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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday said the West was “militarizing” southeast Asia in a bid to contain Russian and Chinese interests, setting the stage for a confrontation between Russia and Western leaders at the G20 summit in Bali.
Lavrov will head Russia’s delegation to the summit – the first such meeting since Moscow invaded Ukraine in February – after the Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin was too busy to attend.
Ukraine is set to dominate the agenda with Western leaders likely to publicly confront Russia over the Ukraine war and push the likes of China and India to criticize Moscow’s actions.
Speaking during a press conference at the conclusion of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Phnom Penh, Lavrov scolded the United States over its actions in the region, which both Russia and the West see as a potential strategic geopolitical battleground in the coming decades.
“The United States and its NATO allies are trying to master this space,” Lavrov told reporters.
He said Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy was an attempt to bypass “inclusive structures” for regional cooperation and would involve “the militarization of this region with an obvious focus on containing China, and containing Russian interests in the Asia-Pacific.”
Biden told southeast Asian leaders that Washington was committed to building an “Indo Pacific that’s free and open, stable and prosperous, and resilient and secure” as he outlined a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the United States and the region.
Neither the United States nor Russia is a member of ASEAN, a 10-member group of southeast Asian countries, but several world leaders attended the talks ahead of next week’s G20 summit in Bali.
Russia has sought to foster much closer economic, political and security ties with Asia since the West hit Moscow with unprecedented sanctions in response to the Ukraine war.
Putin portrays Russia and China as the leaders of a global rebellion against the post-Soviet global dominance of the United States and the West. The United States casts China and Russia as the two main global threats.
U.S.-China Rivalry
The head of the International Monetary Fund warned of risks to the global economy from the rivalry between China and the United States, while describing tariffs put on Chinese imports under then-President Donald Trump as counterproductive.
“We may be sleepwalking into a world that is poorer and less secure as a result,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told the Washington Post in an interview published on Saturday.
“I lived through the first Cold War on the other side of the Iron Curtain. And, yeah, it is quite cold out there,” Georgieva, who was born and raised in Bulgaria, said in the interview. “And to go in a second cold war for another generation is … very irresponsible.”
President Biden has yet to resolve the key policy issue surrounding tariffs on Chinese goods established by his predecessor that cost U.S. importers billions of dollars.
“It is important to think through actions and what they may generate as counter actions carefully, because once you let the genie out of the bottle, it’s hard to put it back in,” Georgieva said of the Trump-era tariffs.
Biden’s team wrestled for months with various ways to ease the costs of duties imposed on Chinese imports as it tries to tamp down inflation.
China’s military exercises around Taiwan led Biden administration officials to recalibrate their thinking on whether to scrap some tariffs or potentially impose others on Beijing, people familiar with the matter told Reuters in August.
Beijing staged the war games that month after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei, and has since continued military activities nearby including almost daily fighter jet crossings of the sensitive median line in the narrow Taiwan Strait.
Relations between the world’s two largest economies have strained in recent years over issues like tariffs, Taiwan, intellectual property, cyber security, the removal of Hong Kong’s autonomy and the origins of the coronavirus outbreak, among others.
