China's Growing Ties with Laos

Laos is transforming from a landlocked, battered pawn of the West into a central hub for China's economic rise. 

October 29, 2020 (Joseph Thomas - NEO) - The landlocked Southeast Asian nation of Laos, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic and home to a little over 7 million people, has over the past decade built important ties with neighbouring China particularly in the fields of tourism, trade, investment and infrastructure. 

For a nation that has suffered tremendously amid and in the aftermath of the US war on Vietnam, its growing ties with China and its accelerated development finally offer a light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. 

Infrastructure Drives Economic Growth 

Over a decade ago, those traveling through Laos would find winding roads twisting through the nation's mountainous terrain. A trip from Kunming, China to Laos' capital of Vientiane took 3 days. But while traveling through these winding roads, one would notice Chinese construction crews working on modern highways. 

Today these highways have cut a trip by road from Kunming to Vientiane to just one day. This has driven economic growth inside Laos including a huge influx of tourism and trade, both of which have more than doubled over the last ten years. 

Now, China is near completion of a high-speed rail line through Loas, a nation that previously lacked any rail network to speak of.

Connecting to Laos' growing transportation networks along its southern borders is an already well developed network of roads and traditional rail in Thailand, along with an already-under-construction high-speed rail network that will link the three countries (China, Laos and Thailand) together, boosting trade and tourism for all three. 

The political, economic, and financial ties between China and Laos and Laos' southern neighbour, Thailand, will create what will be a massive economic corridor through the very center of Southeast Asia and will eventually link up and benefit others in the region including Malaysia, Myanmar and Cambodia. 

Western Criticism 

Western influence in Southeast Asia is in serious decline. Its inability to propose viable alternatives for even nations eager to balance and hedge their growing ties with China, has left the region turning to others including Russia and Japan. 

Instead of finding a way to compete directly with China's growing influence and economic might, based in its massive industrial capacity, the US and other Western nations have doubled down instead on "soft power" and investment schemes absent of any actual concrete projects. 

The focus thus has become not competing with China but simply pressuring nations to avoid national and regional development simply to deny China constructive partners. It is a policy no nation would voluntarily support, thus the growing US-backed political instability and protests seen in Southeast Asia. 

The US in particular has been an eager promoter of accusations over what it calls China's "debt trap diplomacy." Of course major infrastructure projects incur debt, but it is debt that can be paid off. Even in Western media sources critical of China's growing influence in Southeast Asia, it is admitted that nations indebted to China, even nations making concessions to China because of growing debt, have provisions included in deals that will allow these same nations to buy back shares in projects and infrastructure in the near to intermediate future. 

For Laos, highways and dams are already paying dividends in terms of economic growth. While expensive, high-speed rail moving through Laos will create opportunities and development that are in no other way possible for the country. 

The economic prosperity Laos receives in exchange for this infrastructure will eventually make it possible to settle its debts and then some. 

As far as balancing against China's massive military and economic power, Laos' other major trading partner is Thailand. Thailand's investments in Laos, which shares history, culture and even linguistic similarities with Thailand, help ensure China is unable to establish an outright monopoly over Laos' external ties. 

For the West, were it serious about competing in Asia, it should participate in the game that is now actually being played; one of balance built through trade, partnerships and infrastructure networks, not a modernised version of Europe's colonisation in the region last century. 

Laos: West's War on Asian Development

January 7, 2020 (Joseph Thomas - NEO) - At face value, the Financial Times' article, "Laos’s Belt and Road project sparks questions over China ambitions," reads like a politically-motivated attack on infrastructure development in Asia. Because it is.

The article's subheading, "High-speed train line in one of Asia’s poorest countries may benefit Beijing more than locals," alone contradicts the correlation between the development of infrastructure and the alleviation of poverty. It also reveals the article as indeed, a politically-motivated attack on China and Asian development couched behind flimsy concerns over the nation of Laos and its people.

The article reports:

 Near Bom Or, a village of dirt streets and shacks in northern Laos, Chinese construction crews have cut a tunnel through a mountainside to carry high-speed trains along a 400km rail line across the country, a section of a planned route from Kunming in south-west China to Singapore. 

The tunnel is part of a $6.7bn project through the rugged countryside around Luang Prabang, the ancient capital of Laos, one of the highest profile being built under China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The article also claims:

Beijing has used the programme to build roads, ports and power stations in some of the world’s poorest countries. But critics have raised concerns about the social and environmental impact of the projects, saying that many of them are white elephants that have left states heavily indebted to Beijing. 

The project in Laos, one of Asia’s poorest countries which has no independent media and limited civil society groups, has been carried out with little public consultation.

Of course, by "independent media" and "civil society groups," Financial Times means fronts funded by and for US and European interests.

The construction of massive infrastructure projects always incurs debt. The construction of nation-spanning or region-spanning mass transportation systems always displace locals living in their proposed paths and locals will always protest having to move from their homes. These are problems that mega-projects throughout history have always faced and are not unique to China's Belt and Road Initiative.

While these issues are noteworthy, the fact that the Financial Times (and other Western media outlets) omit the obvious benefits for Laos exposes the lopsided narrative of political propaganda dressed up as journalism.

Landlocked Laos is Finally Being Unlocked 

Anyone who has previously set foot in Laos would have immediately seen and felt its isolation from the rest of the world and the impact it had on Laos' economic prospects.

A little more than a decade ago, those travelling through Laos would have noticed a severe lack of modern highways and a complete lack of rail.

To move from one part of the country to another, tourists, cargo and business people would have to travel through narrow, winding mountain roads. To travel from Laos' northern border with China to its capital near Laos' border with Thailand required around 3 days of travel only if team driving was used and no stops were taken for sleep.

The isolation of Laos because of its geographical location, mountainous terrain and lack of transportation infrastructure was an obvious obstacle for economic progress. The obvious solution was developing transportation infrastructure.

Now that China is working with Laos to do just that, it has been met by concerted and constant condemnation from the West.

With the completion of Chinese-built highways alone, an influx of business and tourism has predictably followed. The movement of tourists and products is expected to expand even more with the completion of high-speed rail (expected to be completed in 2021).

The Financial Times even admits:

One likely source of business will be Chinese tourists visiting Laos, whose numbers have roughly doubled from 400,000 in 2014 to 800,000 last year. 

