The ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), launched in 1994, was the first multilateral process in East Asia focused explicitly on security. The general and entirely reasonable expectation was that Defence Ministers would in due course participate alongside Foreign Ministers.
That expectation was misplaced.
In the consensus environment of the ARF, there was resistance to the sharper dialogue that a meeting of Defence Ministers might produce. ASEAN was still sensitive about its status as a political, economic and social grouping devoid of a security purpose. It did not formally promulgate a security dimension until 2003 and it is hard to lead a group in a direction that the driver does not want to go.
Washington was the first to press for a gathering of Defence Ministers. William Perry, President Clinton’s first Secretary of Defence, gave several speeches in the region in 1994/95 advocating such a step, citing an annual gathering of North and South American Defence Ministers in Williamsburg as a promising precedent. This proposal encountered complete silence.
Later in the decade, some ASEAN Defence Ministers (including Malaysia’s current Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak) toyed with the idea but elected not to give it any profile. There were also some exploratory exchanges between Australia and Singapore following which Singapore’s then Defence Minister, Dr Tony Tan, ventured a trial balloon. Dr Tan invited the US Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, to deliver an address in Singapore and invited his regional counterparts to attend.
This would have meant an ‘incidental’ gathering of regional Defence Ministers—had any of them turned up. Even Australia’s minister was unable to attend, although that was due to a schedule clash, not hesitation about the concept.
Clearly, getting even ASEAN let alone East Asia’s Defence Ministers together was an enterprise fraught with potential embarrassment and perhaps even political risk. The journey then went off on a tangent.
In 2001/02, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London secured the backing of the Singapore government to host a high-level security conference to which regional defence ministers would be invited. The conference format was adapted to allow discreet discussions among participating Ministers. This forum, the Shangri-La Dialogue, was loosely modelled on Europe’s Wehrkunde conference.
In Europe, Defence Ministers met routinely, either the context of the Western European Union (the EU’s defence forum) or NATO. The Wehrkunde gathering was an informal time-out for Ministers: Chatham House rules; no media; no communiqué.
In Asia, it was going to be done the other way around: an informal time-out for Ministers in the absence of formal meetings.
The Shangri-La Dialogue has met every year since 2002. Participation at the Ministerial level has inched forward but has always been in the lap of the political gods. The US Secretary of Defence has participated every year, but China has never attended at the Ministerial level. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to suppose that the Shangri-la process helped to erode the hesitations within ASEAN about allowing Defence Ministers to establish their own forum. In terms of process and possible outcomes, an official meeting of Defence Ministers is, of course, entirely different from a casual encounter incidental to a conference.
The speed with which the ADMM decided to expand its membership is also remarkable. The footprint of the ADMM+8 will be close to that of the ARF and it will be interesting to see how the relationship between two forums evolves. Indications are that both the American and Chinese ministers plan to attend so the outlook for a positive start is good. The ADMM+8 is likely to take shape as one of the more substantial pieces of Asia’s multilateral security architecture.
Ron Huisken is a Senior Fellow at the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, School of International, Political & Strategic Studies, ANU.