If it was a major unforced error on the part of the Australian government not to have given advanced warning to Paris of its intention to scrap a deal to buy French submarines, it was even more incomprehensible that Canberra failed to prepare its partners in the region for the announcement of a major new defence arrangement.
Among the Southeast Asian capitals, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur have raised concerns most directly. Not only does AUKUS threaten to entrench a new Cold War mindset in the region, they suggest, there is also a danger that Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines may herald the beginning of an arms race in the region.
Critics of AUKUS in the region could be forgiven for detecting a whiff of anachronism about the pact’s membership: it was not so very long ago that all three of its participants possessed colonies in Asia. Former Australian prime minister John Howard once infamously described the country he led as the ‘deputy sheriff’ of the United States in the region, a remark that rankled in Asian capitals and embedded a characterisation of Australian diplomacy that Canberra has struggled to shake off ever since.
In some ways, the return of great power politics to Asia recalls the geopolitical conditions in which ASEAN was born. Prior to the Association’s creation in 1967, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) — whose only Southeast Asian members were Thailand and the Philippines — was a stalking horse for US, French and British security interests in the region.
After the destabilising period of konfrontasi between Indonesia and Malaysia, ASEAN’s foundation represented a significant break with the past: it declared that the region should be free from any outside interference, whether Western or from the communist bloc. SEATO became irrelevant and was eventually dissolved, and ASEAN became the central convening body for regional integration and cooperation in Southeast Asia that balanced off interference from the Eastern and the Western blocs.
The principle of non-interference is no diplomatic cliché: it is the organising principle of ASEAN and it explains why reception of AUKUS has been so tepid. Neither Chinese nor American interference are new to Southeast Asian nations, and while some ASEAN members appreciate Australia’s strengthened military position in the face of a more assertive China, they are also acutely aware of the dangers of an unconstrained Washington.
In our lead article this week, Dino Patti Djalal, former Indonesian presidential spokesperson and ambassador to the United States, asks where the agreement leaves ASEAN strategically and what impact it might have on ASEAN centrality as a balancing force in Asia’s security equation? ‘Some Southeast Asians are worried that AUKUS could affect ASEAN’s stabilising role in a volatile geopolitical landscape’, he points out.
‘In its dealings with Beijing and Washington’, Dino concedes, ‘ASEAN’s diplomatic posture has been too soft and its voice too muted. ASEAN needs to articulate its interests more forcefully to maintain and shore up its relevance in the geostrategic chessboard of the region. That might well mean being somewhat less polite and a little more blunt’.
ASEAN has a strategic design that’s embedded in its structure and organising principles. Respect for sovereignty, consensus decision-making, open multilateral economic and political dealings, non-aggression guarantees and a nuclear free weapons zone are all part of the ASEAN package. Thus far, it is the experiment in open (non-exclusive) regionalism that succeeded. It has aspirations for its Dialogue Partners not only to respect its principles and norms but to sign on to them; that would help to secure against the damaging economic and political costs of a return to the big power competition by which it was riven in the 1960s and 1970s.
ASEAN has impressive convening power and is in the driver’s seat of the region’s diplomatic arrangements, but as Dino says, it now needs to lay out its design to the competing powers and for it to be accepted by them. The ideas that Marty Natalegawa, former foreign minister of Indonesia, has proposed of an ‘Indo-Pacific treaty’ that would apply the norms of ASEAN’s Treaty Amity of Cooperation (TAC) to the wider region could be a good starting point.
In the wake of AUKUS, Dino calls for Australia to follow through in practice on its assurances about the importance of ASEAN centrality because that’s at the heart of regional stability in Australia’s backyard. He also suggests that Australia and its AUKUS partners need to engage in serious confidence building in the region. That confidence-building, he urges, needs to embrace China despite the significant elevation of diplomatic statecraft and political courage that will be required, because it is crucial to Asia’s economic and political security.
This is timely advice, and congruent with the conclusions on Australian and Japanese cooperation set out in the report released last Monday by the Australia-Japan Research Centre. That report made the case for a regional comprehensive security agreement that confirms multilateral principles and sign-on to ASEAN’s TAC principles to secure an open, prosperous and politically stable region. That would provide a framework conducive to attenuating unproductive conflict between the United States and China in East Asia, and bolstering the interests of ASEAN and the region’s small and middle powers.
That makes a redoubled effort to engage with ASEAN the highest priority. Australian engagement with Southeast Asia that strengthens ASEAN is a critical complement to the political-security hedge that the Quad and AUKUS provide, that entrenches ASEAN’s multipolar regional order of rules, openness and stability and lowers regional security risk.
The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.