Columbia University Borton-Mosely Distinguished Lecture
H.E. Bilahari Kausikan, CAPS Senior Advisor
April 8, 2025
On April 8, 2025, CAPS Senior Advisor H.E. Bilahari Kausikan gave a lecture at Columbia University as part of the Borton-Mosely Distinguished Lecture Series, jointly sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Harriman Institute.
Introduction
Southeast Asia is not a natural region but a geopolitical construct. Although most of its members now choose to forget or downplay this inconvenient historical fact, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) which today more than anything else, defines the region, was profoundly influenced by Cold War dynamics as they played out in Southeast Asia. In its origins at least, ASEAN was in fact a Cold War organization. Within the broad framework of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, Sino-Soviet competition, manifest most starkly in the Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia from 1979 to 1991, played a crucial role in giving ASEAN a clear purpose and direction after drifting for almost twenty years after it was established in 1967. But what does a Cold War organization do after the end of the Cold War? Furthermore, how does ASEAN operate after it expanded to include Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia which were mired in Cold War proxy civil wars and in which the communist or proto-communist parties emerged victorious? That Russia and China are no longer adversaries but in a close anti-western partnership that they claim is ‘without limits’ is a further complication. By examining these questions, this lecture hopes to provide a better understanding of how a much misunderstood regional organization operates and the challenges it faces.
In the late 1970s, thanks to the generosity of American tax-payers for which I will always be grateful, I arrived at Columbia University, resolved on pursuing a PhD on the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. To supervise my studies, the University had assigned me to a very distinguished scholar. I don’t remember whether we had our first meeting in what was then called the Russian Institute, but I do vividly remember that the meeting did not go well. He asked what aspect of Soviet foreign policy interested me, but hardly had I finished replying, the echoes of my words still reverberating in the air, when he dismissed my interest as inconsequential. Every attempt to persuade him otherwise was completely ignored. Not even brushed aside, just ignored.
Clearly this relationship was not going to work. So I took myself off to the East Asian Institute where another distinguished scholar had his lair. He was the author of a book about the Japanese intervention in Siberia after the First World War that I remembered reading as an undergraduate at what was then called The University of Singapore (now the National University of Singapore), and I brashly asked him to be my supervisor.
That scholar was the late James W. Morley. I don’t know why he agreed to take me on and I regret not asking him when I was posted to New York as our representative to the United Nations in the mid-1990s. Perhaps his fancy was tickled that someone from Singapore had read his book which had been published as a study of the Russian Institute about 20 years before I barged into his office. I recall Professor Morley asking me if his book was prescribed reading for any course at the University of Singapore – it wasn’t. I chanced upon the book when I was loafing in the library stacks when I should have been studying.
The topic that had been so abruptly dismissed years ago was ‘Soviet Policy Towards ASEAN’ – the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. I never finished my dissertation. But I still think it was not an inconsequential subject.
Perhaps in the larger scheme of things, Soviet policy towards ASEAN was indeed not a first order issue at a time when Cold War dynamics had been profoundly modified by the US rapprochement with China and important nuclear arms control agreements were being negotiated between the US and the Soviet Union. But as I vainly attempted to explain, it was not inconsequential to the peoples of Southeast Asia.
I am therefore delighted and deeply honoured to have been given this opportunity to finally share my views on the significance of the Cold War in shaping the idea of Southeast Asia with a captive Columbia University audience. I only hope that having listened to me, you do not conclude that inviting me to deliver the 2025 Borton-Mosely Lecture was an act of reckless folly.
Southeast Asia is not a natural region by which I mean an area that can be defined by something intrinsic to itself. The only thing intrinsic to Southeast Asia is its great diversity, and that is just another way of saying that there is nothing intrinsic to itself. Of course, there were ancient patterns of trade and other interactions linking the various peoples and polities that existed in what we now call Southeast Asia. But by the end of the 19th century these had been disrupted if not completely destroyed as the entire region had fallen under colonial rule. Thailand remained formally independent but first Britain, and then the US, exercised decisive influence over it.
The colonial authorities kept their imperial possessions separate and minimized contacts between their subjects. None of the imperial powers conceptualized the territories they controlled as being ‘Southeast Asian’. The term ‘Southeast Asia’ gained currency only after the strategic imperative of recapturing the territories under occupation by Imperial Japan during the Second World War required that the area be conceptualized more or less holistically.
The Japanese occupation was the first time that the entire area was under a single authorithy and the allied powers had to deal with it accordingly. Even then ‘Southeast Asia Command’ was based in Columbo in Ceylon, did not include all the territories we now understand as ‘Southeast Asia’, and never exercised command over all allied forces within the area. Even as a geopolitical concept forged in the furnace of war, ‘Southeast Asia’ was not entirely coherent.
It still is not an entirely coherent geopolitical concept – or at least it still is a work-in-progress and perhaps will always be. It is now generally accepted that Southeast Asia is defined by the ten members of ASEAN. Although there is still some debate over the timing and conditions of its membership, there is a consensus that Timor Leste will eventually be admitted to ASEAN. Southeast Asia will then comprise 11 countries. But Timor Leste has been an Observer only since 2022, whereas Papua New Guinea has been an Observer in since 1976, but there is a firm consensus that it will never be admitted as a member. And as I will explain later, that there may be some reason to believe that membership of ASEAN may not be the last word on what is Southeast Asia.
