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From Singapore to Palawan: how Kamala Harris’ Asean engagement could shape her presidency
As vice-president, Harris deepened Washington’s ties with Asean and issued a clear rebuke of Beijing’s expansive South China Sea claims
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If Kamala Harris were to win November’s election, analysts say her extensive engagement with Southeast Asia as US vice-president would put her in good stead to continue the current administration’s policies in the strategically vital region.
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Through high-profile visits to key US allies Singapore and Vietnam, Harris has already staked out a tough stance against China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea, a central battleground in the intensifying US-China rivalry.
Those experiences “will acquit her well in the foreign policy sphere if she ascends to the presidency in 2025, having already become familiar with a region that sits at the epicentre of the US-China rivalry,” said Jonathan Stromseth, a professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.
During her 2021 trip, Harris said “Beijing continues to coerce, to intimidate and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea”. In her foreign policy speech in Singapore, she rejected China’s “unlawful” territorial assertions that were rebuffed by an international tribunal in 2016.
“These unlawful claims … continue to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations,” Harris declared in a firm rebuke of China’s expansionist ambitions in the hotly contested waterway.
Deepening her regional engagement, Harris returned to Southeast Asia in 2022, becoming the highest-ranking US official to visit Palawan, a Philippine island abutting the South China Sea. There, she reiterated Washington’s staunch support for Manila amid China’s muscular maritime assertions.
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