In the rebound that has followed the globally painful summer for the markets (see: “Charts”), success has been unevenly distributed. Particular highlights include Australia, benefitting from increasing political ties and cooperation with Vietnam and the Philippines, primarily in trade and maritime security in the South China Sea. The Philippines’ President Marcos’ new stance on loosening restrictions regarding EVs and EV parts benefits the whole East Asian And ASEAN regions more broadly, while also signaling unification with the shared regional interest of keeping shipping and trade lanes confidently undisturbed by hosting multiple ASEAN-centered fora on maritime and regional peace efforts. Meanwhile, high profile visits by officials and legislators from Vietnam to New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, South Korea, Laos, Cambodia and multiple African nations, indicate broad reaching efforts to capitalize on its currently-well-priced path into the next decade of modernization. The openness to these and other similar international cooperation measures by economies all up and down the span of the Eastern Pacific seaboard marks broad-reaching consensus on the importance of regional cooperation in tackling climate-based societal evolution. The Trans-Pacific world is becoming more regionally integrated and increasingly co-invested in the shared outcomes of internationally-cooperative (and usually expensive!) new projects and restructurings.
Passionate and growing public investment in environmental matters will either backstop or motivate these complex, costly and necessary international efforts throughout the intermediate term (12-18 months.) As particularly harsh episodes of winter life ravage local populations of Northern Hemisphere residents and the energy-intensive realities of modern society crystallize further in the minds of ordinary citizens, national governments will face growing political pressure to prove their capital commitment to investing in future-forward energy security to both their domestic constituents as well as their international co-parties and neighbors.
Continuing and compounding interest in environmental management across all fields is forcing nations to cooperate and, hopefully with increasing frequency and magnitude, obligate funds to essentially update some little part of the modern world to be more eco-sustainable in the long-term, which is, of course, our greater shared necessity. This is all good, but because it will be expensive and painful to some communities, moderate amounts of political opposition will always remain. Growing pains are real, but they should never be the obstacle preventing growth; smart and effective governments will be those who consider and pre-allocate funds to relocate and compensate the disadvantaged, as well as include natural scientists in the strategic planning process.
Evolving Priorities
Romping around in someone else’s neighborhood, which they help to police (despite some loud local dissenters), the United States is very concerned with making sure China’s dominance doesn’t grossly displace American (and, they assert, global) economic vitalities, like supply chains and trade routes. From this posture, American FDI and security assets are routinely dispatched across the Eastern Pacific seaboard to counter China’s activities in-kind and ensure economies aren’t overly disrupted, or aren’t reorganized in a way that shifts the relative balance of power out of American control. Admittedly, the US needs to consider more areas where they can allow local and regional
authorities within Asia to newly-manage what have been historically American-controlled financial, economic, and trade fundamentals.
Cooperating broadly across Asia will require accepting and accommodating counterparties with very different political and ideological goals, and who are, in some cases, predominantly Muslim (the largest being Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country ~270M ppl), Communist (PRC, Vietnam), and anti-American (potentially anyone in Asia depending on contemporaneously-perceived levels of American overreach or inaction); none of these are disqualifying qualities for sustainable future economic success. Those who choose to cooperate rather than contest, in our experience, will be more successful in the long run.
tkscm, limited 