China must offer reassurance on its military buildup, Australian Foreign Minister says

The Asia-Pacific region is seeing more destabilising actions, according to Australia’s foreign minister, who cited China’s recent missile test and its military buildup as issues where nations want reassurance from Beijing. “Times are tough – we see behaviour which is destabilising, we see a lot of challenges for peace and security,” Penny Wong said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Manila on July 21 as South-east Asian nations meet. “We’ve seen the largest military build-up since World War II in our region,” she said, adding that while China might argue it has a right to do that, “what other countries would want in the face of the fastest military build-up we have seen is assurances about intent, assurances around transparency.”Australia has raised its concerns about China’s recent missile test in the Pacific, Wong said.She pointed out that it “was done without the sort of notice, predictability, and therefore assurance of intent that countries of the region expect. This goes to whether or not actions are destabilising or actions contribute to stability.”Wong is attending the annual meeting of the Association of South-east Asian Nations, along with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.The gathering comes as Washington and Beijing are asserting their interests across the region, prompting middle powers like Australia to band together with like-minded nations to form groups that carry more weight.The nations that make up Asean are central to securing Australia’s strategic interests as they are so close, Wong said.She added that while the country’s principal strategic relationship is still with the US, it is working hard to build ties with the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and others in the region. On the clash earlier this week between the Chinese and Philippines coast guards, Wong said that it was in the interests of all countries to observe the law of the sea. Since coming to office in 2022, Australia’s centre-left government has signed defence deals with Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Indonesia and India, as well as other accords with a number of Pacific island nations. Canberra has also improved ties with Beijing after they collapsed during the pandemic, though relations have not returned to the friendly level seen a decade ago.Australia is still protecting sensitive domestic sectors from Chinese investors and also trying to limit Chinese access to the Pacific.Australia operates a delicate diplomatic balance between its economic interests in China, the nation’s largest trading partner, and its seven-decade security alliance with the US.That has become even more complicated given the unpredictability of the Trump administration. Wong also repeated Australia’s constant refrain that it wants de-escalation in the Middle East, saying that both sides need to take steps to achieve that.“So we all want to see a resolution. That does take both sides. It takes the Iranian regime doing negotiating in good faith and also stopping its proxies seeking to escalate the situation,” she said. BLOOMBERG