ASEAN and the idea of Southeast Asia it encompassed did not spring out, Athena-like, fully-formed from the brows of its founding fathers in 1967. ASEAN emerged only after many dead-ends, hesitations and meanderings through the tangled processes of post-war decolonization and the dynamics of Cold War rivalries between the US, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China as they played out in the region.
It would be tiresome to recount very step of the complicated and convoluted diplomatic maneuvers of the 1950s and through the 1960s whereby various, not always compatible, ideas of regionalism were floated, competed and coexisted, influenced or displaced each other, before ASEAN finally emerged. A sampling of names will give you a flavor: The Pacific Pact, The Asia-Pacific Council, The Ministerial Conference on Economic Development of Southeast Asia, the Southeast Asia Friendship and Economic Treaty, Maphilindo, the Association of Southeast Asia.
Some were initiated outside Southeast Asia and included countries from Northeast Asia and Taiwan as well as Australia and New Zealand; none included all the countries we now consider ‘Southeast Asian’. Some of these experiments lasted into the 1970s. For at least a decade after 1967, it was not at all clear to both its members and external powers with interests in Southeast Asia that ASEAN would not go the way of these earlier experiments.
All these experiments have long been forgotten. They are worth mentioning only to underscore that there was nothing inevitable about ASEAN’s emergence. Its founding members were divided over some very fundamental issues. But what is most striking about the tortuous processes leading to ASEAN’s formation and its fragile first decade is that the aspiration to regional organization of some sort may have on occasion faltered but never disappeared.
Regionalism was always regarded as an important tool enabling weak countries of Southeast Asia, living amidst the rivalries of major powers, some measure of voice and agency. It is worth reminding ourselves that while the primary locus of the Cold War was in Europe, in Asia the Cold War was hot in Korea and hot in Indochina, and that conflicts in Indochina continued through the 1980s, driven by Sino-Soviet rivalry long after US-Soviet relations had stabilized in Europe.
Buttressing the determination to preserve voice and agency, was what has proven to be the most powerful force in Southeast Asia since the mid-20th century: nationalism. Nationalism defeated colonialism, shaped ideologies of both Left and Right, and with two very tragic exceptions, enabled the countries of Southeast Asia to successfully navigate the risks and uncertainties of the Cold War. Trying to define your own region through regional organization was a way of asserting agency over your own destiny rather than allowing the rivalries of external powers to shape your region and determine your future.
The major powers had their own preferred notions of regional order and since the 1950s deployed proxies to advance them. But no external power has ever been able to shape the Southeast Asian regional architecture entirely in accordance with its preferences. Countries in the region had their own ideas and resisted. Even formal American treaty allies, the Philippines and Thailand, had reservations about American ideas of what constituted a desirable regional architecture and even as they seemingly went along with American ideas, sought manoeuvre space to pursue their own preferences. The Philippines, for example, used regionalism to stress its Asian identity as a gesture towards the anti-American streak in Filipino nationalism. Thailand too had its own ideas about regionalism, perhaps to obscure that it had been an ally of Imperial Japan during the Second World War and only American intervention saved it from retribution from the returning European powers. Southeast Asia was and remains too complex and diverse a region to be captured whole.
The preferred American conception of regional order – SEATO – had only two Southeast Asian members and never took off. Britain, the principal US deputy, had more experience dealing with Southeast Asian realities and took a more eclectic approach, encouraging any regional experiment that showed any promise of promoting stability. After SEATO clearly failed and in particular the war in Vietnam proved unwinnable and not worth the candle, the US too eventually came around to supporting ASEAN, albeit initially without any great enthusiasm. American attitudes towards ASEAN have never been without some degree of ambivalence across many different administrations. Scepticism about multilateralism whether regional or global and a preference for bilateralism which maximizes American leverage were not recent inventions of President Donald Trump.
An interesting footnote: it was an American academic Russell H. Fifield, of the University of Michigan, a specialist in US policy towards Southeast Asia, who in a 1963 publication for the Council on Foreign Relations four years before ASEAN was formed, realized that any tight SEATO-like organization would never attract sufficient regional support and proposed a looser structure which he suggested should be called – guess what? – the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. At their first meeting in 1967, the ASEAN foreign ministers acknowledged Fifield’s contribution.
The focal points of Soviet and Chinese efforts were North Vietnam, which dreamt of an ‘Indochina Federation’ under its control, and Sukarno’s Indonesia in which the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) was exercising growing influence which gave a Leftist cast to Sukarno’s idea of ‘Indonesia Raya’ – Greater Indonesia — covering most of ‘Alam Melayu’ or the Malay world. Moscow and Beijing competed for influence in both North Vietnam and Indonesia.
The Soviet Union was generous in providing military supplies to both North Vietnam and Sukarno’s Indonesia. Mao’s China had less material resources but we now know that more than 400,000 ‘volunteers’ from the People’s Liberation Army and related organizations served in Indochina. There were perhaps only 5 or 6 thousand Soviet advisors. But both the Soviet Union and China were ultimately disappointed. The PKI moved towards Beijing, and after its victory over the South, Hanoi turned to the Soviet Union.
