Southeast Asia

In the period of January 12-17, 2017, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made another tour across several countries in South-East Asia (SEA). And it’s hard to say which number tour this is, considering his trips to the region on the occasion of a variety of forums regularly conducted on the basis of ASEAN, an Association uniting 10 SEA countries.

Philippines, for decades a limping invalid, poor and suffering from countless ailments, is now suddenly finding itself at the vanguard, reshuffling the entire Asia Pacific, sending Western imperialists packing.
In Manila, where the US used to roam unopposed, now Russian warships are calling on goodwill and symbolic visits.

The governments of the United States and United Kingdom have spent decades and millions of dollars creating the political opposition fronts that constitute support for Myanmar’s new (and first ever) State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi. This support includes backing Suu Kyi’s saffron-clad street fronts who make up a nationwide network of “monk” alliances and associations.
And it is these alliances and associations that have served at the forefront of persecution against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority.

President-elect Donald Trump’s “accidental” phone conversation with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen was neither a gaff nor a decision Trump and his advisers unilaterally made.
It is merely the latest evolution of US foreign policy in Asia Pacific amid the collapsing “Pivot to Asia” policy pursued under the previous administration of President Barack Obama.

At the end of December 2016, both Taiwan and the world were shaken to the core, when images appeared in the local press and online, depicting students parading in Nazi uniforms proudly raising their hands in salute, an act banned in most of countries of the world. Mail Online reported:

Parroting the US State Department’s rhetoric, almost verbatim to justify the decision, a UK envoy vowed to fly warplanes over, and sail warships through the South China Sea over “concerns” regarding “freedom of navigation there.”
Reuters in its article, “British fighters to overfly South China Sea; carriers in Pacific after 2020: envoy,” would report:

Some fifteen years ago, when I lived in Hanoi, I used to come very often to the rooftop bar at the Meritus Hotel for an evening drink, just to feel gentle breeze and to spot ancient cargo boats majestically sailing on the surface of Red River. Sometimes the river could be clearly visible, but often it was covered by fog, like in an old Vietnamese painting.

Reading commentary, analysis, and even alleged “reports” from the Southeast Asian state of Myanmar, it would appear that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi – poster child of American and European “democracy promotion” – is helpless to avert what is quickly expanding into wholesale genocide against the nation’s Rohingya minority.

Donald Trump overlooked the ASEAN countries in his pre-election campaign. His disregard of the actively developing region with a population of 625 million people and a total GDP worth 2.4 trillion dollars (the world’s seventh largest economy), which is playing an important role in the Asia-Pacific Region, is in stark contrast to Barack Obama’s policy of strengthening the USA’s position and influence here.

One of the world’s most important processes in recent years has been the weakening of the US dollar on the international currency market and the desire of many countries to abandon it in order to release their economies from US influence. The United States is resisting this process.