“It is Chinese tourists and products in, and raw materials out,” said Nadège Rolland, an expert on BRI with the National Bureau of Asian Research, a US think-tank. “But eventually the BRI is about much more than infrastructure — it is policy co-ordination that will align the claimed needs of the region with those of Beijing.” 

Not only will transportation infrastructure in Laos connect it with China, Chinese as well as Thai projects seek to extend road and rail projects being built in Laos into Thailand and onward to Malaysia and Singapore.

Laos will go from a mostly isolated, underdeveloped nation, to a key corridor linking China to 3 of the top 5 largest economies in Southeast Asia. Its location will go from hindering its development to being central to its future development, wealth and trade.

China is indeed benefiting by transforming Laos into a corridor it can reach the rest of Southeast Asia through. But it is connecting Laos, its people and economy with the rest of Southeast Asia as well.

Villagers in the path of these projects may or may not be receiving adequate compensation. Laos may be taking on additional debt. Environmental issues may or may not be receiving adequate attention. But there is no doubt that unlocking Laos as a terminally landlocked and isolated nation will improve the net wealth of it and its people.


"Humanitarian Concerns" Mask Hegemonic Ambitions: Bombs vs. Bridges  

The concept of cities and nations strategically located to facilitate transportation and trade being key to their historical wealth and success are concepts we are taught in elementary history and social studies classes. Why then are these same basic concepts escaping the attention of Western journalists while writing article after article condemning Beijing and Vientiane's determination to link the country with its neighbours through modern, high-speed transportation links?

The notion that high-speed rail is something only developed nations need, rather than a means to drive development is a baseless argument presented and promoted not by the people of Laos or supported by the facts surrounding ongoing development there, but by the editorial boards of Western publications like the Financial Times.

Attempts by the West to feign concern over "human rights" or "environmental" concerns in regards to infrastructure projects in Laos also fall far short of credibility. The US and other Western powers are not in any way genuinely concerned with the nation of Laos or its people.

To prove it, the US alone left more than 80 million unexploded bomblets (10 each for every man, woman and child living in Laos) littering Laos during the Vietnam War. Since then, some 20,000 people have died and many more maimed by them.

Washington's token support to clean up its unexploded weapons is, for all intents and purposes, meaningless. The current rate of disposal the US funds means that Laos' countryside will finally be safe not in the next several years or decades, but several centuries from now. Rather than protesting desperately needed transportation infrastructure, if the US was genuinely concerned about Laos it would start by removing its own unexploded ordnance still killing and maiming Laotians to this day.

Not only does Washington fail to invest in actual areas of concern for the people of Laos (including fulfilling obligations regarding its own unexploded ordnance littering the nation), it is hiding behind disingenuous concerns to impede projects essential for addressing their best interests, including infrastructure and economic development.

Supposed "concerns" expressed by the Western media and the interests in Washington, London and Brussels they represent, are not about helping the people of Laos or protecting the environment, they are about preventing Laos from forever finally and fully escaping out from under the spectre of American and European colonialism past and present.

These "concerns" also mask what is in reality an attempt by the West to impede competitors like China from displacing what the US itself claims is its own "primacy" over Asia. China's drive to develop infrastructure and economic progress in neighbouring nations will also directly undermine US "primacy" over Asia.

Thus, Western "humanitarian" and "environmental" concerns are merely hiding a genuine desire to eliminate competition and maintain regional hegemony.

An independent Asia built on healthy competition, collaboration and the primacy of national sovereignty is an Asia where Washington's and its partners' current approach to international relations cannot exist.

Luckily for Asia, it appears it is moving forward with an approach toward development that has displaced the West's divisive and disruptive presence in the region. Meanwhile, the West, instead of attempting to compete with China on equally constructive terms, is doubling down on the very approach that has precipitated its regional and global decline to begin with.

Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

West Seeks Control Over Asian Rivers

December 8, 2019 (Tony Cartalucci - NEO) - At first glance the human rights and environmental issues surrounding a proposed dam seem like serious objections to their construction. In some cases they may be.

In other cases - these concerns are manufactured, promoted, and cynically exploited by foreign special interests who seek to impede dam construction and likewise impede the march forward of the developing nations seeking to build them.

The key to knowing the difference is following the money behind groups opposing construction - and in many cases - the same handful of opposition groups can be found protesting the construction of dams across the entire developing world.

"International Rivers" Seeks Western Control of "Rivers Internationally" 

Much of what is claimed and promoted in the West to be "international" often merely means Western fronts seeking to impose themselves and their interests "internationally."

"International Rivers" is no different. As a supposed nongovernmental organization (NGO) - it claims to be "at the heart of the global struggle to protect rivers and the rights of communities that depend on them." 

In reality, International Rivers is a Western corporate-funded foundation dedicated to imposing control over the use of rivers worldwide through a network of likewise Western-funded "local" NGOs.

International Rivers' opposition to dam construction in the developing world is not predicated on any genuine concern for human rights or environmental issues surrounding rivers - or "the rights of communities that depend on them" - but instead is dictated by who is constructing the dam.

Dams financed by the likewise deceptively named World Bank receive only token attention from International Rivers - which was only created toward the end of the World Bank's own dam building spree - while those financed and constructed jointly with China are now the target of years-long protest campaigns promoted endlessly across the Western corporate media.

International Rivers - over the years - has been funded by the following; The Sigrid Rausing Trust, Tides Foundation, Google, Open Society, the Ford Foundation, and many others. 

Many of those contributing to International Rivers are in turn creations of corporate-financier interests themselves. 

Direct sponsors, such as the Sigrid Rausing Trust, Ford Foundation, and Open Society, are also involved in funding policy think tanks such as the Brookings Institution - a pro-war, pro-corporate conglomeration that features alongside the Sigrid Rausing Trust as donors (.pdf), banking empires including JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Barclays Bank, big-oil interests including Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and Statoil, as well as big-defense corporations Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.

It is clear that these special interests are not concerned with the human or environmental impact of hydroelectric energy production - considering many are directly overseeing the global petroleum racket and the many much more serious human and environmental abuses that stem from it. 

Instead, this objection to dam construction represents a desire to eliminate both potential competitors, as well as any semblance of independence in regions of the planet the West seeks to project its power into.  