Cold War dynamics were of course not the only consideration for Southeast Asian advocates of regionalism. I had earlier mentioned that Southeast Asia can only be characterized by its diversity. But these are not ordinary differences of, say, the level of economic development or political structure. The key diversities are primordial differences of race, language and religion that define core identities. Nationalisms infused with race, language and religion – the plural is crucial – divided the newly independent countries of Southeast Asia as much as their nationalisms provided a common desire to maintain autonomy amidst Cold War competition.
Race, language and religion are closely correlated in Southeast Asia and are still central to the domestic politics of the countries of the region as well as to intra-regional dynamics. It makes for a complex and confusing mosaic of motivations and sensitivities, all the more so in the 1950s and 1960s when nationalisms were still young and tender, quick to take offense.
Time and the accumulated experience of working together has taken some of the rawness off the tensions that inevitably arise when core identities rub up against each other, but the identities themselves, will never disappear or substantively change. The potential for conflict thus still lurks not very far beneath the surface diplomatic politesse and needs constant management. This prescribes what was and remains ASEAN’s primary function: the management of relationships among its members in a region where stability – or even civility – in relationships cannot be taken of granted.
Each of these two broad considerations – dealing with Cold War competition and managing intra-regional relationships – eventually came to be seen as the necessary condition for achieving the other: stabilizing regional relationships would minimize opportunities for major powers to exploit intra-regional divisions and compromise the autonomy of all. After ASEAN was formed, the Indonesians had a slogan that captured the essential idea: national resilience enhances regional resilience and regional resilience enhances national resilience.
Autonomy was the one value that all Southeast Asian nationalists, regardless of their other differences, could all agree on. Southeast Asian countries were all interested in regionalism as a means of maintaining their autonomy, but their competing nationalisms, different ideas of regionalism, and their different strategies to put their ideas into practice, ultimately sunk all early experiments at regionalism. You might call this the paradox of diversity – diversity makes regionalism simultaneously more necessary and more difficult to achieve. There was often not even agreement on which countries should be included in the different early proposals.
However, by the mid-1960s, these broad factors – cold war dynamics and mutually suspicious nationalisms — had coalesced into two inter-related problems: how to deal with the largest country in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and how to deal with the smallest, Singapore. Both in their own ways were outliers and aroused suspicions.
Singapore is a majority ethnic Chinese country in a region where ethnic Chinese are a not always welcomed minority and have suffered bouts of violence at the hands of majority populations. In 1965, Singapore had been forced to leave Malaysia because of the suspicions of the Malay political leaders that we wanted to replace their idea of Malaysia based on Ketuanan Melayu – Malay dominance – with a Malaysia based on multiracial equality.
Racial and ideological fears melded in concern that newly independent Singapore would become a stalking-horse for communist China, an anxiety that was stoked by the fact that Singapore’s merger with Malaya was strongly opposed by the China-supported Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and merger had entailed close-run political battles between the PAP and China’s United Front proxies. In 1965, the MCP underground was still active in Singapore and continued to be active through the 1970s. That decade is usually considered a period of fast growth for Singapore but MCP bombs went off as late as 1974 and it was a much more volatile period than generally remembered.
China and the Soviet Union had both denounced Malaysia as a ‘neo-imperialist plot’ designed to perpetuate western sway over Southeast Asia. Sukarno’s Indonesia echoed Beijing and Moscow. The Philippines also criticized the proposed incorporation of North Borneo over which it had claims – now the East Malaysian state of Sabah – into Malaysia. In 1963 Sukarno had launched Konfrontasi – ‘Confrontation’, a tactic he had used successfully against Dutch New Guinea – to, as he put it, ‘Ganyang – crush – Malaysia’. Kontrontasi was an undeclared war fought from 1963 to 1966 against Malaysia and after Singapore left Malaysia in 1965, against us as well.
Sukarno’s removal from power after the PKI’s failed China-supported coup that same year (1965) opened the way to wind down Konfrontasi. Suharto’s New Order was still strongly committed to the kind of “entitled nationalism” that had been among the primary causes of Konfrontasi – the phrase ‘entitled nationalism’ is that of a very distinguished scholar of Southeast Asia, George McTurnan Kahin, who used it when writing contemporaneously about Konfrontasi – and refers to the belief that because of its size and because it had gained independence through revolution rather than granted it peacefully like Malaya, Indonesia was entitled to determine the shape of the regional order and lead Southeast Asia.
Although a man of the Right rather than the Left, Suharto was no less a nationalist than Sukarno; no less committed to a ‘free and active’ – “Bebas dan Aktif” — foreign policy, and had no less strong a belief in Indonesia’s right to lead. But Suharto’s ‘New Order’ chose to pursue Indonesia’s leadership ambitions through focusing Its nationalism on economic development rather than ‘living dangerously’ as was his predecessor’s preference. Economic development requires stability. ASEAN succeeded primarily due to the difference between Suharto’s Indonesia and Sukarno’s Indonesia.
But regardless of who ruled in Jakarta, due to the vast imbalance of size between Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia – Indonesia is bigger than all other Southeast Asian countries combined – Indonesia poses and will always pose a problem analogous to that faced by Europe after Bismarck united various German-speaking polities in 1871 to form Germany: a potential source of instability in the heart of a region. In Europe, it took two world wars and a Cold War to find an equilibrium.
