U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam, on August 24, 2021. Harris makes an official trip to Southeast Asia to gather regional allies as the world’s leading state. it is successful due to a fall in Afghanistan.
Evelyn Hockstein | AFP | Getty Images
Strategic competition between the United States and China became the forefront when Vice President Kamala Harris began the second stage of her official visit to Southeast Asia in Vietnam.
Harris on Wednesday told Vietnamese officials in the capital Hanoi that Beijing needed to put pressure on its actions in the South China Sea. Vietnam is a vocal opponent of China’s vast territorial claims to strategic waterways.
“We need to find ways to put pressure and increase pressure, frankly, so that Beijing complies with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and can challenge its intimidation and excessive maritime demands,” Harris said.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS is an international treaty that describes the rights and responsibilities of nations in the world ocean space. It forms the basis of how international tribunals, such as the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, resolve maritime disputes.
Harris’ comment followed his speech in Singapore on Tuesday, when he said Beijing had continued to “coerce, intimidate and claim the vast majority of the South China Sea.”
The South China Sea is a resource-rich waterway that is a vital trade route through which billions of dollars of world trade pass each year. China claims almost the entire sea, some of which have it they have also been claimed by some Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines.
In 2016, a court in the Permanent Arbitration Court dismissed China’s lawsuit as legally unfounded, a ruling Beijing ignored.
In response in Harris’s Singapore speech, Chinese state media accused the U.S. vice president of trying to “make a wedge” between China and its Southeast Asian neighbors.
Prior to arriving in Vietnam on Tuesday evening, Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and China’s ambassador to Vietnam held a meeting without notice, Reuters reported. During the meeting, the Chinese ambassador pledged to give two million doses of Covid-19 vaccine to Vietnam, according to the report.
The biggest geopolitical contest
While Harris has been cautious in attacking Beijing, political analysts and former diplomats have said there is no doubt that his trip is part of the US strategy to compete with China.
The rivalry between the US and China is the “biggest” geopolitical issue right now, said Kishore Mahbubani, a prominent former Singapore diplomat.
“So clearly, the visit of Vice President Kamala Harris is part of the contest between the United States and China,” Mahbubani, now a distinguished fellow at the Asian Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, said on Wednesday.
“Southeast Asia will be a very, very critical scenario for this competition,” he said.
His sentiment is shared by Curtis Chin, a former U.S. ambassador to the Asian Development Bank. Chin said China’s rise is “a major foreign policy challenge” for the U.S. and much of the world, although the consequences in Afghanistan continue.
The United States must devote all its attention to Southeast Asia and, to a large extent, to Asia, not just to the countries with which we have formal alliances.
Curtis Chin
senior member, Milken Institute
President Joe Biden has faced criticism over how he handled the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. The issue has overshadowed Harris’ trip to Southeast Asia, and reporters have focused their questions on Afghanistan at the vice president’s joint press conference with Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Monday.
“The United States must devote all its attention to Southeast Asia and much of Asia, not just the countries with which we have formal alliances,” Chin, a senior member of the Milken Institute, said on Wednesday. Squawk Box Asia “from CNBC.
“And when I say all this, this is not just diplomatic and military commitments, it means a real business commitment: that’s what the United States needs to focus on, too,” he added.
In his conversations with the Prime Minister of Singapore, Harris discussed issues ranging from supply chains to climate change and the pandemic.
He announced in Vietnam that the U.S. will donate one million additional doses of Pfizer’s Covf vaccine, bringing the total U.S. donation to the Southeast Asian country to six million doses. Harris also launched the new regional office of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Hanoi.
The vice president is scheduled to conclude her trip to Southeast Asia on Thursday.