The wood and the metal: the year so far in SEA

We’re about three quarters of the way through the Year of the Rabbit. Personally, I’ve not been a fan. Anything you would normally associate with rabbits does not seem to have been borne out by what must be one of the most tumultuous years in recent history.

But if I’d been paying attention properly, I shouldn’t have been surprised. While rabbits are apparently associated with wood, this year is associated with metal, and wood and metal are not natural partners (think choppers and trees).  

I’m absolutely not an expert on Chinese astrology, but this metaphor seems apt for what’s going on in SEA at the moment.

There are undoubtedly some game little trees putting out leaves and sprouts. What’s unfolding in Myanmar is still fraught and fragile, and the status of the ethnic minorities still represents a very big river to cross. Nevertheless, something useful seems to be stirring. Thailand has been given another chance to let a democratically elected government live out its normal lifespan. It’s too early to rule out some awful nationalist backlash, but domestic change also seems to be on the way to solving the temples dispute with Cambodia. Malaysia has announced some promising reforms. Singapore has the potential to lay new ground in showing that you can be a stand-out economic performer while still keeping up with the evolving political aspirations of your citizens. Indonesia is struggling on the home front in some respects, but its chairmanship of ASEAN this year has been admirable.

Many of these beginnings could turn into even-better-news stories, if we don’t kill them off in their infancy with unrealistic expectations and all-too-heavy, self-interested pressure.

But the regional environment – which seems increasingly dominated by the South China Sea – is the chopper that threatens to lay about this newly burgeoning forest. And though China, with that undoubtedly provocative line on the map, is often presented as the big bogey-man in the scenario, actually few individual participants come out of this unfolding story in an entirely good light.

Claimants within SEA are not exactly shrinking violets. And attention from the larger region is becoming ever more intense. From a Japanese perspective, “[w]hat is happening in the South China Sea can be a harbinger of the potential shift of the strategic thinking among the regional states and eventually the regional strategic order itself“. India, too, has its own point to make. And the South China Sea pops up very specifically in the communiqué of the AUSMIN consultations.

Evelyn Goh clearly warns ASEAN that this dispute could potentially become an arena for China and the US “to send messages of resolve to each other”. Other contentious SEA-focused issues could similarly morph into arenas for their grandstanding.

The problem for SEA – and the East Asia Summit will only sharpen it – is that both these powers are difficult to keep in their box. The US often manages to do the better PR job. But like Gary Hawke, I sometimes wonder whether it always differentiates among “engagement”, “leadership”, and “dominance”.

Given this climate, an independent ASEAN at the helm of the EAS is a must – for the wider region and the wider world. The East Asia Summit (EAS) will be a dangerous disaster if it even begins to start resembling an anti-China forum. ASEAN understands this all too well. It is part of the reason it resisted the idea of an “Asia-Pacific community” parented by a key US ally. (And note how the AUSMIN communiqué takes care to “welcome Australia’s leadership role in building a more robust community in the Asia-Pacific region through the EAS”.)

ASEAN is much, much more useful, for the region and the world, as the honest-broking middleman it has always sought to be. It must not be turned into another element of what China already suspects is a range of actors arrayed against it. ASEAN – with its hard-to-herd assortment of differently leaning but ultimately balancing individual states – does not look threatening in itself. This has always been its great asset. It would be tragic to seek to undermine that asset.

The presence of irrepressible South China Sea claimants within ASEAN itself inevitably makes its task on this particular dispute more difficult. As Simon Tay observed before the recent ASEAN Regional Forum, ASEAN needs to “make efforts to calm the seas before anyone can usefully debate how to divide them”.

But the ante is upped enormously, on this and on future disputes, if its big regional neighbours try to coopt or crowd it.  

SEA’s statespersons have often been extraordinarily successful in balancing the influence of the great powers that surround them. This facility has played out for the good of the wider region as well as SEA itself. But their task is becoming harder and harder, and they often seem to be undermined by the very parties who stand to gain most from their continued success in this area.

Many of the good fruits we see growing in SEA at the moment could be choked off if the wider geopolitical arena turns sour. ASEAN has an important role to play. Let us allow it to play that role – as ASEAN, not as some extra limb of any of the extra-regional powers.  

For the wood to keep growing, the metal needs to be kept in check.