Southeast Asia was wiser or perhaps just luckier. A confluence of events from the mid-1960s created a window that made ASEAN viable as a solution to the problems of Indonesia and Singapore – to envelop both in an idea of Southeast Asia characterized by embracing the reality of diverse, even competing, nationalisms rather than struggling to overcome
Them. That confluence of events also generated and sustained the political will among its members to hold ASEAN together in its fragile first decade.
What were those events? By 1966, Suharto’s ‘New Order’ had brought Indonesia more into alignment with those Southeast Asian countries that saw the Cold War conflicts in Indochina as threats. Sukarno’s Indonesia had a somewhat romantic idea of North Vietnam as paralleling Indonesia’s own experience. A year before, in 1965, the American escalation of the Vietnam War raised fears of its spread and the entanglement of other Southeast Asian countries to a new level. This enhanced the attractiveness of regional organization as a buffer. Four years later, Richard Nixon’s 1969 Guam speech made clear that regional states would have to take greater responsibility for their own security lending urgency to efforts to stabilize non-communist Southeast Asia. In 1973 the US withdrew from South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, leaving them to their fates. In 1975 all of Indochina fell to communism.
This was a shock equivalent to that Mr. Trump has administered on Europe by making clear his intention to stop the Ukraine war even at Kyiv’s expense. Southeast Asia went through it half a century earlier. It brought a new focus and sense of purpose to ASEAN which had managed to hold together, but was nevertheless was still drifting rather than setting clear directions for itself.
All the five original ASEAN member were anti-communist even if they professed non-alignment. All had faced violence from communist insurgents or subversives. In 1976 ASEAN held its first Summit in Bali and signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation which renounced force as a means of settling disputes. The Treaty was open to accession by other Southeast Asian countries. It was meant as a gesture to the new governments of Indochina. None showed the slightest interest.
Two years after the Bali Summit, on Christmas Day 1978, Vietnam, with the Soviet Union at its back, invaded Democratic Kampuchea – as Cambodia was then known – overthrew the Chinese supported Khmer Rouge government, and installed a puppet regime. This was another salutary shock to ASEAN.
A newly reunited Vietnam had been speaking ominously about bringing what Hanoi called “genuine independence” to Southeast Asia. Its invasion of Kampuchea and installation of a puppet regime gave a sharper focus to ASEAN’s fears and further urgency to ASEAN cooperation.
Two months after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, in February 1979, China invaded Vietnam. This initiated another fundamental shift of Cold War dynamics in Southeast Asia, which led to Beijing dropping its support for Southeast Asian communist insurgencies and working with ASEAN to oppose the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. This implied China’s de facto acceptance of ASEAN’s idea of regional order, although Beijing retained its own ideas of what that regional order should be used for; not ideal but better than China’s previous hostility towards ASEAN.
I still remember the bewilderment of an American friend, a student at Columbia Journalism School, at my response when he brought me the news of China’s invasion of Vietnam, excitedly waving the New York Times. I told him that I had not thought that China would do us such a big favour and that ASEAN would now probably be alright. His bewilderment taught me something about the naivete of some Americans about the use of naked power – force — in international relations.
The Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Kampuchea was a Sino-Soviet proxy conflict. It was beyond ASEAN’s strategic weight to find a solution to this big boys game. A solution had to await a shift in what the Soviet Union used to call the global configuration of forces. But for the entire decade of the 1980s, ASEAN played a secondary but nevertheless critical diplomatic role in preventing a Vietnamese fait accompli so that when the configuration of forces did finally shift after Gorbachev came to power and started to retrench Soviet over-extensions to concentrate on perestroika, a solution involving an act of self-determination for Cambodia was still possible.
Only months after the second Paris Conference on Cambodia in October 1991 finalized a peace agreement that led to the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops and UN-supervised elections in Cambodia, the Soviet Union imploded and the Cold War was over.
I do not intend to describe all the twists and turns of ASEAN’s diplomacy on the Cambodian issue during the 1980s except to say that the greatest complexities were not dealing with adversaries, but managing intra-ASEAN differences. But I cannot over-emphasize how crucial that decade was in ASEAN’s evolution.
Holding together despite numerous and sometimes bitter tactical disagreements, standing our ground not just against adversaries, but also China, the US, and Europe — who were all ostensibly on our side but sometimes acted otherwise — and more often than not prevailing or forcing these much stronger countries to compromise, gave ASEAN confidence in its own agency.
Success won ASEAN international respect, and made ASEAN’s partners take it seriously – Japan and Australia aside, other partners had been polite rather than deeply engaged in their dealings with ASEAN prior to the Cambodian issue showing what ASEAN could do when pressed. An entire generation of ASEAN diplomats, myself included, learnt our trade during that decade.
I have taken quite some time – some of you may perhaps think too long – sketching the history of the evolution of ASEAN and the idea of Southeast Asia. I did so because I am convinced that it is impossible to understand contemporary Southeast Asia and its ability to cope with a new iteration of great power rivalries, without the historical background. Too much superficial and just plain wrong assessments are made because the region’s history is forgotten or ignored, including by too many Southeast Asians themselves.
