Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer denied yesterday that a proposed regional security dialogue linking Australia with Japan and the United States was meant to contain China, according to a report from Sydney Morning Herald.
The US-Australian ministerial talks held on July 30 in Canberra had discussed a plan on security between Washington and its Asia-Pacific allies, Australia, Japan and South Korea. Both US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell attended the talks.
Powell told reporters after the talks that the US supports the plan and hopes the four countries, the US, Australia, Japan and S. Korea, to "come together and talk more often."
Mr Alan Dupont, a leading strategic analyst at the Australian National University, said that the new security arrangement under discussion smacked of the sort of alliance relationships that existed in the region during the cold war.
Dupont thinks this is an indicator that the US is trying to build some kind of containment strategy, Sydney Morning Herald reported.
On the one hand, the plan conveys some wishes of Australia for US military involvement in Asia-Pacific area and Japan's responsibility for more of the regional security, but on the other hand, Australia is wary of provoking China.
With this in mind, Downer denied the security plan is to develop a so-called Asian NATO or that is designed to threaten China or contain China.
"It wouldn't be worth doing if it was going at the end of the day, to cause enormous regional consternation." Downer said.
However, Downer said the proposal merely aimed to bring together nations with a lot in common and was not "part of a broader strategy on containment of China or anything like that", the news report concluded.
(CIIC by Xiao Wei 08/01/2001)
