Why This Book?

On 20 March 2019, I represented the Philippines at a High-Level Dialogue on Indo-Pacific Cooperation hosted in Jakarta by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Indonesia, Retno Marsudi, and which was attended by Ministers, Senior Officials and Ambassadors of the eighteen countries belonging to the East Asia Summit (EAS). At the ASEAN Summit with the United States held in Manila in November 2017, President Donald Trump had first broached the concept of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy (FOIPS). Soon after, the so-called Quad (the United States, India, Japan and Australia) also expounded on the strategy, but downplaying any adversarial implications that might be associated with it in view of the impression that it was an isolationist strategy to exclude or contain an emerging China in the regional political and security architecture. From then on, much speculation and discussion have been generated on the so-called Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS) and Indonesia, projecting herself as a leader in ASEAN and always zealous to surface ASEAN Centrality in the emerging regional security architecture, took pains to host this event. High level delegations from the eighteen EAS members attended the event. At that meeting which was the first ministerial-level forum to explore ideas on this emerging area of cooperation, almost all delegates stressed the importance of and support for ASEAN Centrality in the evolving political/security and economic architecture of the region which straddles the Indian and Pacific oceans, including the Member States of ASEAN. Yet, while prefacing their interventions with support for ASEAN Centrality, non-ASEAN countries expounded on their own particular initiatives on how they understood the Indo-Pacific approach, strategy or concept, including the FOIPS of the United States, the Belt and Road Initiative of China, the Quality Infrastructure Program of Japan, the Indo-Pacific Foreign Policy of Australia, and others, giving the impression that the participants did not have the same views as myself on what ASEAN Centrality meant and how it should be implemented. The implication, of course, is that their respective Indo-Pacific strategy or concept is the norm to be followed to ensure the political stability and economic prosperity of the region. After all the participants had spoken, as the Russian Ambassador and I were the most junior in the group in terms of rank, we were the last in the speaking order, but he spoke first before I did.