Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called out Beijing over China claiming most of the South China Sea and says the U.S. will stand by Southeast Asian nations with competing claims.

Nobody wants to take sides. Collin Koh is a Research Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. Geography, he says, is one reason.  Malaysia, Indonesia, even Vietnam to a good extent – to them, the U.S. is not the resident power in Southeast Asia, but China is. So you have to live with China for good or bad anyway. So I think that is how we explain the ambivalence towards Pompeo’s statement by and large from Southeast Asia.