With think tanks like Brookings drawing up plans for literal wars as a means of projecting Western power across the globe, it is not difficult to understand lesser forms of projecting power - through co-opted NGOs operating under the guise of "human rights" and "environmentalism" - are also very much amongst their tools.

Not What is Being Built or Where, But Who is Building it and Why That is the "Problem" 

In fact, the notion that International Rivers and the Western media promoting their work are politically motivated - merely hiding behind human rights and environmentalism rather than upholding either - is buttressed by International Rivers itself in a post titled, "Banks and Dam Builders." It admits:

Traditionally, the World Bank Group has been the most important financier of large dams. For decades, the World Bank funded the construction of mega-dams across the world.  

In recent years, however, Chinese financial institutions have taken over this role, and have triggered a new boom in global dam building. Other public sector national banks, including Brazilian banks, Thai banks, and Indian banks, have also financed an increasingly important share.

Here, International Rivers admits the real problem is not dams in and of themselves, but dams being financed and built independently of Western involvement and benefit. The recent surge in dam projects is taking place in a region of the world the West openly seek to influence, manipulate, exploit, and even use as a collective proxy against China. It cannot do so if the region is working together on massive multinational infrastructure projects with China and each other. 

Fake News to the Rescue 

The Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand (FCCT) has already repeatedly been exposed taking money from the very same corporate-funded foundations underwriting International Rivers - and lying about it.  

The FCCT - a front of Western corporate media organizations including the BBC, AFP, AP, Reuters, and others - poses as a journalist network but in reality functions as a public relations front promoting Western interests in both Thailand and wider Southeast Asia, merely under the guise of journalism. 

That the FCCT recently hosted International Rivers and a panel discussion on, "Silencing the Mekong The making of Xayaburi dam," targeting the joint Thai-Laotian project should come as no surprise. The idea of either nation let alone both cooperating in the construction of essential infrastructure independently of the West and its interests sets a precedent for both nations to continue doing so in the future and for other nations in the region to follow suit. 

Many of the supposed concerns revolve around protecting remote impoverished villages whose inhabitants are actually the cause of overfishing and placing several species on the endangered list - rather than allowing the project to move forward, providing energy, flood control, and economic development that could provide better and more sustainable occupations for local communities. 

The FCCT's various individual media members have taken turns writing favorable articles promoting protesters opposed to this dam and others. The FCCT panel discussion itself includes several of these supposedly local "NGOs" including Salforest which is in fact also funded by Western corporate and government foundations.  

Nothing about the funding of those opposed to the dams is mentioned, nor any critical questions regarding possible motivations of foreign-funded opposition groups beyond "human rights" and "environmental" concerns. 

While there are obvious issues surrounding a dam's construction that demand debate - it is a debate that must be had by the people and governments of the nation or nations to be impacted by a dam's construction. The West - separated by oceans and continents - has no say in the dam's construction anymore than Thailand or Laos has a say in construction projects built in the West.

If the US and Western Europe believe Facebook ads allegedly funded by foreign interests and targeting their elections constitutes an "attack" on their sovereignty - what does an entire protest movement funded and directed from the other side of the planet constitute when it attempts to block massive and beneficial infrastructure projects tied to national and regional development in Southeast Asia? 

Let the nations along the Mekong River decide themselves on whether or not to build dams - free of foreign interference and money tied to interests already guilty of serial offenses against both human rights and the environment - and offenses many times worse than the construction of any dam could possibly pose.

Since the FCCT represents Western media organizations guilty of aiding and abetting special interests in those serial abuses - no one is less qualified than the FCCT to host a panel discussion on affairs that are ultimately those of Thailand and Laos. And once again, the FCCT is caught meddling under the guise of journalism rather than just reporting the news. 

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.

US Decries Chinese High-Speed Rail in Laos

April 24, 2018 (Joseph Thomas - NEO) - China's plans to build high-speed rail connecting Kunming in its Yunnan province with the rest of Southeast Asia are already underway. In the landlocked nation of Laos, tunnels and bridges are already under construction.

The United States has, in general, condemned China's One Belt, One Road (OBOR) sweeping infrastructure programme, with US and European policy circles accusing Beijing of what they call "debt trap diplomacy."

Quartz in an article titled, "Eight countries in danger of falling into China’s “debt trap”," would claim:

Beijing “encourages dependency using opaque contracts, predatory loan practices, and corrupt deals that mire nations in debt and undercut their sovereignty, denying them their long-term, self-sustaining growth,” said US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on March 6. “Chinese investment does have the potential to address Africa’s infrastructure gap, but its approach has led to mounting debt and few, if any, jobs in most countries,” he added.

The report continued, stating:

Some call this “debt-trap diplomacy“: Offer the honey of cheap infrastructure loans, with the sting of default coming if smaller economies can’t generate enough free cash to pay their interest down.

While nations should protect themselves from the dangers of being indebted to foreign interests, the US and supposedly international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are hardly innocent of wielding debt as a geopolitical weapon themselves.

However, while some of China's projects may be questionable, others offer tangible benefits not only for China, but for the regions they will be interlinking.

Laos' Escape from Colonial Shadows  

The real concern in Washington, London and Brussels is regarding infrastructure projects that are successful, bringing profit and benefits to both Beijing and partner nations, allowing them to collectively move out from under centuries of Western primacy.


Before Chinese investment picked up in Laos, the capital of Vientiane was diminutive even compared to nearby Thai provincial capitals. The sports utility vehicles of US and European nongovernmental organisations could be seen driving through the small city's streets, some of which were unpaved. Banners bearing the UN logo encouraged local residents to turn off their lights, making an already eerily dark capital even darker at night.

Campaigners funded by Western capitals attempted to obstruct earlier projects, including dams that would have created energy, expanded industrialisation, provided jobs and boosted the economy.

Over the past decade, Chinese investment has seen highways built across Laos connecting its isolated capital with its neighbours. Vientiane has seen not only an uptick in Chinese investment, but from Vietnam and Thailand as well.

The completion of a high-speed rail network connecting Kunming, China to Singapore, and passing through Vientiane, Laos, will bring even more people, goods and investments into the nation.

