Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has an opening during this week’s summit with regional leaders in Laos to step up Canada’s efforts to help Southeast Asian countries facing escalating threats from China, experts say.
Southeast Asian countries want to stop China from using its navy, Coast Guard and merchant vessels to bully them during territorial disputes, and they need stronger protection from cyber threats, said Stephen Nagy, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a specialist in Indo-Pacific security matters.
“None of the countries in the region want to escalate the security tensions within the region, but they do want to have the capabilities to be able to deal with these challenges bilaterally with China,” Nagy said.
On Thursday, Trudeau begins two days of talks with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a regional bloc made up of Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia.
The ASEAN’s mission is to foster economic growth and promote peace and stability. But promoting peace in the region has gotten more challenging in recent years as China’s approach to foreign relations has grown more aggressive.
This week’s summit is happening against a backdrop of rising tensions in the South China Sea, a vital international trade artery. China is claiming most of the busy waterway, despite overlapping claims by Brunei, the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam.
China’s been using “hybrid tactics,” Nagy said — including the deployment of coast guard and merchant vessels to pressure the Philippines or the Vietnamese to move away from territory it believes falls within its exclusive economic zone.
The Vietnamese foreign ministry recently accused Chinese law enforcement of attacking Vietnamese fishermen and taking away their fishing equipment.
The Philippines said in August that China’s coast guard had fired water cannons on two of its vessels, damaging one.
“The South China Sea is really a cauldron of instability,” Nagy said.
“What we think is this could cascade into a kinetic conflict. And what that means is a conflict between militaries within the South China Sea. “
Nagy said such a conflict would affect the roughly $5.5 trillion US in trade that goes through the South China Sea every year — trade that includes hundreds of billions of dollars in Canadian goods. He also said it would disrupt vital supply chains, such as those supplying semiconductors to Canadian industry.
Canada supplying ‘dark vessel’ technology
Vina Nadjibulla, vice-president of research and strategy for the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, said Canada and the U.S. are among the countries that have been calling…
Read More: Canada could help balance the scales with China as tensions rise in South