ASEAN losing its composure

Southeast Asia is at a dangerous crossroads. Once regarded as a haven of relative stability and economic progress, today the region is buffeted by escalating geopolitical struggle between the United States and China, state fragmentation in Myanmar and internal political conflicts that are exposing the limits of democratic reform and the dangers of populism.

These issues will be on full display at the annual leaders' summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations next week in Jakarta and may well intensify as the group's rotating chairmanship passes afterward from Indonesia to Laos, the bloc's smallest and poorest member.

Civil society and the international community have long looked to ASEAN, which has reliably preserved regional peace for decades, to deal with major challenges.

But the bloc is now deeply divided. On Myanmar, for example, mainland states have put a premium on state integrity and security over political change and reform while more democratic maritime states, led by Indonesia, regard military rule as intolerable.

In an alarming public display of regional dissonance, Thailand recently directly engaged with Myanmar's military junta without informing Indonesia. By playing on such divisions, the junta has avoided complete ostracization.

The region is also divided over the extent to which China poses a threat and whether it should be contained by the United States and its allies.

Laos, Thailand and Cambodia have close ties with Beijing, reflecting proximity or long-standing political alignment. Vietnam views China with deep historical enmity but maintains a dual-track relationship sustained by ties between the two nations' ruling communist parties. Even so, Hanoi has drawn closer to the US.

The Philippines has effectively checked out of ASEAN because officials in Manila believe the group has done nothing to defend the country's maritime claims against Chinese intrusions, noting its failure to support the 2016 arbitral ruling by a court in The Hague affirming Philippine sovereignty over contested areas.

"We might as well be allied with Taiwan, Japan and South Korea," said a former official after the recent confrontation between a Chinese coast guard ship and Philippine vessels attempting to resupply troops on Second Thomas Shoal in the disputed Spratly Islands. Manila has indeed moved closer to the US since Ferdinand Marcos Jr. became president last year.

Compounding such rifts over external issues is a distinct political divide. The rise of democratic reform movements in Indonesia, Malaysia and even Thailand over the last 30 years has led to more frequent changes in national leadership.

As a result, the personal relationships that held ASEAN nations together under more authoritarian regimes have frayed. Some democratic leaders have begun to wonder why they need to spend so much time with tedious ASEAN meetings when their domestic constituents are more interested in social equality and food security than strengthening regional identity.

All this has made Southeast Asia more fragile and isolated than it appears. Great power leaders who once routinely attended regional summits now often skip them. The US and China prefer bilateral engagements during which they can press for alignment. While he will skip this month's ASEAN summit, US President Joe Biden will visit Vietnam right afterward, reportedly to sign a bilateral strategic partnership agreement.

ASEAN has lost its much-touted centrality and is frankly on life support as an autonomous multilateral platform, reflecting to some degree the decline of multilateralism globally.

What can be done to revive effective multilateral cooperation and rescue the region from fracture by competing great powers and division by political dispute?

Civil society has traditionally helped in quiet ways to build and sustain the sinews of connectivity in the region. Networks of academics and think tanks helped promote connections and address sensitivities among governments and offered regional policy ideas.

Many of those veteran scholars are now retired or deceased. The younger generation has not filled the void, in part because the rivalry of the great powers has polarized much of their ranks.

A possible new approach would be to launch a recovery process to help reconnect the 10 ASEAN states. This would involve identifying common challenges rather than relying on outdated institutionalized processes or weak mechanisms to manage conflicts and protect human rights.

There is clearly a need for cross-bloc dialogue about what can be done. A bottom-up approach could offer innovative ideas and help ease the acrimony that has built up over the past few years. Post-pandemic, there is an urgent need for more contact and understanding in a region vastly more challenged than it was even five years ago.

The US and China are locked in an epic, dangerous rivalry that treats Southeast Asia as a battleground, so they will not be of help. But midsized powers and traditional partners such as Australia, the EU and UK could support regional cohesion if they spent less time pushing Western values and seeding animosity toward China, which even if justified, generates further division.

Southeast Asian governments and their leaders could help by speaking with one voice on critical issues and maintaining traditional balancing approaches to great power competition. As things stand today, there is a real chance that the Philippines and China will come to blows over the Second Thomas Shoal.

That would bring the United States and China dangerously close to war. Will ASEAN leaders be able to combine and collaborate to prevent any crisis from escalating? Right now, that looks doubtful.