US, China And ASEAN Nations

 

Photo source: The Economic Times

By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe Upfront

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, ASEAN began to remedy a persistent institutional weakness: its failure to integrate defence leadership into regional diplomacy. The creation of the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting in 2006 marked a decisive shift, bringing defence ministers into a structured forum for dialogue. By 2010, this platform had expanded into the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus, incorporating eight key partners—Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Russia, and the United States. The decision in 2017 to institutionalise this gathering as an annual forum significantly deepened habits of cooperation, offering a rare venue where strategic mistrust could be managed through routine engagement.

Alongside ASEAN-led mechanisms, parallel forums have flourished, reflecting both the region’s growing importance and the competitive impulses of major powers. Foremost among them is the Shangri-La Dialogue, convened annually in Singapore by the International Institute for Strategic Studies with the backing of the Singaporean government. The Dialogue has evolved into Asia’s premier security summit, where defence ministers, military chiefs, and policy thinkers articulate national positions and test emerging ideas. As Ben Bland has observed in the Financial Times, the forum often serves as a diplomatic barometer, revealing not only policy shifts but also the tone of great-power competition.

That competition has compelled both Beijing and Washington to recalibrate their engagement with Southeast Asia. Nowhere is this clearer than in the long-running negotiations over the South China Sea. For decades, ASEAN states sought a binding code of conduct to manage disputes in these contested waters. China’s initial reluctance was evident even after it signed the non-binding Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea in 2002. Yet, by the mid-2010s, as Beijing recognised the strategic value of institutional influence, it became more responsive to ASEAN’s demands. The production of a draft negotiating text in 2018 marked a modest but meaningful step forward. By 2023, amid intensifying rivalry with the United States, Chinese officials signalled a renewed willingness to accelerate the process—an indication that institutional diplomacy can, at times, temper geopolitical friction.

The United States, for its part, has sought to embed itself more firmly within ASEAN-centred frameworks. In 2009, Barack Obama became the first American president to meet collectively with ASEAN leaders, symbolising a commitment to multilateral engagement. That same year, Washington acceded to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia, and by 2011 it had joined the East Asia Summit. Under Joe Biden, cooperation has broadened beyond security to encompass public health, infrastructure, environmental sustainability, and gender equity. Initiatives such as the US Department of Defense’s annual funding to train Southeast Asian defence officials underscore an effort to cultivate long-term strategic relationships rather than episodic alliances.

Economic statecraft has become another arena of contestation. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, launched earlier in the decade, found institutional reinforcement in the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2015. These mechanisms have enabled Beijing to finance large-scale infrastructure projects across the developing world. In response, Washington and its partners have advanced alternatives, including the Blue Dot Network in 2019, the Build Back Better World in 2021, and the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment in 2022. As Demetri Sevastopulo has reported in the Financial Times, these initiatives reflect not only economic priorities but also a strategic attempt to shape the rules governing global infrastructure development.

For many developing countries, this rivalry has yielded tangible dividends. Competing offers of finance and expertise have expanded their room for manoeuvre. In Southeast Asia, US-backed programmes have supported cleaner and more efficient energy systems, leveraging relatively modest public investments to unlock far larger pools of private capital. Meanwhile, Chinese financing has underwritten transformative projects, such as Laos’s $6 billion railway and Pakistan’s extensive rail modernisation under the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. As Keith Bradsher has noted in The New York Times, such projects can be both lifelines and liabilities—accelerating growth while raising concerns about long-term debt sustainability. Yet for governments with limited access to capital markets, these initiatives often represent the only viable path to infrastructure development.

Despite these areas of cooperation and competition, the broader trajectory of US–China relations has deteriorated sharply in recent years. Tensions over Taiwan have brought the two powers perilously close to confrontation, underscoring the fragility of the current order. The central challenge for policymakers is not to eliminate rivalry—an unrealistic ambition—but to manage it within clear boundaries.

Military competition will persist, but it must remain bounded by prudence. Misjudgements about capabilities or resolve could prove catastrophic, particularly in a nuclear context. Equally important is the preservation of economic interdependence. The intricate web of trade, investment, and people-to-people ties between the United States and China remains a powerful stabilising force. Undermining this interdependence for fleeting political advantage would weaken one of the most reliable buffers against escalation.

Finally, the framing of competition matters. Casting the US–China relationship as an ideological struggle between democracy and autocracy may resonate domestically, but it risks alienating countries that do not wish to be drawn into binary alignments. Xi Jinping has generally avoided such rhetoric in international settings, favouring a more flexible posture that allows partners to engage without overt political alignment. By contrast, the tendency in Washington to emphasise ideological divides can narrow diplomatic space.

A more restrained approach would better serve regional stability. Many Asian states, including Singapore and Vietnam, prioritise autonomy over alignment and pragmatism over principle in their foreign policies. As Gideon Rachman has argued in the Financial Times, the success of any great power in Asia depends less on ideological appeal than on its capacity to accommodate diversity and respect sovereignty. In this context, a quieter, less doctrinaire diplomacy—one that privileges coexistence over confrontation—offers the most credible path to sustaining peace in an increasingly contested region.