18th Shangri-La Dialogue:
Growing Tensions between the United States and China

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No. 2019-09 Current Issues & Policies

Dr. Chung Eunsook

(chunges@sejong.org)

Senior Research Fellow,

The Sejong Institute

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In 2019, the Shangri-La Dialogue (official name: Asia Security Conference) was held for May 31 to June 2 at Shangri-La Hotel, Singapore. More than 60 people from 40 countries attended and many defense ministers led their delegations. The Shangri-La Dialogue has been held at the Shangri-La Hotel every year since 2002 as a Track-1 Asian security dialogue devised by the Institute for International Strategic Studies (IISS) in the UK. It is evaluated as a touchstone for reading Asian security horizons.

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Currently, the U.S.-China competition fashioned by President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping has reached its pinnacle. Trade and tariff negotiations, US-China military demonstrations using battleships and fighter planes in the South China Sea, etc. are receiving attention from the rest of the world. In addition to these issues, the lack of U.S.-China strategic credibility extends to 5G technology, human rights, cyberspace, espionage, civilization, and so on. Serious international issues such as the North Korean nuclear issue, climate change, and terrorism are hard to resolve without the participation of the US and China. Naturally, prior to the 18th Shangri-La Dialogue this year, everyone made projections on what content the defense secretaries of the two countries would address.

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Patrick Shanahan, who served as the U.S. Secretary of Defense after Mattis, took leadership to explain the content and implementation of the Indo-Pacific Strategy Report issued by the Pentagon.

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China has dispatched the head of the Department of Defense (Wei Fenghe) for the first time in eight years since 2011 and made efforts to state their national defense policy seeming peaceful while simultaneously criticize the role of the US in both the international and regional arena.

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Here, I examined the mutual distrust between the U.S. and China revealed in the Shangri-La Dialogue this year, acknowledged the worries of the ASEAN member states regarding this matter, and briefly compared the positions of the South Korean, Japanese, and EU security chiefs regarding the denuclearization of North Korea. Ironically, South Korea is taking similar approaches as China while Japan and the EU are taking similar approaches to the U.S. on this matter. In this regard, the 18th Shangri-La Dialogue will be recorded as a special chapter where the position of the ROK Ministry of Defense was widely understood and at the same time misunderstood. In Korea, the conflict will gradually become more and more diverse and will come up as a daily policy issue. Responsible strategies and policy lines concerning national security are urgently needed.

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※ Translator’s note: This is a summarized unofficial translation of the original paper which was written in Korean. All references should be made to the original paper.

※ This article is written based on the author’s personal opinions and does not reflect the views of the Sejong Institute.