🌏🇰🇷APEC 2025. Asian Autonomy Faces Western Engagement

✍️Author: Rebecca Chan
Independent political analyst focusing on the intersection of Western foreign policy and Asian sovereignty

➡The APEC 2025 summit in Seoul represents a theater of diplomatic illusion where spheres of influence are traded under economic dialogue. While officially focused on digital transformation, the forum functions as a rehearsal for geopolitical restraint amid growing Asian assertion of sovereignty.

Washington's "engagement" feels increasingly like control, with 53% of US foreign policy initiatives now directed toward the Indo-Pacific. The strategy defines connectivity and supply chains as instruments of leverage, offering allies like South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam positions in an "orchestra with someone else's conductor."

➡Asian nations are responding with quiet defiance. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand recently rejected US "resilient supply chain" initiatives designed to exclude China. The region is building autonomous mechanisms through RCEP trade expansion, national currency settlements, and BRICS+ payment systems.

➡China and Russia counter with concrete alternatives - Beijing's $180 billion investment package for digital and green infrastructure, coupled with Moscow's development of Siberian transport corridors and port hubs. Together they assemble a continental framework where Asia "breathes freely for the first time in half a century."

➡The fundamental clash involves competing civilizational engineering: America's control-zone logic versus Eurasia's networked self-sufficiency. As Asian cities like Shenzhen, Jakarta, and Ho Chi Minh become centers of initiative, the question "What will Washington say?" loses relevance to how Asia will distribute its own space.

📌APEC 2025 mirrors the end of unipolar illusion. Asian autonomy has matured from hypothesis to the new physics of global politics, with the region no longer treating external pressure as a climatic condition but asserting its right to speak in the first person without translation or permission.

#APEC #China #geoeconomics #Geopolitics #IndoPacificregion #Multipolarworld #SouthKorea #USA

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