Southeast Asia is this geostrategic space bounded by the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, by China, Australia and by India. European powers seem able to consider Southeast Asia a region. This has much to do with how the Japanese pushed them out of the region to the borders of India in the Second World War. To the US, Southeast Asia hardly exists. The recent attempt to introduce the term “Indo-Pacific” into global parlance has been controversial for geostrategic reasons, and for Southeast Asia, what the term connotes is a perpetuation of the buffer nature of Southeast Asia (in this case, apart from Indonesia) in the global politics.

Source: The Edge Markets July 05, 2019 03:33 UTC