US Offers Only Complaining as Alternative

The US State Department's Radio Free Asia (RFA) media front in a special titled, "China's Fast Track to Influence: Building a Railway in Laos," attempts to leverage America's favourite soft power tools, namely "human rights" and "environmental issues" along with warnings of debt to cast doubts on the project.

The article claims:

The railway – which will eventually run from Kunming in southwestern China through Laos, Thailand, and Malaysia to Singapore – is a key component of China’s signature global infrastructure plan, the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. 

China is now the top investor in Laos, and Chinese companies are pouring billions of dollars into Special Economic Zones, dams, mines, and rubber plantations. Beijing hopes the aid and investment will draw the landlocked Southeast Asian nation, a former French colony with close ties to its communist mentor state Vietnam, into Beijing’s orbit.

The article also claims:

“[Laos was] left with no real alternative but to accept large-scale Chinese investment in infrastructure, even if it meant accepting the economic and political influence that comes with it,” researcher Michael Hart wrote in the Dec. 20, 2017 issue of World Politics Review. “The risk of rebuffing Beijing was too great, as sustained growth and faster development are vital to ensure the legitimacy of the ruling party.”

The supposed alternative to Chinese-built infrastructure and real, tangible progress, of course, is for Laos to continue hosting US and European NGOs attempting to create parallel institutions to run the nation with before eventually replacing the ruling political order in Vientiane with a US and European-backed client state.

Even as Laos begins to irreversibly exit from under the shadow of the West's colonial past, the US and Europe are unable to offer any significant projects that actually provide Laos with an alternative route toward real economic progress.

RFA's article attempts to scrutinise government compensation for residents displaced by the project and point out supposed environmental issues tied to the railway, two vectors the US has often used to impede development in nations worldwide to prevent economic progress and competition to US preeminence.

The US media is also attempting to encourage fears of a China it claims in the near future will overstep its bounds and trample its neighbours.

While China will undoubtedly win significant influence in Laos and reap benefits from its infrastructure projects across the region, other nations across Southeast Asia will as well.

The sort of primacy achieved by Europe and the US across Asia before the World Wars will be difficult, if not impossible for China to duplicate. While China does possess a powerful economy and is constructing a formidable military, the disparity in economic power and military might in the region today is not comparable to that which existed between Western colonial powers and their subjects in the past.

The technological divide that had previously granted the industrialised West its advantage over the rest of the underdeveloped world has been bridged. The same technology China is now using to drive its manufacturing and high-tech industries are also being leveraged by other developing nations across Asia offering competition as well as a regional balance of power.

This exposes the real fears Washington is currently dealing with, not a China transforming into a regional or global hegemon and threat, but a multipolar Asia that is no longer subjected to US hegemony or threats.

Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. 

America in Asia: Arrogant, Unapologetic, and Ready for More Conflict

September 19, 2016 (Tony Cartalucci - NEO) - The United States exists an entire ocean away from Asia, yet its policymakers, politicians, and even Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter have declared America's "primacy" over the region, vowing to assert itself and its interests above all nations actually located in Asia. 

In a June 2016 Reuters article titled, "U.S. flexes muscles as Asia worries about South China Sea row," Secretary Carter is quoted as saying:

The United States will remain the most powerful military and main underwriter of security in the [Asian] region for decades to come – and there should be no doubt about that.

The US, by presuming to dictate all that takes place across Asia, has all but declared itself a hegemon.

Reiterating the notion of American primacy and exceptionalism is a full-time occupation for the US State Department's employees. This includes US Ambassador to ASEAN Nina Hachigian who pointed out to followers on Twitter that she had "spoke to some Lao shop owners" following US President Barack Obama's recent visit to the Southeast Asian nation, and "they said [President Obama's] visit was the most exciting and significant event in decades."

Of course, for the nation of Laos, the most significant event regarding the US is undoubtedly the 2 million tons of munitions the US dumped on it between 1964 and 1973. These 2 million tons include cluster bombs consisting of some 266 million submunitions, an estimated 30% of which were left unexploded and remain to this day an enduring, deadly hazard to Laos and its 6.8 million people.

There are an estimated 80 million submunitions still littering the country, or about 11 for each man, woman, and child that lives in Laos. 20,000 people have been killed by unexploded US munitions and many more maimed which includes losing limbs.


According to the Lao National Unexploded Ordnance Programme (UXO LAO), 444,711 submunitions (about 0.55%) have been destroyed between 1996 and 2010.  Despite the dangerous and exhausting work, eliminating 0.55% of the 80 million submunitions still littering the country amounts to virtually nothing.

When faced with these facts, Ambassador Hachigian assured Twitter followers that:

We've been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to clean them up and President Obama just doubled annual contributions.

Of course, an elementary student could have told the ambassador that doubling nothing still equates to nothing.

Establishment journal, The Diplomat, in an article titled, "Obama in Laos: Cleaning up After the Secret War," would claim:

In recent years, U.S. support for UXO clearance and victim assistance in Laos has dramatically increased. In response to steady pressure from NGOs like Legacies of War and their allies in Congress, U.S. funding for this work increased from $5 million in 2010 to a record $19.5 million this year. These resources, disbursed by the State Department’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, are used to support clearance efforts that destroy up to 100,000 pieces of lethal ordnance in Laos annually, employing 3,000 workers in the commercial and humanitarian sectors.

At 100,000 submunitions per year, Laos should be safe from US cluster bombs in just under 1,000 years. This is hardly "cleaning up."

The Real Legacy of America in Asia

The Diplomat, US President Obama and US Ambassador Hachigian, however, are helping Asia understand the real legacy of America in the region - one of both catastrophic war, and of what are essentially deadly, enduring consequences that will haunt generations for 1,000 years to come - quite literally.

And not only has America done this to Asia, it does so unapologetically . The BBC in its article, "Laos: Barack Obama regrets 'biggest bombing in history,'" would note:

Mr Obama did not offer an apology for the bombing.

However, President Obama's "regrets," and Ambassador Hachigian's attempts to portray America as taking responsibility for the ongoing consequences of America's actions could be interpreted as apologetic by some. However, one must remember that an apology must also be accompanied by a genuine desire never to repeat the offense in question again - something the US clearly has no intention of doing.

