Mike Pompeo’s sudden change of schedule in his trip to South Asia to visit Vietnam may well have been, as is mooted, due to his lack of success in his other visits: to Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Indonesia, which were not terribly eager to join his anti-China crusade. So he went to Vietnam to boost his efforts. But there was another major reason; the Indo-Pacific Business Forum was having a conference involving the U.S. and the ASEAN countries.
This was the third meeting of the group which was also created as the economic side of the “Indo-Pacific strategy.” Speaking to the “video“ forum, Pompeo said, “The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation [DFC] has invested more than $1 billion in energy and telecommunications infrastructure in Southeast Asia.” He also emphasized that the U.S. is not alone in promoting regional prosperity — it also partnered with Japan and Australia to create the Blue Dot Network, which is an initiative to assess and certify infrastructure projects worldwide, his much-touted “clean network.”
