On the foreign policy front, Vietnam scored something of a coup when Indonesia said that it would take up Vietnam's goal of establishing multilateral talks on territorial claims over the South China Sea. During its chairmanship of the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 2010, Vietnam was successful in bringing that topic to the top of the group's agenda. China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei claim ownership of all or part of the disputed waters, which include some of the world's busiest shipping lanes, lie atop rich fishing grounds, and potentially have large reserves of oil and natural gas. This year Indonesia has taken up the revolving chairmanship of ASEAN and the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, said in February that he would continue to push China to engage in multilateral discussions over the disparate claims to the disputed waters. This is an uncomfortable development for China, which prefers to discuss its overlapping claims to the area separately with each individual nation involved. On the one hand, bilateral discussions would enable China to make the most of its growing economic influence over South-east Asia, but, on the other, multilateral talks would allow the individual nations involved to present a stronger front.

In 2010 Vietnam also encouraged the US to step into the fray and the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said during a visit to Hanoi that the US would be willing to help rival claimants to come together to discuss their dispute. This appears to have given Indonesia some confidence to pursue the multilateral approach in addition to the West. Indonesia does not claim any portion of the South China Sea for itself. However, the country is concerned about the strength exhibited by China in pressing its claims over the area, and over its impact on the status of the Natuna Islands-an archipelago close to Indonesia's largest natural-gas reserve. Indonesia has tried unsuccessfully for years to get China to spell out the exact extent of its claim to the South China Sea. It should be noted that while Vietnam's leaders will likely be pleased that Indonesia is pushing for a multilateral resolution of the disputes over the area, the government is also pursuing its own, separate discussions with China about their overlapping claims. In 2010 a Hong Kong-based daily newspaper, South China Morning Post, reported that Vietnamese and Chinese officials had met four times to discuss the dispute and that China had refused to discuss claims to the Paracel Islands, limiting discussions instead to only the Spratly Islands.