Even as President Obama and Ambassador Hachigian announce America's desire to go from doing virtually nothing about the 80 million cluster bomb submunitions scattered across Laos, to doing next to nothing about them, the US is currently assisting their allies in Saudi Arabia to blanket the nation of Yemen with them.

According to an ABC News article titled, "House OKs Ongoing Cluster Bomb Sales to Saudi Arabia, Saying a Ban Would 'Stigmatize' the Weapons," it was reported that:

Congress has opted to continue selling cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia, citing a need not to "stigmatize" the weapon. But human rights advocates pointed to the close vote, 216 to 204, as progress towards ending the U.S.-Saudi trade of cluster munitions, which advocates say causes indiscriminate carnage.

The US has also spent years scattering radioactive depleted uranium across various battlefields including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia.

According to the Guardian report titled, "Scientists urge shell clear-up to protect civilians," it was stated that:

Up to 2,000 tonnes of DU has been used in the Gulf, a large part of it in cities like Baghdad, far more than in the Balkans. Unep has offered to go to Iraq and check on the quantities of DU still present and the danger it poses to civilians.

And while Laos faces 1,000 years of US cluster bomb munitions if current levels of disposal are maintained, nations like Iraq and Afghanistan facing US depleted uranium have several million years to wait until the danger subsides based on uranium's radioactive half-life.

It is obvious that should the US apply military force anywhere in Asia ever again, it will do so with equal or even greater consequences than it has already visited upon Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, or that its allies have visited upon nations like Yemen. 

Fact checking the US President and various US ambassadors' rhetoric regarding America's true record in Asia points out a nation of infinite arrogance, unapologetic for the enormous and enduring suffering it has brought quite literally from an ocean away, and proves with its current actions elsewhere throughout the world that it is ready and willing to sow yet even more chaos. 

Considering this, one must be forgiven for wondering just what "security" Secretary Carter is referring to that the US is underwriting in Asia - it is certainly not security those in Asia are enjoying - certainly not in Laos - at least not for 1,000 years to come. 

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.      

Upcoming US Presidential Visit to Laos is About Confronting China

September 2, 2016 (Tony Cartalucci - NEO) - The United States is attempting highlight the historical nature of an upcoming visit to the Southeast Asian state of Laos by US President Barrack Obama. By doing so, the US hopes perhaps the rhetorical narrative of the visit can compensate for a lack of real political substance.

Image: President Obama's visit to Laos is a follow-up of US Secretary of State John Kerry's visit in early 2016.

In an official White House statement titled, "Statement by the Press Secretary on the President’s Trip to China and Laos," US spokespeople claimed:

President Obama will travel to China and Laos September 2-9, 2016. This trip will highlight the President’s ongoing commitment to the G-20 as the premier forum for international economic cooperation as well as the U.S. Rebalance to Asia and the Pacific.

The statement would also claim:

President Obama will be the first U.S. president to visit Laos, where he will participate in the U.S.-ASEAN Summit and the East Asia Summit. Additionally, he will have bilateral meetings with President Bounnhang Vorachith and other key officials to advance U.S.-Lao cooperation on economic, development, and people-to-people ties, among other areas.

The White House statement would also mention President Obama's intentions to participate in the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative  (YSEALI) Summit, an indoctrination program with strong parallels to both British and Roman imperial strategies used to "culturally colonize" targeted nations, regions, and peoples.

Finally and most revealing, the statement claims (emphasis added):

This visit also will support the President’s efforts to expand opportunities for American businesses and workers to sell their products in some of the world’s fastest-growing markets. Central to this effort is the Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP], the high-standards trade agreement that will unlock key markets to American exports and cement America’s economic leadership in the Asia-Pacific.

In other words, the US president's visit to Asia, particularly Laos, is to expand - or perhaps attempt to reassert - US influence and more specifically control over the region.

Image: Part of the YSEALI indoctrination process is US President Obama's participation in the summit, giving participants a genuine feeling of being part of America's "club," rather than that of the nations they were born and raised in - a weapon of "soft-power" coercion in America's arsenal.  

From presiding over the YSEALI summit - indoctrinating and training youth from across Southeast Asia to serve amongst America's vast network of faux-nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) - to pushing the unsolicited and very unpopular TPP trade agreement, the president's visit represents a continuation of America's coercive and disruptive brand of geopolitics standing in stark contrast to China, whom the US finds itself increasingly being pushed out of the region by.

Battlefield Laos 

Though rarely in the headlines, what is playing out in Laos is a powerful microcosm of a much larger geopolitical struggle unfolding across Asia.

Even if all other metrics were even - the US would have an uphill battle before itself in challenging Chinese influence in the small but pivotal landlocked nation. Laos suffered immensely from America's war with Vietnam in the 1960s-70s. According to the UN-funded Washington-based "Legacies of War" organization:

...from 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing missions—equal to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years – making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.

To this day, even as President Obama prepares to visit Laos, nearly 100 Laotians a year are killed or maimed by US ordnance still littering the nation's landscape.

In addition to this enduring and unenviable legacy, the US' activities in Laos since the war have been less than constructive to say the least. While China builds railways and roads quite literally from one end of the nation to the other, and while China and its Southeast Asian neighbors help it construct dams to utilize its many rivers and mountainous terrain, the US has constructed instead an army of faux-NGOs dedicated to obstructing these infrastructure projects based on "human rights" and "environmental" concerns.  

When President Obama and his entourage arrive in Laos, they will see joint Lao-Thai-Sino infrastructure and construction projects punctuating the increasingly modern and well-developed capital city of Vientiane. Chinese and Thai brands also are represented, as is a clear socioeconomic influence from neighboring Vietnam.

In contrast, President Obama's entourage will also see SUVs with Western-funded NGO logos on their sides, racing around the city, posting up banners encouraging the Laotian people to use less electricity and resources in an effort to reduce demand for modernization and development and the joint infrastructure projects led by China and Thailand to address this demand. 

What the US Lacks in Substance, It Makes Up for in "Soft Power" Coercion

Between both China and Thailand's proximity and cultural ties to Laos - with Laotian and Thai languages being closely related and even discernible by both peoples - as well as their substantive and tangible contributions to Laos' development as a modern nation-state, the United States' policy of asserting geopolitical primacy over Asia, including Loas, its people, and its resources stand little chance of attracting widespread support from leadership in Vientiane. 

