ASEAN: ASEAN needs to boost ties with Russia: expert

December 7, 2017 Contributor 0 Comment ASEAN: ASEAN needs to boost ties with Russia: expert

Yuri A Raikov says ASEAN and Russia need to strengthen ties because they share political and security interests. The Myanmar Times

Russia and ASEAN must strengthen their ties and cooperation because they share political and security interests, according to a leading Russian strategist.

Yury A Raikov of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations said that while ASEAN has doubts about the intentions of major powers like the United States, China and Japan as they vie for dominance in Asia-Pacific, but the group has no such reservations about Russia, because Moscow has no aggressive designs on the region.

Russia is working hard to forge closer ties with ASEAN, he said in a speech to the Myanmar Institute of Strategic and International Studies on Tuesday. Russia was admitted as a full dialogue partner of the group in 1996 and joined the East Asia Summit in 2011 at the same time as the US. “As a bloc, ASEAN is quite powerful, just look at meetings in the past 25 years that ASEAN led. So powerful,” he said.

Raikov said ASEAN members should not think of Russia as a superpower, because it is not. He said that while the former Soviet Union was the world’s No. 2 economy, Russia now ranks sixth in the world.

Asked why Russia has failed to qualify as a strategic dialogue partner of ASEAN, he said that ASEAN has very high expectations of Russia, as a full dialogue partner, to meet its economic and security needs. He added that in the past, Russia was unable to provide the economic needs of ASEAN, unlike other dialogue partners such as the US, China, Japan and Europe, which serve this function well.

ASEAN has seven strategic dialogue partners – China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand and the US. Russia and Canada are waiting for reviews of their status and were invited recently to attend a lunch session of the East Asia Summit.

He urged ASEAN to cooperate with Russia because it can change the power dynamic in the region, be it in the South China Sea or the North Korean nuclear crisis.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Raikov touched on Russian foreign policy toward the Asia-Pacific as well as the foreign policies of China, Japan and India and their interaction with one another.

Throughout his presentation, Russia’s economic power and its constraints surfaced time and again. He said that Russia wants to integrate with the economies of East Asia but its economic power is limited by international sanctions.

Obviously, he was referring to Siberia, which has been given top priority by President Vladimir Putin, but he stressed that the country’s economic planners are also looking at East Asian markets.

The Moscow State Institute of International Relations is run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia and is widely considered the most elite university in the country.

THE MYANMAR TIMES 07 DEC 2017