ASEAN Steers Between Two Powers with Joint US Military Exercise in South China Sea

South China Morning Post

07 September 2019

Asean’s first joint exercise with the US, which wrapped up on Friday, is the latest effort by the Asian bloc to rebalance its military engagement with Beijing and Washington, while avoiding being seen to tilt towards either of the two regional powers, analysts said. Rajeev Ranjan Chaturvedy, a visiting fellow at the RSIS at NTU Singapore, said both exercises aimed to enhance understanding and the skills needed to deal with emerging maritime security threats together. But the China-Asean maritime exercise was quite limited in scope, involving search and rescue and high availability disaster recovery activities. In contrast, the US-Asean exercise aims to boost situational awareness and interoperability, he said.

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