Southeast Asia is the Geographical Center of the US-China Struggle for Influence

Mai Nguyen holds a Bachelor of Arts in Government and International Affairs from George Mason University and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, concentrating and specializing in International Security Policy and UN/International Organizations Studies. She was a recipient of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program Scholarship.

Abstract: Southeast Asia is the geographical center of the U.S.-China struggle for influence. Yet, despite the increasing geopolitical tension, Southeast Asian countries manage to maintain good relations with each other while preserving good relations with both Washington and Beijing. These countries also manage to get both superpowers to contribute to their growth and development. A huge factor contributing to this is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Thus, this paper will investigate how Southeast Asian countries, through ASEAN, cope with the increasing geopolitical tension in the Indo-Pacific region. It will discuss the overall hedging strategy that ASEAN member states employ when interacting with one another, as well as the U.S. and China. Then, the paper will focus on how Southeast Asian states engage in multiple levels of interactions with the U.S. and China in the larger Indo-Pacific region. Then it will determine whether this strategy is successful in ensuring the region’s neutrality amidst rising tension between Washington and Beijing, as the relevance of ASEAN in the region will depend on how it can maintain its image as a neutral organization. Consequently, the paper will propose recommendations for future U.S. foreign policy.

1. Strategy in Southeast Asia: Hedging

            Southeast Asian countries engage in hedging strategy by using ASEAN as a platform. Hedging can be defined as “insurance-seeking behavior under high-stakes and high-uncertainty situations, where a sovereign actor pursues a bundle of opposite and deliberately ambiguous policies.”[1] ASEAN member states engage in hedging to manage uncertainty as hedging can allow realpolitik adaptation to changing circumstances.[2] To preserve its political maneuvering space and neutrality, this helps ASEAN member states avoid alignment with either Washington or Beijing.[3] Hedging is an incredibly dynamic strategy for small and medium-sized states as it allows them to adjust their policies to remain ambiguous.[4] This brings three positive consequences.

First, ASEAN has sustained and regularized dialogue mechanisms that bind and enmesh superpowers and other partners in constant collaboration, dialogue, and socialization.[5] This helps ASEAN counter the risks of becoming irrelevant. Second, ASEAN serves as a buffer to keep distance from the big powers, limiting their influence, checking, and constraining their actions. Michael Leifer posits that ASEAN member states leverage the presence and participation of competing powers as “mutually constraining and countervailing forces for the purposes of denying dominance, diversifying partnerships, as well as ensuring room for bargaining and competitive cooperation.”[6] The presence of competing powers to counterbalance one another thus can act as an institutional shield and shock absorber to mitigate and offset risks. Third, ASEAN members also build cooperation mechanisms between themselves and external partners. Cheng-Chwee Kuik emphasizes that layers of cooperative mechanisms are to build collective responses to emerging crises and shared challenges.[7] These three effects have helped ASEAN member states offset risks, most notably, the dangers of superpowers’ entrapment, interference and subservience, regional instability, and becoming irrelevant in regional affairs.

2. ASEAN’s implementation of hedging strategy

With the escalating competition between the U.S. and China, it is critical for ASEAN to navigate this relationship. To keep its equidistance from both superpowers, ASEAN has been employing hedging as a strategy to engage Washington and Beijing while at the same time binding them through the organization’s norms and mechanisms.

First, ASEAN has proactively created a network of regional mechanisms and forums to better bind great powers as ASEAN’s external partners in its hub of cooperative frameworks that focus on promoting confidence-building measures, preventive diplomacy, and cooperative security. In each individual mechanism, ASEAN member states enjoy influence over the agenda and pace of cooperation.[8] Consequently, these mechanisms remain the only multilateral cooperative forums in the region. Great powers’ enhanced participation shows the strategic importance of ASEAN-led forums in the region. This is increasingly important as superpowers realize the need to constrain themselves from engaging in a full-blown Peloponnesian-like war.

Second, ASEAN also proactively includes great powers’ regional strategies in ASEAN-led ones. With China, ASEAN formulates its own documents to incorporate Beijing’s initiatives in the broader Asia-Pacific region into ASEAN’s regional networks. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) offers ASEAN member states opportunities for infrastructure building. Despite extensive bilateral engagement between China and ASEAN member states, ASEAN as an organization only referred to  BRI in neutral terms in the context of other connectivity initiatives.[9] While creating a common regional stance, ASEAN also generates a response that can appease its other external partners, namely Washington. This shows ASEAN’s reluctance to accept China’s growing influence in the region as it can create potential dependency.

