman, senior defense analyst at the US-based think-tank Rand Corporation, thinks that "[Biden] said that the Asean centrality is at the heart of his administration's Indo-Pacific strategy. If that's true, then the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework should have been unveiled <…> to allow for time to talk about how Asean can integrate into it. Instead, by unveiling it later on during the Quad summit, it's going to look like an extra-regional framework of which Asean is not really a factor." According to the expert, the May 12-13 summit became a "major missed opportunity.".

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