A meeting between the presidents of the US and China is necessary and can help dial down tensions between the world’s biggest economies, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said.
“You need a meeting to head in the right direction but you don’t expect a meeting to make everything sweetness and light or something,” Lee told Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait on Wednesday at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore.
Southeast Asian nations have grown concerned over the prospect of a conflict as the US and China spar over contentious security issues like Taiwan and the South China Sea. Leaders have urged the geopolitical heavyweights they count as their two biggest trading partners to avoid allowing competition to splinter critical supply chains and destabilize the region.
Tensions in the South China Sea escalated after Chinese vessels recently collided on two separate occasions during a Philippine resupply mission to a military outpost in Second Thomas Shoal. China went on to accuse the US — a Philippine treaty ally — of encouraging provocations by other countries in the disputed maritime area.
“Four Asean countries have claims in the South China Sea,” Lee said. “All of them want to work an arrangement out between themselves and with China, but at the same time all of them have other stakes with China.”
Under President Joe Biden, the US has bolstered its network of security partners across the Indo-Pacific region with an eye on containing China’s military ambitions. But with Washington now occupied with wars in Ukraine, and now Gaza, the question remains to what extent it is distracted in Asia.
Singaporean officials have expressed some optimism despite the tensions. The US has sought to thaw relations with China ahead of an expected meeting between Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco in November. Washington also wants to reestablish largely severed military contacts.
Author: Philip J. Heijmans and Rebecca Choong Wilkins
