Southeast Asia Archive

A series of recent developments in the Philippines has added suspense and drama to next year’s presidential election, which otherwise looks likely to reinforce the country’s long-standing tradition of politics as an affair of political families. The political drama originally centered on who would be the eventual presidential candidate representing outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte’s party, the PDP-Laban, in the May 2022 election. Though the party fielded an incumbent senator as its candidate, he was seen as a mere placeholder for Duterte’s daughter, Sara Duterte-Carpio, who was expected to be named as a replacement candidate at the last moment. Having cultivated suspense […]

Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne concluded a four-day tour of Southeast Asia this week, visiting Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia. The trip was widely seen as an effort by the Australian government to allay concerns in some nearby countries over the recently announced AUKUS defense pact, which calls for Australia to deploy nuclear-propelled submarines with assistance from the United States and United Kingdom. On the Trend Lines podcast this week, Susannah Patton, a research fellow in the Foreign Policy and Defense Program at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Center, joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman to talk about the wide […]

Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne is finishing up a four-nation tour of Southeast Asia this week, having begun her trip in Malaysia before moving on to Cambodia, Vietnam and finally Indonesia. A main goal of the visit is to conduct follow-up talks after Canberra agreed in late October on a new “comprehensive strategic partnership” with the main regional bloc, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Another prominent item on Payne’s agenda is to seek understanding from ASEAN members for Australia’s three-way defense partnership with the U.S. and the U.K., which was just announced in September. Known as AUKUS, the pact […]

Tensions within NATO over the past two decades have led some to assert that the old military alliances of the 20th century are a thing of the past. Soon, the argument goes, they will give way to looser, ad hoc groupings like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, comprising Australia, India, Japan and the United States; the AUKUS security pact among Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States; or other “coalitions of the willing” formed to address specific concerns, like those that intervened in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. To be sure, the past 30 years have punched some […]

Every day, the gargantuan U.S. intelligence community, with its budget of $84 billion, scans the world looking for threats to the United States. In a landmark report released last month, the National Intelligence Council identified a big one: climate change. The world’s failure to curb greenhouse gas emissions and the brutal impacts of climate change, the assessment warns, are now poised to upend geopolitics over the next two decades as global warming exacerbates diplomatic tensions, cross-border competition and instability in heat-stressed countries. It is hard to overstate the importance of this new report, which is the latest National Intelligence Estimate, the intelligence […]

In late September, the leader of Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong, invited his Cambodian and Laotian counterparts—Hun Sen, who is also Cambodia’s prime minister, and Thongloun Sisoulith, who is also Laos’ president—to Hanoi for a meeting. According to Vietnam’s official media, the three leaders talked about cooperation past and future, and the necessity of effective and close-knit relations among the ruling parties and governments of the three countries.  Such a banal readout for a rare in-person meeting raised some eyebrows and fueled speculation. Writing for Asia Times, David Hutt reported that “analysts and observers saw the Hanoi-hosted talks as a significant […]