Manila hosts ASEAN summit as Trump, Modi and Putin head to Asia

The 11-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations opens its last leaders' summit of the year in Manila on Sunday, with India's Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump expected to attend and the South China Sea code of conduct the Philippines had hoped to sign still unsigned.

The Philippines holds the ASEAN chair this year. A Southeast Asian diplomat involved in summit preparations told AFP, in a report carried by CNA, that he did not see any agreement on the code being reached in Manila. Philippine and Chinese sailors clashed a day before the July summit, and a diplomatic row erupted at an October defence meeting.

Siew Mun Tang, former head of the ASEAN Studies Centre at Singapore's ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, said a code signed 10 or 15 years ago would have been meaningful, but that the militarisation of islands by China and Vietnam had changed conditions on the ground. He also said Trump's midterm election defeat would not lead the region to treat him as a lame duck. "He has two more years. He can do a lot of things," Tang told AFP.

Attention then moves to Shenzhen for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference. Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to be a central figure, and Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney are due at both gatherings. French President Emmanuel Macron will be in Phnom Penh for a Francophonie summit at the same time.

A proposed meeting between China's Xi Jinping, Trump and Putin is the APEC event drawing most attention, though its agenda remains unclear. Putin has pushed for talks on Ukraine. Trump said this week the focus would be denuclearisation and ending the war in Iran.

Analysts quoted by AFP counselled low expectations. Ryan Hass of the Brookings Institution said Xi and Putin would give Trump "a respectful hearing" on arms control but would likely agree only on "broad principles without committing to any follow-on actions". Wang Wen, dean of Renmin University's Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, said talks could end without a breakthrough.

A meeting Trump once sought with North Korea's Kim Jong Un appears abandoned, with Pyongyang rejecting repeated overtures.

Artificial intelligence is on the APEC agenda after Xi and Trump agreed in September to set up a communication channel for AI incidents. Xi said at the time that the two countries had a responsibility to develop and manage AI for good and ensure it stays under human control. Stephen Wu of Carthage Capital called a hotline diplomacy's cheapest instrument: "free to announce, free to ignore".

On trade, a pause in the China-US tariff war was extended to January 10 during Xi's September visit to the White House, with friction remaining over Chinese rare earth exports. Harry Murphy Cruise of Oxford Economics wrote that existing tariff measures rest with the US president and executive branch rather than Congress, and that reversing them would require legislation the president could veto.

CNA also reported that a spying scandal around Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, once widely expected to accompany Trump to APEC, could weigh on the AI discussions.