With the U.S., there were speculations that both “Free and Open Indo-Pacific" (FOIP) and Quadrilateral Security Dialogue[10]QUAD) could undermine ASEAN as a regional organization.[11]member states adopted their own “ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific." The document ensures that the organization would remain at thhe center of “forging and shaping the vision for closer cooperation [12].” The Outlook emphasizes that cooperation must be through ASEAN-led mechanisms and other non-ASEAN regional mechanisms. This signifies that Indo-Pacific is an integrated and interconnected region of cooperation and dialogue. This implies that the region is not a place for superpower rivalry. In its drivign seat, ASEANN will steer the partnership independently from the influence of superpowers. It also reiterates ASEAN member states’ commitment to maintain its centrality and identity as a neutral platform for countries in the region to convene, negotiate, and cooperate.

The Outlook achieves the goal of creating a common strategy to manage U.S.-China competition in the region by further embedding both countries and their partners/allies in its ASEAN-led mechanisms. Even though some critics still believe the Outlook is only rhetoric with no enforcing mechanisms, these are some of the positive effects that critics should take notice of. It serves as a reference point for ASEAN states to engage with other countries on bilateral levels.[13] This effort is among many that highlight ASEAN’s ability to continuously engage with each superpower and deepen cooperation while ensuring that such engagement would not overshadow its centrality in the region.

The hedging acts with the U.S. and China in recent years show ASEAN member states’  proactive and preemptive efforts. ASEAN’s ongoing efforts to bridge different perspectives of competing states and to bridge a platform for cooperation strengthen its reputation as a neutral driving force for peace and stability in the region. Consequently, ASEAN’s proactive neutrality is the result of its norms and identity within a multilateral setting. With a uniform regional strategy, it is implied that the intra-regional relations among ASEAN member states are relatively peaceful as they are able to reach a common stance. This creates a perception of regional stability. To superpowers, ASEAN-led forums are less threatening because of their established neutrality. This negates leadership competition between superpowers, power asymmetry, and leverages ASEAN member states’ strategic positions in the region. This also empowers ASEAN member states in their bilateral relations, letting them deepen existing partnerships and diversity into new ones. By participating in these mechanisms, external partners understand that this is ASEAN’s approach to navigating regional dynamics, consequently showing their support for ASEAN’s strategy of equidistance that ensures their strategic independence and economic development.

3. The continuance of hedging strategy:

Under the increasing US-China competition, ASEAN member states are concerned with losing their strategic autonomy and being marginalized from their role as primary regional convenors under the ASEAN umbrella.[14]Consequently, ASEAN member states need to strengthen their strategic relevance by managing and coordinating the increasingly complex relationships in the region, brokering necessary compromises, and having equidistance between the U.S. and China. This section argues that ASEAN member states will likely continue their strategic hedging strategy given their careful cultivation of ASEAN as a neutral platform.

First, the current development of the U.S.-China competition is riddled with uncertainties. This strategic competition will inadvertently hurt the interests of ASEAN member states because they have good relations with both countries. At the same time, China’s intentions as a rising power make ASEAN member states err on the side of caution.[15] Washington also fails to attain complete confidence from the member states. Yet, the continuous engagement with Washington hows how ASEAN member states view the country as a strategic partner to counterbalance Beijing’s presence and influence in the region and even as a bargaining chip when negotiating with China. Thus, hedging is still a good strategy as the ambiguity of the strategy allows ASEAN member states to strengthen relations with both Washington and Beijing to counterbalance the latter’s influence in the region and to their national interests.

Second, Washington and Beijing still stress the importance of ASEAN. China has been trying to reassure its ASEAN partners of its peaceful and benign intentions. President Xi Jinping once stated that: “China was, is, and will always be ASEAN’s good neighbor, good friend, and good partner.”[16] Washington also repeatedly emphasizes its support for ASEAN, through statements from President John Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.[17] These commitments are shown in the upgrade of the ASEAN-China relations to a comprehensive strategic partnership in November 2021 and the establishment of an ASEAN-U.S. comprehensive strategic partnership in November 2022.[18]ASEAN members also participate in both Washington-led and Beijing-led exclusionary initiatives. This shows ASEAN’s importance for U.S. and Chinese regional strategies as they still compete for ASEAN member states’ alignment. Because of closer contacts with both superpowers, ASEAN continues to be the main driving force in the region.

Third, hedging strategy at the national level will continue to stay. Murray Hiebert posits that “all countries in Southeast Asia view China with some mix of expectation and fear, aspiration and frustration.”[19] Therefore, hedging strategy is still a critical component in ASEAN member states’ foreign policies. For strong middle powers, the need to hedge is still prominent in their foreign policies. For instance, Indonesia has not allowed itself to become too dependent on Chinal instead it has diversified its funding for infrastructure from Washington’s allies.[20] The hedging strategy that Vietnam employs brings about significant and symbolic results. Within the last quarter of 2023, Vietnam upgraded its bilateral relations with the U.S. to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and received Xi for a high-level visit. Even for countries known as China’s client-states, hedging is increasingly important in their foreign policies. Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Manet posits that he would not want to be “owned lock, stock and barrel” with another country, hinting at China.[21] This is a possible sign that Cambodia is diversifying its relations. With the current trajectories, hedging is still a prominent strategy in their playbook. This will translate into hedging at the regional level as well. Hedging is here to stay.

