pongsudhirak10_Fred Dufour_Stringer_Chinese Military Fred Dufour/ Stringer

Defusing Asia’s Arms Race

China's goals in Asia are to prevent its neighbors from uniting against it and to diminish the role of international law in a region where it seeks strategic hegemony. Now that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague has ruled against its claims to the South China Sea, will China take the path of militarism or diplomacy?

BANGKOK – The ruling against China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague will be met with relief in the region’s capitals. But it is unlikely to reverse one of Asia’s most worrying trends: an alarming regional arms build-up.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Asia now accounts for almost half of the world’s arms expenditure, which is more than twice the total arms expenditure of countries in the Middle East and four times greater than that of Europe.

Vietnam, which restored diplomatic relations with the United States only in 1995, is now considering allowing the US Navy to use its Cam Ranh Naval Base – which was built and used by the US Air Force during the Vietnam War (and then by the Soviet and Russian navies). It has also purchased a clutch of Russian-made submarines, and it spent eight times more in arms procurement between 2011 and 2015 than it did in the previous five years. Thailand, too, wants submarines for its navy, despite having only shallow waters in the Gulf of Thailand and no territorial claims in the South China Sea.

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