Image: China is building dams to produce energy, jobs, and development in Laos, while the US invests in faux-NGOs opposed to all forms of local, tangible development in favor of compromising "free trade agreements" like the TPP and military cooperation aimed at stoking costly regional conflict, not preventing it. 

However, what the US lacks in geopolitical substance, it can make up for with "soft power" geopolitical coercion. Part of the responsibilities of faux-NGOs operating within Laos is to apply pressure on the government to make unsound policy decisions favoring US interests at the expense of both Laos' and Asia's regionally. 

President Obama's participation in the YSEALI summit is part of this - indoctrinating young Asians, including those from Laos - to integrate themselves into the networks and institutions serving Western interests rather than those of Laos and Asia. Upon completion of the YSEALI's programs, these young people will find themselves as part of America's growing networks across Asia, opposing development in Laos, hampering constructive ties with Laos' neighbors, and instead, favoring and promoting policies including the implementation of the TPP, "open markets," US-ASEAN military integration, and other compromising policies that serve Washington's interests at the expense of Laos, its sovereignty, development, and its future. 

As awareness grows regarding the true nature of US "soft power" and the role it plays in coercing nations behind the scenes, its effectiveness will likely wane. With no alternatives able to compete with the current level of investment and engagement Laos' immediate regional neighbors have committed, the US faces the prospect of its "primacy" in Asia being further undermined. Then again, for a North American nation to declare "primacy" over Asia to begin with is somewhat problematic and an issue the whole of Asia needs to address more openly and directly. 

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.

Laos: The New Cold War Battleground You Don't Know About

February 1, 2016 (Tony Cartalucci - NEO) - The "New Cold War" could be a potential description for the unfolding geopolitical lay of the planet as Russia reemerges as a world power, and China rises as a new one in the face of a prevailing Wall Street-Washington-London international order.

The most obvious battlegrounds taking shape in this "New Cold War" are Ukraine, Syria, and the South China Sea. Perhaps not as high-profile but no less important are the ongoing conflicts in and around Libya, the proxy war being waged across Yemen, and America's enduring occupation of Afghanistan in Central Asia.

However, there are other struggles taking place that go virtually unseen by the general public, or are briefly mentioned - out of context in the news - before being quickly forgotten.

Laos - A Pivotal Battleground 

Image: Victims of unexploded US ordnance. 

For the Southeast Asian state of Laos, this is not the first time it has played a pivotal role in the ongoing struggle between East and West. It was bombed during the Vietnam War by the United States and according to the UN-funded Washington-based "Legacies of War" organization:

 ...from 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing missions—equal to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years – making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.

Even as US diplomats find themselves today posing for photo opportunities in Laos' capital, Vientiane, nearly 100 people a year are still killed or injured across the country from unexploded US ordnance.

Today, Laos serves as more than a mere extension of the Vietnam War's battlefield and subsequent legacy. Bordering Myanmar, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, it is a crossroads between much of Southeast Asia as well as the gateway into East Asia.

Though landlocked, Laos possesses immense hydroelectric potential - potential that has been incrementally developed through cooperation with Beijing. Not only do dam projects help manage water resources and provide electricity for the people of Laos, it has allowed Laos to become an increasingly important source of alternative energy for its neighbors as well.


In developing Laos' potential as a gateway between Southeast Asia and East Asia, China has undertaken or begun planning several massive infrastructure projects across its territory including highways and railways. Thailand has also played a role in developing Laos' infrastructure. It has invested in a China-Laos-Thailand highway connecting the three nations, as well as constructed Laos' first rail station across the border from Nong Khai, Thailand.

Image: Thanaleng Station, Laos is an extension of Thailand's northeast rail line. Chinese and Thai investments have helped connect landlocked Laos to its neighbors. 

In the capital Vientiane itself, one will find both Chinese and Thai businesses investing in the city. And because Thailand and Laos share linguistic similarities, much of the media consumed in the capital is streaming directly from Thailand.

It would seem then, despite the destruction it suffered at the hands of the United States decades ago, it is slowly on its way back up, and thanks to strengthening ties with its neighbors.

America's Proxy War with China 

While called the "Vietnam War," in reality, Washington's war in Vietnam was but a part of a larger proxy war aimed at encircling and containing China. Exposed in the Pentagon Papers in the early 1970's, three important quotes from these papers would reveal this strategy.

It states first that:

...the February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain China.

It also claims:

China—like Germany in 1917, like Germany in the West and Japan in the East in the late 30′s, and like the USSR in 1947—looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us. 

Finally, it outlines the immense regional theater the US was engaged in against China at the time by stating:

...there are three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China (realizing that the USSR “contains” China on the north and northwest): (a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front. 

While the US would ultimately lose the Vietnam War and any chance of using the Vietnamese as a proxy force against Beijing, the long war against Beijing would continue elsewhere. This includes all of Southeast Asia today, with US attempts to put in place client regimes in Myanmar through Aung San Suu Kyi's political front, Anwar Ibrahim's in Malaysia, Thaksin Shinawatra's in Thailand, continued subjugation of the Philippines which had existed as a US territory for nearly half a century (1898-1946), and of course, through more subtle political subversion in Vietnam itself.

Target Laos 

What will strike any visitor to Laos' capital of Vientiane is not just the incremental progress being made by Chinese and Thai development, or the expansion and evolution of Laos state enterprises, but also the vast number of Western-funded NGOs present. Besides their numerous offices, SUVs with NGO logos affixed to the doors, and scheming agents muttering in the corners of Vientiane's many cafes, there is no actual evidence of any positive impact they are making.

The role of these NGOs besides building networks and cultivating collaborators, is to leverage social and environmental facades to oppose the construction of infrastructure across the country - especially dams and transportation projects. The goal is to cut off China and preserve Laos' natural and human resources for development by Western corporations who, so far, have been late to the game.

A similar formula has been used in Myanmar, where NGO opposition to dams in conjunction with armed groups attacking construction sites helped delay or cancel many projects that may have transformed Myanmar for the better. The war on Laos has gone from mass bombing to mass propaganda, with US-backed NGOs coordinating activities both in Laos and in neighboring countries pressuring the government in Vientiane to delay or cancel dams that were to be built in cooperation with Beijing.