Fourth, ASEAN can still manage traditional security issues. The intense focus on what ASEAN fails to do has overshadowed what the organization has succeeded in. The South China Sea dispute is one such cases. So far, the organization has managed to keep the issue relevant in the regional and international arena. First, after the 2012 incident in which ASEAN failed to release a communique with reference to the South China Sea dispute, ASEAN member states manage to release annual communiques that includess languages referring to the dispute. Second, the U.S.’s Freedom of Navigation Operations has acted as a counterbalance against China’s activities. These factors are two among many bases for ASEAN claimant states to negotiate a Code of Conduct (CoC) with China. Even though the negotiation towards a legally binding CoC is challenging, ASEAN still manages to keep the dispute alive while also keeping it from being a “hot war.” Furthermore, ASEAN facilliates and promotes practical cooperation in non-sensitive issues, such as the agreement on a Code of Unplanned Encounters at Sea.[22] These facts should be commended and not ignored. This shows ASEAN’s ability to maneuver in an increasingly complex and challenging regional security environment. This ability stems from ASEAN’s hedging strategy, which has afforded its member states strategic and political space to do so. With its norms and hedging strategy, ASEAN member states work slowly but surely in tackling complex issues.

4. Recommendations:

The U.S.-China competition provides both challenges and opportunities for ASEAN member states. In terms of challenges, the rising competition between Washington and Beijing will narrow the political space for ASEAN to maneuver when both superpowers no longer value ASEAN as a regional organization that can provide neutral platforms. Thus, ASEAN member states need to adapt to the current situation so as not to lose their centrality in the region, consequently losing advantages that the member states have cultivated for decades.

In terms of opportunities, if they utilize the competition efficiently, ASEAN member states can further leverage their strategic positions as well as ASEAN’s standing in Washington’s and Beijing’s foreign policies. First, with the increasing exclusionary initiatives in the region, ASEAN member states can diversify their cooperation and deepen their relations with superpowers. They can also include new initiatives in their network of cooperation. First, this will strengthen ASEAN’s neutral stance in great power competition, thus being able to play the role of an “honest broker.” If ASEAN can do so, superpowers will more likely to respect ASEAN’s neutrality and centrality in the regional architecture. Second, this motivates ASEAN to continue engaging in proactive hedging. This will help ASEAN send credible signals as a neutral forum while still engaging in ambiguous and counteracting national foreign policies. This will also prevent superpowers from taking advantage of the differences between ASEAN member states and driving a wedge between them, thus undermining ASEAN’s credibility as a regional organization.

Therefore, to create a conducive environment for ASEAN to minimize challenges and take full advantage of the opportunities given by the U.S-China competition, the U.S. should take into consideration he following:

1.      To not force any ASEAN member states to choose a side. It is hoped that Washington is aware that as developing countries or countries that have little natural resources, ASEAN member states often prioritize economic development and growth. Forcing them to choose exclusively one side will potentially bring negative consequences for Washington, especially when ASEAN states look to diversify their economic partnership to generate fast growth.

2.      To not have the “democracy vs. nondemocracy" narrative in the U.S.-ASEAN relations. To have such narration will only negatively affect Washington’s strategy in the region as ASEAN member states are a collective of democratic, autocratic, communist and absolute monarch regimes. Not only will this remind ASEAN member states of their Cold War past but it will also go against the strategy that China is employing. China is currently puting out a narrative of an uncompromising Washington.

3.      Relatedly, to not make its initiatives exclusionary towards ASEAN member states. The exclusion of Laos and Cambodia from the IPEF is a missed opportunity for the U.S., especially when both small Southeast Asian states have explicitly expressed their interests in joining. This closes the window of opportunities for Washington to open more cooperative areas and improve its relations with Laos and Cambodia. The exclusion of Laos and Cambodia will only create opportunities for China to further its cooperation with these two countries, increasing the reality of both becoming China’s client states. Furthermore, this will only serve as a precedence for other states when it judges whether it can improve relations and cooperate more with Washington.

4.      To let ASEAN member states lead cooperative efforts with both Washington and Beijing in common global challenges. Having multiple countries that can be heavily affected by climate change in the Southeast Asia region is a good start to have ASEAN member states take the lead. First, this will strengthen ASEAN as a neutral forum of cooperation and ASEAN centrality in the region. Second, this will embed China more deeply into regional and international architecture. Third, cooperation in non-traditional security issues can lay the foundations for cooperation for traditional security issues in the future.