Let me now suggest what lessons we can take from the history I sketched in order to better understand ASEAN and the challenges it faces as it navigates an increasingly complex strategic environment. There are two broad lessons.
First, given the tensions and suspicions between different variants of Southeast Asian nationalisms, it took the strong and sustained external stimulus of the Cold War and Sino-Soviet rivalry to foster regional cooperation. That it was obviously to everyone’s advantage to cooperate was not enough. If the Cold War and Sino-Soviet rivalry had not turned violent in Southeast Asia, I doubt ASEAN would have been formed or if formed, would have survived and prospered. And even then, it took regime change in Indonesia to align all our fears in the same direction.
Competition being an inherent characteristic of relations between sovereign states, and human nature being what it is, organizing against something is almost always easier than organizing for something. Although they viewed US attempts to ‘contain’ communism in Southeast Asia with various degrees of scepticism, the original five ASEAN members all opposed communism. Singapore, for example, did not think the US would succeed in Vietnam but was nevertheless grateful that it tried because it bought time for us and other non-communists to put our own houses in order. Moscow’s and Beijing’s criticisms of ASEAN as a disguised SEATO were not entirely unwarranted. In spirit, if not always in action, ASEAN was a product of the Cold War. This raises a very fundamental, potentially existential, question. If you are, however loosely, a Cold War organization, what do you do when the Cold War is over?
The obvious answer is to do what you claimed was your purpose all along: economic cooperation. The Bangkok Declaration, ASEAN’s founding document, said nothing about political or security matters, these being deemed too sensitive. It focused instead on economic, cultural and other uncontroversial forms of cooperation — almost everything under the sun except what had really had brought ASEAN together, leading Mr. S. Rajaratnam Singapore’s first foreign minister, to once quip “it was a very difficult problem of trying to say nothing in about ten pages, which we did.”
Some half-hearted attempts at cooperating on industrial projects and establishing preferential trade arrangements were made during the 1970s and 1980s. They did not amount to very much. The economies of most ASEAN members were as much or more competitive than complementary, or at least their leaders and officials believed them to be so. This is still largely the case. Although Trump’s imposition of very high levels of tariffs on several ASEAN members ought to incentivize greater economic cooperation among ASEAN members – and we can expect rhetorical calls to accelerate, broaden and deepen economic cooperation as a response to the tariffs – Trump’s tariffs are, at least in the short to medium term, more likely to deepen the competitive dynamic as states rush to try and gain exemptions in the context of a softening world economy. The difficulties of economic cooperation again illustrates it is easier to organize against something rather than for something even when the benefits of the latter are clear.
Post-Cold War globalization nevertheless offered opportunities and ASEAN has set ever more ambitious goals for reducing barriers to goods, services, capital and skilled labour in order to make Southeast Asia a single market and production base. There has been some progress. ASEAN likes to speak of itself as a market of 700 million and the world’s fifth largest economy. The reality, however, is that Southeast Asia is still 10 separate economies and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Growth in Southeast Asia is almost all due to national policies and national efforts. ASEAN’s contribution is mainly indirect— providing the stability that makes growth possible.
There is usually a problem when trying to assess regional economic cooperation of deciding whether the glass is half empty or half full. What is for sure in ASEAN’s case is whether half full or half empty, filling the glass has been fitful and slow. ASEAN has been much better at formulating plans than implementing them. There is always a large performative element in ASEAN’s plans. This is not due to any particular perverseness of its members. Opening markets or linking markets is always politically difficult even when the benefits and the necessity of doing so are clear. But there are two factors that make it more than usually difficult in post-Cold War Southeast Asia.
The first factor is the post-Cold War expansion of membership to include Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. While this was desirable, or at any rate inevitable, and is now irreversible, it has enhanced what I earlier called the paradox of diversity, and not just in economics. It is obviously easier for five or six countries to reach consensus than ten. But that is not the real issue.
The five original members had different strategic outlooks and hence different calculations of national interests which sometimes involved issues that were of critical importance to the countries concerned. But they nevertheless were usually able reconcile their interests to reach consensus. The real problem is that expansion was undertaken almost casually, without sufficient preparation, or even sufficient thought, about how the new members were to be socialized into ASEAN mores. The only consideration was how to deal with the lower level of economic development of the new members, but that was seen as largely a technical issue and was in any case not the core of the problem of expansion. ASEAN is poised to repeat this mistake with the admission of Timor Leste, a state still teetering on the brink of failure after more than two decades of independence.
The five original members, and Brunei after it joined, understood clearly that once ASEAN was formed, calculations of national interest had to contain some element of the regional interest. The regional interest is not always the main or most important element in the calculus of interests. In most matters, the regional interest is not a first-order consideration because ASEAN is an inter-state organization with very limited supra-national ambitions and national interests always come first. But the understanding that there always has to be some element of the regional interest in national calculations is weak in all new members except Vietnam. It remains weak even though expansion of membership occurred more than twenty years ago.
The second factor, which accentuates the impact of the first, is that the domestic politics of all 10 ASEAN members has become more pluralist and hence complicated as they developed economically.
