ASEAN's South China Sea ulcer

Continued failure to address the South China Sea issue is not only a short term failure it now represents a significant and ongoing risk to ASEANs health. The regional organisation should seek treatment, and stat. The just concluded meeting of ASEAN Foreign Ministers in Vientiane, Lao PDR, looked like it was going to be a high profile failure. The fear was that the meeting would repeat the 2012 experience of being unable to produce a final communiqué in the face of Cambodias insistence that nothing was said that would criticise China over the South China Sea. Four years later ASEAN may have avoided such a public display of disunity but the released communiqué, together with a Joint Statement between ASEAN and China on the SCS, suggest that nothing has been resolved.