5.      To appreciate ASEAN’s careful cultivation of a cooperative environment in the region. Although the changes can be slow, ASEAN member states clearly recognize what would happen if ASEAN can no longer be perceived as neutral ground. Therefore, Washington should not pressure ASEAN to change its current position or strategy immediately. In fact, it is desirable that Washington allows breathing space for ASEAN member states to negotiate among themselves to reach a common stance in which all member states feel that they still have ownership in their decisions. At the same time, Washington should create opportunities for ASEAN member states to continue diversifying their partnerships.

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ENDNOTES

[1] Cheng-Chwee Kuik, “Getting hedging right: a small-state perspective,” China International Strategy Review 3, issue 2 (2021), 301. 

[2] Ibid., 256-258.

[3] Alfred Gerstl, Hedging in Southeast Asia: ASEAN, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam and their relations with China (Routledge: 2023), 28. 

[4] Evelyn Goh, “Southeast Asian Strategies toward the Great Powers: Still hedging after all these years?,” The Asan Forum, 22 February 2016, https://theasanforum.org/southeast-asian-strategies-toward-the-great-powers-still-hedging-after-all-these-years/  

[5] Yuen Foong Khong and Helen Nesadurai, “Hanging Together, Institutional Design, and Cooperation in Southeast Asia: AFTA and the ARF,” Crafting Cooperation: Regional International Institutions in Comparative Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

[6] Michael Leifer, The ASEAN Regional Forum: Extending ASEAN’s Model of Regional Security, Adelphi Paper no. 302, (London: Oxford University Press for IISS, 1996).

[7] Cheng-Chwee Kuik, “Hedging via Institutions: ASEAN-led Multilateralism in the age of the Indo-Pacific,” Asian Journal of Peacebuilding 10, no. 2 (2022), page 369-371.

[8] Alice Ba, “ASEAN and ASEAN Centrality,” Institutionalizing East Asia: Mapping and Reconfiguring Regional Cooperation (London: Routledge, 2016), 23.

[9] Alfred Gerstl, Hedging in Southeast Asia: ASEAN, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam and their relations with China (Routledge: 2023), 31.

[10] Cheng-Chwee Kuik, “Hedging via Institutions: ASEAN-led Multilateralism in the age of the Indo-Pacific,” Asian Journal of Peacebuilding 10, no. 2 (2022), 375.

[11] Renato Cruz De Castro, “Under the shadow of the giants: The ASEAN in search of a common strategy in a fluid and perilous Indo-Pacific region,” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 7, issue 2 (2022), 295.

[12] “ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific,” ASEAN online, 2019, https://asean.org/asean2020/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/ASEAN-Outlook-on-the-Indo-Pacific_FINAL_22062019.pdf  

[13] Cheng-Chwee Kuik, “Hedging via Institutions: ASEAN-led Multilateralism in the age of the Indo-Pacific,” Asian Journal of Peacebuilding 10, no. 2 (2022), 375.

[14] Dewi Fortuna Anwar, “Indonesia and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific,” International Affairs 96, issue 1 (2020), 113.

[15] Yao Wen, “ASEAN States’ Hedging against the China Question: Contested, Adaptive, Transformative,” In The China Question (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 249.

[16] Xi Jinping, “For a shared future and our common home,” 22 November 2021, Speech at the Special Summit to commemorate the 30thanniversary of China-ASEAN Dialogue Relations.

[17] “The United States – ASEAN Relationship: Fact Sheet,” U.S. Mission to ASEAN online, July 12, 2023, https://asean.usmission.gov/the-united-states-asean-relationship-2/

[18] Jie Zhang, “Rebuilding strategic autonomy: ASEAN’s response to US-China strategic competition,” China International Strategy Review 5, issue 1 (2023), 83.

[19] Murray Hiebert, Under Beijing’s Shadow: Southeast Asia’s China Challenge, (Lanham, MD: Center for Strategic and International Studies and Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 5.

[20] Dewi Fortuna Anwar, “Indonesia and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific,” International Affairs 96, issue 1 (2020), 121.

[21] “Hun Sen heir could get New York business reception after Cambodia succession,” Reuters, 5 August 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/hun-sen-heir-could-get-new-york-business-reception-after-cambodia-succession-2023-08-04/#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20Aug%204%20(Reuters),for%20Southeast%20Asia%20told%20Reuters.

[22] Alfred Gerstl, Hedging in Southeast Asia: ASEAN, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam and their relations with China (Routledge: 2023), 96.