It pleases some observers to call this democratization. I prefer to call it the pluralization of politics but I will not quarrel about semantics. But it is a fact that western democracies have not been very effective at decision-making because of the range of interests and opinions that have to be accommodated. In Southeast Asia, the complications of politics that have become more pluralistic do not manifest themselves or play out in the same way in every ASEAN member. But they cannot be ignored in any member. This has not only made reaching internal consensus more difficult, but it has also privileged short-term political imperatives over long-term calculations. The degree to which this has occurred varies from country to country, but it is never entirely absent in the domestic decision-making of every country. It has made taking hard decisions harder.
When ASEAN was able to act decisively the internal politics of none of its members could be described as democratic as the term is understood in the West or in my preferred terminology, they were all far less pluralist than today. Some held fair elections, but all were in some degree what the West would call authoritarian. Again if it pleases anyone to use that term I am not going to quibble with them. Nor am I advocating a return to the past – that is neither desirable nor possible – but it cannot be denied that authoritarian systems, because the range of interests and opinions they have to accommodate is narrower, are better placed to take hard decisions and pursue them over the long-term.
However, it is also a fact that this is an advantage only if the decision was the correct one in the first place. ASEAN was lucky that its early leaders made the right decisions. That is less evident today. It is not that subsequent leaders were all less intellectually capable, although undoubtedly some were not the brightest bulbs: they had other talents – ruthlessness and cunning perhaps – that brought them to power. But whether intelligent or otherwise, their decisions had to be based on different considerations than earlier generations of leaders because their internal political environments had become more complicated.
This is a new reality that cannot be avoided. But consensus decision-making cannot be abandoned. Decision making by consensus is the logical consequence of what I had identified as ASEAN’s primary purpose: the management of intra-ASEAN relationships and the tensions between different nationalisms. Deciding by consensus reassures the small that the big will not impose their will on them; equally it reassures the big that the small will not gang up against them. Any other modality of decision-making risks small differences escalating into major problems or even conflict.
Decision-making by consensus, and its collorary, non-interference in the internal affairs of members, has often been modified in practice, but it cannot be abandoned as a principle. It is slow, inefficient, and often results in the lowest common denominator setting the pace. It means that some decisions are avoided and too many are merely performative. But this is the price we pay for having any sort of regional organization at all in an imperfect world.
It is a price well worth paying if you contrast the state of Southeast Asia in 1967 with the state of Southeast Asia today. It was not for nothing that we were then commonly referred to as ‘the Balkans of Asia’. Today we have our problems – which region is without problems and most international issues do not lend themselves to definitive solutions but can only be managed – still, by and large, Southeast Asia is at peace with itself and the world. ASEAN for all its imperfections has proven to be an effective tool for managing intra-Southeast Asian problems and blunting their sharpest edges of intra-regional differences even if cannot erase them. The question is how to keep it this way?
We are what we are and for reasons I hope I have made clear, ASEAN is unlikely to change in any fundamental way. It’s operating methods, it’s weaknesses as well as it’s achievements, are products of the history of a particular region and that history cannot be ignored. We will have to work with the tool that is at hand. As I have very often had to tell critics of ASEAN, it is utterly pointless to criticize a cow for being an imperfect horse.
The new realities I just outlined make an external spur to sustain cooperation even more crucial than ever because post-Cold War dynamics accentuate what I called the diversity dilemma. US-China strategic competition has replaced US-Soviet rivalry and what Moscow and Beijing call a ‘partnership without limits’ has replaced Sino-Soviet rivalry. But neither can provide the kind of external stimulus towards cohesion that ASEAN needs because neither is regarded as the kind of threat that US-Soviet or Sino-Soviet rivalry posed during a different era.
No one can today credibly entertain the hope or fear that communism will triumph in Southeast Asia. Maoist China was clearly a threat to the original five ASEAN members and Brunei. It was regarded with great suspicion by Burma. Attitudes towards post-Mao China are no longer as clear-cut.
Repeated surveys of Southeast Asian opinion have shown that while China is deeply mistrusted, its influence is also acknowledged. By virtue of its contiguity, its size and its economic weight, China will always enjoy significant influence in Southeast Asia. It is a geopolitical fact and an extremely important economic partner that we must somehow deal with and we prefer to deal with it by positive engagement. But for precisely the same reasons – contiguity, size and economic weight – as well as its aggressive behaviour in the South China Sea and towards Taiwan, China also arouses anxieties about engagement compromising our autonomy.
China’s influence tends to be more emphasized because it is more visible, but the anxieties it arouses are as real. This have resulted in a quiet but significant shift of attitudes towards the US military presence in Southeast Asia as a necessary balance to China that allows us to engage China positively without compromising our sovereignty. Of course, there have also always been concerns about American behaviour. Doubts about US reliability have been endemic in Southeast Asia for half a century. The 1969 Nixon Doctrine and the abandonment of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have not been forgotten in Southeast Asia, even as countries improve defense ties with the US and its allies. Such doubts have certainly risen after Trump returned to power, but long predate this administration. Both the new appreciation of the indispensable US role in maintaining balance and the endemic questions about its reliability are part of Southeast Asian reality.