Protesters paradoxically claim that the dams will disrupt both the environment and traditional fishing communities along rivers downstream from dams. Traditional fishing communities, however, are generally synonymous with both unsustainable environmental destruction and poverty. Conversely, environmental impacts by dam construction can be mitigated through careful planning, while working to lift surrounding communities and the nation as a whole from poverty through improved infrastructure and cheaper and more accessible energy.

Protesters are not campaigning for careful planning, or better oversight of projects, they are campaigning instead for arrested development for Laos and its people - the sort of campaign only Wall Street and Washington could benefit from.

Strangling Development 

Image: Protesting a dam because of poor oversight or protesting for plans to mitigate environmental damage during construction and operations of a dam is one thing, to demand no dams be built at all at the expense of an entire nation's development, is another. Such protests are particularly suspicious when it is revealed they are bankrolled by nations who have and still are ravaging the planet for profits and power. 

The impact China and Thailand have had on Laos is self-evident. The roads under ones feet were put there by Chinese construction firms, power running through the wires fed by dams built by joint Lao-Chinese ventures, and a burgeoning economy built upon closer cooperation between Laos and its neighbors, particularly China and Thailand. What the US and those nations in Southeast Asia it is slowly turning against Beijing have done for Laos is more difficult to enumerate - perhaps because there is nothing to enumerate.

A recent article published by The Diplomat titled, "Leadership Change in Laos: A Shift Away From China?," attempts to frame recent political developments in Laos as a potential shift in influence away from Beijing and in favor of Vietnam as well as the international community (read: the West). In reality, the author fails categorically to enumerate what influence Vietnam has in Laos and through which vectors other than speculative political affiliations of outgoing and incoming politicians in the Laotian government, that influence moves.

The Diplomat claims:

Analysts said the changes will give Vietnam an edge in its dealings with Laos. Hanoi has been angered by Thongsing’s plans for massive dam construction projects across the Mekong River and its tributaries which scientists say will impact badly on fish production and food security.

“That new slate at the top of the secretive one-party state are all viewed to be pro-Hanoi while those who are exiting have been allied with the Chinese,” RFA said in its dispatch.

Speculation is also rife that the Mekong River Commission (MRC) – which has lost the support of many international donors – will be forced to relocate out of Laos after claims the government had abused its base in Vientiane to push for the widely unpopular dam construction program.

It appears, at least from a Western point of view, that it is hoped Laos' government will move away from not only its ties to China, but away from all development driven by these ties as well.

However unlikely that is to happen, understanding the role NGOs play in arresting, not catalyzing development, and the role they play in a wider US strategy to encircle and contain China - at the expense of the nations it plans on using as proxies to execute containment - is key to exposing them and flushing them out of Southeast Asia.

China is an immense nation with equally immense potential. It plans on escaping Western containment policies aimed at it for over a half century by bringing the rest of Asia up with it as it rises as incentive for cooperation against containment. To combat this, the US and its NGOs are determined to cut the ropes China has lowered down to its neighbors - while providing no viable alternative for Southeast Asia to hold onto except for domineering "free trade agreements," entangling and costly military alliances, and perpetual political meddling within each respective state.
Considering the lopsided nature of incentives to cooperate with China versus US attempts to dissuade cooperation, and despite the wishful thinking exhibited by publications like The Diplomat, it is no wonder that despite penning a containment policy as early as the 1940's, the US has failed to impede China's progress or effectively create a united front against China in Southeast Asia.

For readers, the next time anti-dam protests make the headlines, they will know who is behind them, and why.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.

ASEAN Economic Community - Why, For What, and By Whom?

November 26, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci - NEO) - On TV, upon the magazine rack, in schools, and on billboards around the country, the coming ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) is being heralded everywhere across Southeast Asia. 

Upon ASEAN's official website, the AEC is described as: 

The ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) shall be the goal of regional economic integration by 2015. AEC envisages the following key characteristics: (a) a single market and production base, (b) a highly competitive economic region, (c) a region of equitable economic development, and (d) a region fully integrated into the global economy.

The AEC is an unquestionable inevitability - and more alarmingly - an inevitability absolutely none of the many hundreds of millions of Southeast Asian citizens have asked for, voted for, or have any direct say in regards to. So inevitable is AEC's unfurling in 2015, that few have even bothered to ask "why?" "for what?" and "by whom?"

A Cheap EU Knock-Off Destined for Catastrophic Failure  

If AEC's premise as described by ASEAN itself sounds suspiciously similar to the European Union (EU), that's because it is. It is not only driven by the same immense global spanning corporate-financier special interests that consolidated Europe's economies, currencies, and institutions, but for the very same goal of collectively looting the region if and when it is successfully consolidated.

The EU now writhes in debt, endless proxy wars fought on behalf of Wall Street and London, and socioeconomic strife caused by EU regulations forced upon various populations against their will. While it was always difficult for citizens of respective European nations to have their voice truly represented within the halls of their own respective national governments, it is more difficult still for the EU's ruling elite assembled in Brussels to be held accountable and made to actually work for the  European people. 


Instead, the EU serves the immense corporate-financier interests that cobbled this supranational consolidation together in the first place. The European people were not allowed to vote on entering into the EU, and those that did repeatedly voted against it until threats, economic extortion, and propaganda finally succeeded in overcoming resistance. In Southeast Asia, nothing of the sort has even been proposed, and most Southeast Asians are oblivious to what ASEAN and the AEC even represent. Like the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) incursion into Asia during the late 1990's, it won't be until catastrophic failure has already swallowed the whole of Southeast Asia that people begin to realize what has been foisted upon them. 

Already, many across Southeast Asia are being effected by bilateral free-trade agreements (FTAs) that allow local markets to be flooded by cheap foreign goods. Socioeconomic disparity, even across Southeast Asia and greater Asia itself can devastate communities and industries already just barely making do. Special interests driven to ink FTAs generally make no provisions to prepare local markets about to be devastated, and no provisions after FTAs take demonstrable tolls. FTAs inked by ousted Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra with China, for example, devastated Thai farmers when cheaper Chinese produce flooded Thai markets. Some farmers including those who grew garlic, were driven almost entirely out of business.

