EAI MPDI Working Paper No. 1

Author

See Seng Tan is the deputy director of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, head of the Centre for Multilateralism Studies, and an associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A student of Asian security, he is the author/editor of 9 books and has published over 40 scholarly papers and book chapters. His most recent book is The Making of the Asia Pacific: Knowledge Brokers and the Politics of Representation (Amsterdam University Press, 2013). He has held visiting appointments at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Australian National University, Griffith University, and Ritsumeikan Asia-Pacific University, and has consulted for various regional organizations and national government ministries and agencies. Before joining academia, he worked at a faith-based, nonprofit organization. He received his B.A. (Honors) and M.A. degrees from the University of Manitoba, and his Ph.D. is from Arizona State University.

I. Introduction

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been lauded for its contributions to the regional security and stability of not just Southeast Asia, but of East Asia as well. In the East Asian context, a key part of ASEAN’s contribution – some would say the only contribution of note – has been to institutionalize political-security dialogue among the world’s powers, great as well as regional, and the ASEAN member nations. This institutionalization of political dialogue was possible through regional security arrangements such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and, more recently, the East Asia Summit (EAS), as well as ASEAN’s dialogue partnerships with China and the United States respectively. If the Cold War goal of NATO, as its first Secretary-General Lord Ismay famously said, was to “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” then a post-Cold War goal of ASEAN, at least for its founding member states (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and Thailand), has arguably been to keep the Americans involved in the region, keep rising Chinese assertiveness in check, and keep ASEAN in charge of regional architecture in East Asia. For ASEAN, the aim has been to ensure the great and regional powers engage the region in pacific and positive ways that contribute to the region’s peace and prosperity without undermining ASEAN’s primus inter pares position within the regional order and the architecture that supports it. And the key to that, ASEAN leaders believe, is to ensure that the China-U.S. relationship, despite its propensity for bilateral competition and possibly even conflict, would essentially remain peaceful, cooperative, and conducive to the peace, prosperity, and security of Asia.

Arguably, relations between China and the United States have evolved into a pattern of mutual strategic hedging. As Evan Medeiros has noted: “It allows Washington and Beijing each to maintain its extensive and mutually beneficial economic ties with each other and with the rest of Asia while addressing uncertainty and growing security concerns about the other.” But while mutual hedging can help prevent geopolitical rivalry from escalating into serious conflict, it remains a delicate and potentially unstable strategy whose effectiveness and sustainability requires judicious management of growing strains in China-U.S. ties and regional reactions to Chinese and American policies, inter alia. Thus understood, ASEAN diplomacy aimed at facilitating big power relations is designed to foster a conducive institutional environment wherein mutual strategic hedging between China and the United States can be reinforced through consultation and confidence-building. In themselves, ASEAN-led multilateral consultative mechanisms are not a basis for strategic hedging, but are designed to keep outside powers involved in regional security dialogue and to provide Beijing and Washington with places and spaces where the security dilemmas that threaten the durability and effectiveness of their mutual hedging can be managed and hopefully mitigated. But are ASEAN’s consultative platforms equally durable and effective in fulfilling their remit, not least when the organization’s “centrality” in Asian regionalism is under question? Can an ASEAN stained by internal disharmony and strained by growing pressures to deliver an effective regional architecture still be useful as, if you will, “Sherpa” to the big powers?

The aim of this paper is to review and assess ASEAN’s historical and contemporary role in facilitating China-U.S. ties toward, at the very least, peaceful strategic competition, if not outright cooperation. Paradoxically, China-U.S. competition and cooperation can equally be the bane of ASEAN’s efforts in this regard. While ASEAN-based multilateral diplomacy and regional cooperation in Asia have served Chinese and American interests, their utility has of late diminished as a consequence of two related developments. On the one hand, tensions between China and the United States have risen, brought about by the post-Afghanistan strategic “rebalancing” of the United States to the Asia-Pacific region. So, too, have tensions between China and some Southeast Asian rival claimants to South China Sea islands and waters. On the other hand, divergent perceptions and perspectives among ASEAN member states, exacerbated by centrifugal pulls exerted on ASEAN by the two great powers – and rendered worse by China-U.S. tensions – have contributed to marked cleavages within the regional organization.

Ironically, the creeping institutionalization of China-U.S. cooperation, with the bilateral Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) process in particular, can prove equally problematic for ASEAN’s facilitating role should that development end up rendering the organization’s services defunct. However, it is neither in China’s nor America’s interest to adopt a “G2” approach to regional governance, and hitherto there has been no hint at all that President Xi Jinping’s call for “a new type of great power relations” implies that the Chinese desire such an approach. In that respect, ASEAN diplomacy still matters.

A brief conceptual note is in order at this juncture. Broadly, there are three ways to define a middle power – according to capabilities, function, or behavior. Middle power diplomacy generally involves the adoption of an internationalist perspective and policy, actively participating in multilateral forums, leading in specific niche areas, and acting as a bridge among nations. There are countless reasons why ASEAN should not be equated with a middle power, not least because it is neither a unitary state actor nor, for that matter, a unitary regional actor. That said, with a combined population of well over six hundred million and substantial economic heft, and with the anticipated establishment of the sixteen-country Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – the hub of what would be the world’s largest free trade area – ASEAN arguably possesses the material requisites to function like a middle power. And if middle powers are, according to one seminal contribution, “defined primarily by their behavior” – characterized principally, though not exclusively by the penchant for multilateralism – then the way by which ASEAN promotes and protects its interests through negotiating with, rather than simply obeying or resisting, great powers suggests behavioral similarities between ASEAN-style diplomacy and middle power diplomacy vis-à-vis great powers.

II. The Great Powers Rebalance in Asia

In November 2011, President Barack Obama announced the plan to conduct rotational deployments of up to 2,500 U.S. Marines in Darwin, Australia, during his speech before the Australian Parliament in Canberra. Another agreement was reached by the United States with Singapore in June 2011 on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue (SLD), an annual semi-official defense forum held in Singapore, to allow the deployment of up to four U.S. Navy Littoral Combat Ships – up from the two vessels previously agreed upon – to Singapore. At the SLD in June 2012, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta reported that the U.S. Navy will reposition sixty percent of its assets to the Asia-Pacific region by 2020. Crucially, the proclivity of some governments – the Chinese, in particular – and a number of pundits to portray the so-called strategic “pivot” or “rebalancing” as predominantly military in orientation has been questioned by others who highlight, correctly, the complex and comprehensive scope of America’s reorientation to Asia. The pivot includes economic, multilateral-diplomatic, and, arguably, democratic dimensions – as reflected, respectively, by the Obama Administration’s participation in the TPP and membership in the EAS, and its engagement with liberalizing Myanmar...(Continued)