The United States uses the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to propel anti-Russian rhetorics, and gathers delegations from worldwide who anticipate the day when this “obsession finally ends,” Ambassador-at-Large, Senior Official in APEC from Russia, Marat Berdyev, said in an interview on Monday.
Speaking to the Russian news agency Sputnik, Berdyev, lambasted the United States for propagating ‘Russophobia.’ He stressed, that the United States “still cannot give up anti-Russian rhetoric in the APEC format.” Further, the ambassador continued that America’s “most faithful allies obediently echo [such rhetorics against Moscow].”
In response to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s all-out invasion of neighbouring Ukraine last year, the European Union (EU), the US, the UK and Canada collectively imposed a barrage of sanctions to cripple the Russian economy in order to shrink the country’s war chest. West froze assets of Russia’s central bank and removed Moscow from the international financial messaging system SWIFT, thus handicapping its payments for oil and gas.
“These escapades are gradually fizzling out. An obedient minority echoes Washington’s microphone. On the sidelines, many delegations admit that they are looking forward to the end of this American obsession,” the Senior Official in APEC from Russia, Berdyev, was quoted as saying.
The third Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Senior Officials Meeting and Related Meetings (SOM3) were held in Seattle, Washington DC from August 1-7. Business leaders met with the senior officials from Pacific Rim economies to forge ahead their policy priorities’including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which made it to the top of the agenda. The next APEC Economic Leaders’ Week is scheduled to take place in the US state of San Francisco in November, 2023.
APEC forum circumvents ‘fundamental principle of consensus?
APEC forum in July-August that spanned over three weeks was aimed at promoting free trade in the Indo-Pacific region. During the first-ever forum that was held in 1993 in Blake Island, the then US President Bill Clinton invited APEC leaders which included the rare visit by the Chinese President Jiang Zemin. As China surpassed Japan in 2011 to become the world’s second-largest and fastest-growing economy in adherence to trade policies and reforms under Deng Xiaoping, former US President Barack Obama hosted the APEC forum at Honolulu prioritising the trade pact in the Asia Pacific–TPP.
In 2018, TPP, the massive Asian trade agreement was signed by the United States and at least twelve Pacific Rim countries that comprised 40 percent of the global economy, and nearly 50 percent of global trade. Just days after Russia announced what it labels as the “special military operation” in Ukraine earlier last year, the Thai Foreign Ministry was informed that Russia’s President Putin will not participate in the forum. Instead, the meetings were attended by Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov in Bangkok.
On Monday, Berdyev asserted that the Thai presidency “made every possible effort to prevent the forum from taking illegitimate decisions that circumvent the fundamental principle of consensus.” However, the US-led forum resorted to an “absolutely opposite approach which bears little resemblance to the usual collegial principle of APEC functioning.”
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