Washington’s Asia-Pacific strategy has gone from maintaining primacy over the region for decades to increasingly desperate attempts to salvage its now waning influence.
This is in part due to China’s rise as an economic, military and political regional power as well as the increasing self-reliance of smaller but still pivotal Asian nations. This includes the Southeast Asian Kingdom of Thailand.
In Washington’ Shadow
The so-called “Pivot to Asia” initiated under the administration of US President Barack Obama as a means of reinvigorating US influence across Asia Pacific vis-à-vis China has resulted in a backlash against tired US policies predicated on “democracy promotion,” “rights advocacy” and increasingly meaningless economic and military ties between Washington and the nations of Southeast Asia.
After a nearly year-long marathon of daily, acrimonious accusations against Moscow for alleged, yet-to-be proven interference in the 2016 US presidential elections, Washington finds itself increasingly mired in its own hypocrisy – openly and eagerly pursing the very sort of interference abroad in multiple nations regarding elections and internal political affairs it has accused Russia of.
As is well known, Southeast Asia is one of the world’s centers of drug production. We are talking about the infamous “Golden Triangle”, located in the remote mountainous areas of the Indochina Peninsula, at the point where Laos, Thailand and Burma (which since 1989 has been known as Myanmar) intersect.
There has been a recent buzz promoted around the so-called Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) – a coalition of sorts counting the United States, India, Australia, and Japan as members. Promoted by familiar corporate-financier funded policy think thanks, the Quad is being portrayed as a step past Washington’s ill-fated “pivot to Asia” to address its waning power in the region.
The situation that has been unfolding over the Rohingya Muslims, one of the many ethno-religious minorities of Myanmar, began to deteriorate sharply since the end of August of this year. A direct reason for the latest outburst of tension in the northern part of the state of Rakhine, supposedly, was the attack on a border post, carried out from neighboring Bangladesh by an armed wing of a political movement defending the rights of this ethnic group in Myanmar.
A mid-December announcement by the European Union was made stating that the EU had agreed to restore ties with the Southeast Asian Kingdom of Thailand “at all levels” after suspending them in 2014 in the wake of a military coup which ousted the government of Yingluck Shinawatra.
AFP reported in its article, “EU resumes official contacts with Thai junta,” that:
In late November, the US, Canadian and British embassies along with several other European partners as well as the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and Amnesty International, organised what they called the “Isaan Human Rights Festival” in northeast Thailand.
US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded media front, the “Isaan Record” in its article, “Rare human rights event gathers Isaan communities and foreign diplomats,” claims (our emphasis):
