The United States’s top diplomat says Washington will expand its military and economic relationships with partner countries in an Indo-Pacific region that he said was increasingly concerned over China’s “aggressive actions”.
During a visit to Indonesia, Antony Blinken on Tuesday described the Indo-Pacific as the world’s most dynamic region and said everyone had a stake in ensuring a status quo that was without coercion and intimidation, in a barely veiled reference to China.
“We’ll work with our allies and partners to defend the rules-based order that we’ve built together over decades to ensure the region remains open and accessible,” he said in a speech at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta.
“Let me be clear: the goal of defending the rules-based order is not to keep any country down. Rather, it’s to protect the right of all countries to choose their own path, free from coercion and intimidation.”
The US secretary of state is in Indonesia on his first visit to Southeast Asia since President Joe Biden took office in January, a trip aimed at shoring up relations after a period of uncertainty about the US commitment to Asia under the administration of Donald Trump.
He added that Washington was “determined to ensure freedom of navigation in the South China sea,” and said Beijing’s actions there threatened the movement of more than $3tn worth of commerce every year.
Blinken also stressed that “it’s not about a contest between a US-centric region or a China-centric region – the Indo-Pacific is its own region”, and said Washington wanted to avoid conflict there.
Beijing has been accused of deploying a range of military hardware including anti-ship and surface-to-air missiles there, and ignored a 2016 international tribunal decision that declared its historical claim over most of the waters to be without basis.
US-China tensions have soared over self-ruled, democratic Taiwan, which China claims as its territory and has vowed to retake one day, by force if necessary. The US-China relationship has deteriorated over a range of issues from cybersecurity and tech supremacy to human rights in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
