Good omen for Asia-Pacific

Second, ASEAN, as expected, is playing the leading role in the ADMM-Plus. The "ASEAN-style" mechanism is an interactive platform and characterizes mutual benefit, mutual respect and a consensus-based decision-making process among its member states and dialogue partners, which will not only ensure ASEAN's core status, but also bring the strengths of the dialogue partners into full play.

Third, since the ADMM-Plus is in line with the changing trend in the Asia-Pacific, it will be in a position to address the diverse regional defense and security challenges and promote cooperation in non-traditional security fields. The five expert working groups of ADMM-Plus have already been cooperating fruitfully in areas of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, maritime security, counter-terrorism, peacekeeping operations and military medicine. In keeping with the spirit of the ADMM-Plus, China sent a big group of People's Liberation Army personnel, the largest among all participating countries, to Brunei to take part in the first ADMM-Plus Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief and Military Medicine Exercise.

Fourth, the mechanism reflects a positive trend in regional security cooperation, which is to guard against becoming a "talking shop" by focusing on practical cooperation and capacity building through training and joint exercises and jointly addressing defense and security challenges.

The ideas that emerge from the practical cooperation and interactions at the ADMM-Plus will create a new regional security cooperation pattern that can go beyond the old-fashioned hegemony model, will be impartial toward all countries, big or small, focus on common security and seek cooperation step by step.

In an open and inclusive regional security mechanism, countries can embrace the new pattern featuring mutual trust, closer interactions and mutual benefit, and bury forever the old logic of an inevitable clash between a rising power and an established power.

The new security cooperation pattern will encourage regional countries to cooperate in non-traditional fields to accumulate positive forces, expand common interests and chart a common destiny for the Asia-Pacific. But ASEAN member states, China and the other regional countries have to make concerted efforts to transform the ADMM-Plus dream into reality.

The author is an assistant researcher at the Institute of Strategic Studies, PLA National Defense University.