The AEC will multiply this by creating similar conditions across all industries and between all of ASEAN's members. Additionally, the AEC then seeks to integrate ASEAN into the greater "global economy," or in other words, FTAs with the US and EU. Industries just emerging in each respective ASEAN member state will be utterly crushed, bought out, or overrun by foreign corporate-financier monopolies. For local tycoons laboring under the delusions that somehow there is a place around the "global elite's" table for them, the current state of the EU should serve as a cautionary reminder that indeed, no there is not. 

Why, For What, and By Whom? 

In addition to buying out and monopolizing all that resides within Southeast Asia, Wall Street and London desire to use Southeast Asia as a bulwark against China's rising power. These special interests may have even used the rise of China as a means to extort cooperation from respective ASEAN member states in the creation of the AEC.

Again, those ruling political orders across Southeast Asia need only look at NATO and how each member within that alleged "alliance" is strong-armed into one undesirable, highly destructive, and costly conflict after another - not only in direct opposition of each respective NATO member's own population, but in opposition of international law and norms. 

An ASEAN AEC fleeced by the West and driven as a proxy into the maw of neighboring China would cost everyone - from the general population to the ruling elite of each of ASEAN's respective member states - just as is seen across the EU. 

The dream of consolidating and exploiting Southeast Asia as a single geopolitical bloc against China is a long documented conspiracy the United States and its partners in the United Kingdom have worked on for decades. 

As early as the Vietnam War, with the so-called "Pentagon Papers" released in 1969, it was revealed that the conflict was simply one part of a greater strategy aimed at containing and controlling China.

Among many important quotes, is one that outlines the immense regional theater the US was engaged in against China at the time, stating: 

“there are three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China (realizing that the USSR “contains” China on the north and northwest): (a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front.” 

While the US would ultimately lose the Vietnam War and any chance of using the Vietnamese as a proxy force against Beijing, the long war against Beijing would continue elsewhere. The use of Southeast Asia as a consolidated front against China would continue on up to and including until today.

This containment strategy would be updated and detailed in the 2006 Strategic Studies Institute report “String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China’s Rising Power across the Asian Littoral”where it outlines China’s efforts to secure its oil lifeline from the Middle East to its shores in the South China Sea as well as means by which the US can maintain American hegemony throughout the Indian and Pacific Ocean. The premise is that, should Western foreign policy fail to entice China into participating in Wall Street and London's “international system” as responsible stakeholders, an increasingly confrontational posture must be taken to contain the rising nation. The use of nations in Southeast Asia to check China's regional power plays chief among this posture. 

Other US policymakers have articulated the use of Southeast Asia as a proxy against China in more direct terms. Neo-Conservative, pro-war policymaker Robert Kagan in his 1997 piece titled "What China Knows That We Don't: The Case for a New Strategy of Containment," noted: 

Chinese leaders worry that they will "play Gulliver to Southeast Asia's Lilliputians, with the United States supplying the rope and stakes.

Kagan would later serve as an adviser to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who would herself declare a campaign to do just that - supply Southeast Asia with "rope and stakes." Called the "pivot to Asia," Clinton would make a hegemonic declaration in Foreign Policy magazine titled, "America's Pacific Century," stating that: 

...the United States has moved to fully engage the region's multilateral institutions, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, mindful that our work with regional institutions supplements and does not supplant our bilateral ties. There is a demand from the region that America play an active role in the agenda-setting of these institutions -- and it is in our interests as well that they be effective and responsive.

Clinton's reference to America playing "an active role in the agenda-setting of these institutions," referring to ASEAN and APEC, and the rest of her very lengthy editorial reflect a nearly verbatim update of Kagan's 1997 piece - if only stated a bit more diplomatically than Kagan's very straight forward "containment of China" proposal. One must wonder how anyone could learn of America's desire to set the agenda of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and not immediately identify overt aspirations of extraterritorial neo-imperialism.  

As part of this desire to set the agenda for Southeast Asia, the US has worked hard through its various NGOs to manipulate, influence, and outright overthrow the political orders in place across the region in order to install compliant regimes that reflect America's goal of consolidating and commandeering theses nations both to wholesale loot them economically, and in pursuit of its containment strategy versus China. 

There's a Reason the AEC is not up for Debate 

Clearly, if the AEC's implementation is merely the consolidation and exploitation of the peoples and resources of Southeast Asia, the process of its implementation will neither be up for debate, nor put to a vote. While the United States and the many overly optimistic proponents of the AEC ceaselessly harp upon the tenants of "democracy" and "human rights," these most basic concepts have been utterly absent in the creation of this new supranational bloc.  

The people of Southeast Asia did not ask for ASEAN nor the AEC. Much of what both represent are in fact openly opposed by many grassroots movements across the region - not to mention by many around the world. There is a reason the AEC is not up for debate and an endless torrent of full spectrum propaganda is undulating the media in efforts to market the AEC to the general public - no one would buy it otherwise. 

In a democratic society, the people are to vote and in return are to be represented by those they voted for. These representatives are to take the needs and desires of the people and turn them into local, national, and international policy. Instead, the AEC represents a conspiracy cobbled together by special interests and then dishonestly marketed toward the general public to accept. In other words, it represents democracy in reverse - it is the supposed representatives telling the people what they "want" rather than the people telling their representatives what to do. Democracy in reverse could also be defined as "dictatorship" - and in that regard, ASEAN and its AEC would not be a national dictatorship, but rather a supranational one magnifying the abuses and ramifications of such abuses accordingly.   

For this reason, whether one is a conservative nationalist or a liberal democrat, the idea of an AEC forced upon the people without their input, consent, or even expressed desire for such a system should be appalling and surely protested against. However, many must already know that such protests would be futile. But this futility itself only further exposes the unwarranted influence and power that truly drives the AEC's undemocratic and intolerable implementation.

Instead, it will be up to groups within each respective ASEAN member, and up to each community within to expose, boycott, and replace with local alternatives both the national and multinational special interests involved. While such a campaign will be difficult, the only other choice is to do nothing and suffer the same indignation, socioeconomic decay, and perpetual war the EU now suffers. The people of Southeast Asia have many advantages including the advantage of time on their side to mitigate a repeat of the EU's slow-motion collapse - but it is only an advantage if people begin acting now. 

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook”.