For the first time in history, the US will host a summit with ASEAN starting tomorrow, February 15, 2016.
The summit will be held at the same California venue where POTUS once hosted Communist China's Xi Jinping.
The subliminal message is quite clear. To Uncle Sam, the 10-country ASEAN has now the same geopolitical value as Communist China!
What should be the focus of this historic summit?
The TPP should be one.
Certainly not human rights. A significant number of ASEAN's Heads-of-State have skeletons in their human rights closet.
Communist China's fake islands in the Spratlys should be another.
But POTUS can really make this summit an earth-shaking event if he will be able to plant the seeds for the revival of SEATO, the Cold War SEA equivalent of NATO.
Some ASEAN members, like Cambodia, will surely refuse to join for obvious reasons.
But the great majority of ASEAN are now in the right mood to join a regional defense alliance.
After all, the Communist China they are now facing is more powerful and more aggressive than the one they faced during the Cold War.
The only difference is that, this time, the whole of Vietnam are on the side of the Good Guys.
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