The West tends to lump China and Russia into one category of ‘authoritarian’ largely because of China’s support for Russian aggression against Ukraine. Southeast Asia does not accept such a simplistic categorization. Russia is not a significant strategic player in Southeast Asia but even Singapore which had taken a strong position on Ukraine and imposed its own sanctions on Moscow, sees no advantage in shunning Russia and continues as much as practical, with bilateral exchanges. Ukraine is not a bilateral issue for us. Other countries have even more nuanced positions on Ukraine and relations with Russia, in particular the Muslim majority countries who see western double standards at play in the contrast between western responses to Ukraine and Gaza. For instance, Malaysia will conduct very high-level visits to Russia later this year.
This brings me to the second broad lesson. Even during the height of the Cold War and Sino-Soviet rivalry, the countries of Southeast Asia have never looked at their choices in a binary way. This is even more so today. I am constantly surprised at the apparent difficulty many otherwise astute commentators, not solely but particularly in the West, have in grasping this simple, and to me perfectly obvious, fact. I have often written about this and so will be brief because we are running out of time and I am sick of repeating myself.
When we say, as perhaps we do too often, that ‘we do not want to choose’ in the context of US-China strategic rivalry, what we really mean is that we do not conceive of our choices in a binary way as just between Washington and Beijing. We mean that we will exercise our agency – and even the smallest state in the most dire of circumstances always has some agency, otherwise I would not be here talking to you because Singapore as we know it today would not exist – to follow our interests in whatever direction they may take us and we see no need whatsoever to neatly line up all our ducks in one direction or another.
This prescribes an omnidirectional foreign policy. We may balance with one major power in one domain; bandwagon with another power or several other powers in a different domain; hedge with several others in other domains. And what we do in one domain does not foreclose working with other powers, even rival powers, in some other way in the same domain. Balancing, hedging and bandwagoning are distinct strategies only in international relations theory. In practice, Southeast Asian countries see no difficulty in doing all simultaneously. To paraphrase the great American novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who in this respect is a better guide to Southeast Asian statecraft than many a political scientist or historian, we have no difficulty functioning while holding two or more contradictory ideas in our heads. That is how we usually function.
As a strategic cross-roads between two crucial Oceans through which pass vital Sea-lines of communication, Southeast Asia is a naturally multipolar region in that almost always throughout its history, there have several powers contending for influence. Southeast Asia statecraft has been honed over centuries of having to live and survive in such an environment.
I do not claim that we always function very well, but this is in principle what we try to do when advancing or protecting our interests. The key word here is agency which I have repeatedly used during this talk. You are never entirely without agency. Whether you have the wit to recognize opportunities to exercise your agency in any set of circumstances, and even if you recognize the opportunities, whether you have the courage and capability to seize them, are of course different matters. Efforts to exercise agency may not always succeed, or not succeed to the extent we may hope, but our history teaches us that not trying to use what agency we possess is disastrous.
I had earlier mentioned that with two very tragic exceptions, countries in Southeast Asia successfully navigated the risks of the Cold War. The two exceptions are Royalist Laos and Prince Sihanouk’s Cambodia. To avoid getting entangled in the Vietnam War, they first adopted neutrality of a rather passive kind – laying low, offending no one, and hoping to be left alone. When this did not work – neutrality is not something you can unilaterally adopt but has to be respected by others and during the Vietnam War none of the parties to the conflict respected anybody’s neutrality — they sought protection from the US. In both cases, they surrendered what agency they had to external parties with the sad results we know. The Pathet Lao were not as murderous as the Khmer Rouge, but bad enough.
To think that concerns about the US will automatically rebound to China’s advantage as too many commentators predict, is condescending nonsense. A particularly insulting variant is that China’s economic weight and growing trade, investments and aid – not to mention what I shall delicately refer to as informal transfers – must necessarily align Southeast Asia with China. It assumes that we are all so stupid as not to know our own interests or so venial as to sell them for a mess of pottage. Straight line projections from economic relations to political influence are always simplistic, and I have had occasion to remind Chinese friends that even the very corrupt can be nationalists.
The will to exercise agency stems from nationalism which I had earlier identified as the most powerful force in modern Southeast Asia. The two countries where nationalism is strongest are Indonesia and Vietnam. These are also the largest countries in Southeast Asia. Without control of Indonesia and Vietnam, no external power can capture Southeast Asia.
This is not to say that there are no risks. Maintaining an omnidirectional foreign policy requires not just agility but, more crucially, the ability to make clinical – indeed cold blooded and ruthless – assessments of interests, regional as well as national interests. This ability is being degraded by the more complex domestic politics of key ASEAN members. The ASEAN position on Myanmar exemplifies this unfortunate trend.
When the coup occurred in February 2021, ASEAN leaders quickly met and adopted a Five Point Consensus that in essence outlined the steps that they expected that the State Administration Council (SAC) as the regime set up by the Tatmadaw – the Myanmar military — called itself, to take in order to return the country to normalcy. The coup leader Senior General Min Aung Hliang was present but did not object.
