The alliance of the United States, Great Britain and Australia (the AUKUS partnership) follows the erosion of the format of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
This was announced on Saturday by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking at the 29th Assembly of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, RIA Novosti reported.
The head of the diplomatic service pointed out that “one of the most fashionable trends now is the so-called Indo-Pacific strategies that were invented by the United States,” in particular AUKUS and Quad.
“All this is in line with the erosion of the universal formats in the Asia-Pacific region, which have existed in recent decades under the auspices of ASEAN,” Lavrov said.
The minister named among such universal formats “East Asian summits, the ASEAN forum on security, meetings of ASEAN defense ministers and partners, the so-called ASEAN + and a number of other formats” based on the “principle of consensus.”
“All of them involved, on the basis of equality and mutual consideration of interests, all the key countries of this region, without exception, including China, and India, and Japan, and the Russian Federation – all key countries,” he continued.
The new Indo-Pacific strategy in the AUKUS format, according to Lavrov, is aimed at the collapse of “a system that relied on the need to respect the indivisibility of security and openly proclaimed its goal to contain China.”