US Representative Ami Bera, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Asia subcommittee, praised Austin’s message. The region was at the “heart of American grand strategy,” Austin said in his speech. Despite vowing to prioritize Asia after taking office last year, President Joe Biden has only recently begun to outline his China policy and the “Indo-Pacific Economic Framework” intended to balance America’s military moves in Asia. The Biden administration is trying overcome skepticism about the US’s commitment to the region after former President Donald Trump withdrew from a landmark Pacific trade pact in 2017 and ramped up criticism of allies. “But whether that’s the reality, I think only the facts will speak for themselves.” We don’t want you to choose,’” Singaporean Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen said. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations “will take comfort that both have said, ‘There is no need to choose. 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.” 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. or China, while Wei implied that the world would only have one choice - China.” “But here they sang different tunes: Austin signaled that countries did not have to choose between either the U.S. “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. 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 destabilizing force behind conflicts from Eastern Europe to the Western Pacific. 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 this weekend for the first time since the pandemic. 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. 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 most strategically important companies, a position that rankled many at the last gathering of defense officials in 2019.
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