It was correct for ASEAN leaders to have set out their expectations of acceptable behaviour by a member; the fact that ASEAN had done nothing when the Thai military staged a coup in 2014 was passed over in discreet silence. Thailand is much more important than Myanmar, double standards are unavoidable in diplomacy, and the Thai King had ex post facto offered a fig-leaf of approval – never mind that this was constitutionally beyond his authorithy. But it was unrealistic for ASEAN to expect the Tatmadaw to, for instance, enter into political dialogue with its opponents and refrain from using force against them as required by the Five Points. If the Tatmadaw was the kind of organization that was prepared to do such things, it would not have staged a coup in the first place. Senior General Min Aung Hliang’s lack of objection was not consent.
The Five Points were aspirational and performative; a posture rather than a policy. Posturing is a perfectly legitimate diplomatic tactic. For example votes on United Nations General Assembly resolutions are ususally postures – expressions of aspirations towards certain types of conduct or that certain principles be adopted as international norms — as countries often have neither the capability nor even the intention to implement their votes and in any case UNGA resolutions are not binding. But to insist as ASEAN did, that the SAC be barred from attending ASEAN political meetings until it complied with the Five Points was to take matters far too far and confused a posture for a policy.
ASEAN has neither carrots nor sticks to influence the Tatmadaw. We can only talk to it. If you refuse to let the SAC attend your meetings, why should it talk to you? By confusing a posture for a policy, ASEAN only made itself look ineffectual. Posturing on a moral high horse may make you feel good for a while, but is not very comfortable and does not make for an edifying spectacle. Also, you might break your neck falling off a high horse.
By contrast, when the Tatmadaw exercised large-scale violence against a civilian-uprising in 1988, ASEAN had, against sustained western pressures, patiently engaged it for decades and even allowed Myanmar to join ASEAN in 1997, until the Tatmadaw gained enough confidence to loosen its grip and allow genuine elections in 2010. The 2021 decision to exclude the SAC was clearly driven by short-term domestic political considerations, primarily in Indonesia and Malaysia, with, unfortunately, Singapore joining them in a lapse from its usually hard-headed foreign policy. Thailand which has had a series of weak governments since Thaksin was ousted in 2006 was ineffective in injecting a greater sense of realism into ASEAN’s approach.
I have spent some time on Myanmar because the consequences of allowing domestic considerations to determine strategic policies was not just to make ASEAN look foolish. If that was all, it would not matter very much. But Myanmar has begun to split ASEAN.
Bangkok has gone its own way to engage the SAC. This was entirely predictable because Thailand with a 2400 km border with Myanmar and perhaps up to a million or more Myanmar refugees and illegal immigrants, cannot afford to posture indefinitely. The emerging split reinforces a long-standing divisions between mainland and maritime Southeast Asia and the different strategic calculations of Mekong riparian states and those states who look to the seas, the former looking more naturally northwards towards China than the latter. Vietnam is caught in-between because the Mekong and the South China Sea are both important to it. But Laos and Cambodia who were never comfortable with the hardline ASEAN position on Myanmar, will drift in Thailand’s direction. Unless ASEAN finds a face-saving way to get off its Myanmar high-horse in good time without breaking its neck, the split between mainland and maritime Southeast Asia will widen. ASEAN will still exist as an organization, its members will continue to maintain omnidirectional foreign policies, but the geopolitical consequences of a split between mainland and maritime at a time of strategic uncertainty are potentially very grave. At very least, it will create another idea of Southeast Asia which will not be advantageous to countries of the region. The risks arising from ASEAN’s mishandling of the Myanmar issue underscores the dangers of soft-headed thinking and confusing feeling good for actually doing good.
But I do not want to leave you with the impression that Southeast Asia’s future is totally bleak. It is still open. There are real problems that will complicate our ability to deal with the difficult times that lie ahead but there is no a priori reason to think that we will not survive. Southeast Asia is resilient and adaptable. We have gone through far worse with far less diplomatic, economic and military capabilities than we now command, and not merely survived but prospered. For Southeast Asia, the path ahead will get steeper and rockier but will still be navigable. We will adapt to his policies and have already begun to do so. Unfortunately, however, that may not be the end of the story.
In geopolitics, Mr. Trump is more a catalyst than anything else. I use the term ‘catalyst’ in the sense of something that speeds up processes. The geopolitical disruptions he has caused in his first term and at present, arise from the acceleration, and thus accentuation, of geopolitical adjustments that were already underway before either his first and second terms as president. The risks they generate are what the late Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, called ‘known unknowns’. But the changes he is trying to force on the world through tariffs take us into the realm of ‘unknown unknowns’.
It is not certain that he will succeed in all of what he says he wants to do: he seems to see tariffs as a kind of Swiss Army Knife – a universal tool – to pursue multiple goals. But regardless of whether he succeeds or fails, at some point, trade and geopolitics – the ‘known unknowns’ and the ‘unknown unknowns’ – will merge, hyper-charging uncertainties. Still, we should never despair. It is pointless just complaining that our cheese is no longer where we were accustomed to find it and I don’t think we will do so.
Barring a catastrophic event such as a kinetic, and not just trade, war between the US and China – which seems unlikely given nuclear deterrence –I am reasonably confident that ultimately, after as many or more hesitations, false starts, dead-ends and meanderings from which ASEAN emerged almost sixty years ago, the uncertainties Mr. Trump has generated will lead to a broader East Asian structure that will afford more scope and manoeuvre space to the small countries of Southeast Asia.