US makes Asia inroads by playing down need to oppose China

Bloomberg

The US sought to bolster its support in Asia by reassuring nations they don’t need to
join a coalition against China, drawing a stark contrast with Beijing’s threats to defend its interests with military force.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Asia’s biggest security forum that the US was taking “wise counsel” from smaller countries, saying they should be “free to choose, free to prosper and free to chart their own course.”
It represented a break from the Trump administration pressing nations to take sides on the use of 5G equipment from Huawei, one of China’s important companies, a position that rankled many at
the last gathering of defense officials in 2019. And it was
a marked difference from China, whose defense minister, Wei Fenghe, vowed this time around to “fight to the very end” against any powers that wanted confrontation.
The two defense chiefs laid out their competing visions for Asian security with
dueling speeches at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, where hundreds of officials gathered for the first time since the pandemic.
While the US attempted to seize on the shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to push back against a more assertive China, Beijing tried to cast Washington as the main destabilising force behind conflicts from Eastern Europe to the Western Pacific.
“Both appealed to the
countries in the Global South in particular,” said Reinhard Buetikofer, a European lawmaker who sits on the body’s Foreign Affairs Committee, who attended the conference. “But here they sang different tunes: Austin signaled that countries did not have to choose between either the US or China, while Wei implied that the world would only have one choice — China.”
Most Asian nations, with a history of being carved up by colonial powers, would prefer to not take sides and let both camps court their support.
Indonesian Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto said all powers “need to have their space, their rights respected,” while Fijian national security chief Inia Batikoto Seruiratu said the people of his small island nation “see benefit from all these relationships that we have, including China.”