Strategic Asia 2008-09: Challenges and Choices

Southeast Asia: Strategic Diversification in the “Asian Century”

executive summary This chapter considers U.S. policy toward Southeast Asia. main argument: The strategically pragmatic Southeast Asian states prefer that the U.S. maintains a strong presence in the region because they see the U.S. as playing a critical role in ensuring regional stability, an imperative that has increased with the rise of China. Key countries in the region are increasingly asserting their own interests, however, leveraging both the “second front in the war on terrorism” card and the China card in relations with the U.S. policy implications: • In order to win reciprocal support for U.S. global strategic priorities, the new administration will find it helpful to pursue policy options that support Southeast Asian autonomy and regional strategic preoccupations. • Given the centrality of economic development in Southeast Asia’s strategic world-view and because the primary threats and opportunities resulting from China’s rise are economic, it is important that the new administration build sustained economic relationships with all Southeast Asian countries. • Limits to U.S. bilateral defense cooperation in the region will push the new administration to focus on a relatively independent U.S. military role that acts more as a deterrent to China than as outright containment of the country. • Rather than intervene directly to support moderate factions of political Islam in the region—which might render moderate Muslim political and religious groups less credible at home—the new administration would instead benefit from focusing on policies to boost the governance, accountability, development, and conflict resolution capacities of Southeast Asian states that face problems with terrorism. Southeast Asia Southeast Asia: Strategic Diversification in the “Asian Century” Evelyn Goh In what has been widely touted as the “Asian century,” the fortunes of Southeast Asia, a relatively less significant subregion of Asia, have improved but remain uncertain. Over the last eight years the strategic landscape in Southeast Asia has been marked by a sense of great uncertainty but also by unparalleled opportunity. The uncertainty has been engendered by doubts concerning the continued strategic commitment of the United States to the region, by dissatisfaction over the U.S.-led war on terrorism, and by worries over the impact of that war on regional stability and domestic political security. Contributing to this uncertainty are continuing concerns with regard both to China’s strategic intentions and to the at times difficult relations between China and other major powers (especially the United States and Japan). Southeast Asia has also, however, enjoyed a renaissance of opportunity arising both from the George W. Bush administration’s explicit recognition of the region as a strategically important front in the global campaign against terrorism and from expanding relations with a rising China that by association have granted economic, political, and strategic significance to the region. By raising the region’s strategic significance in military, political, and economic dimensions and by beginning to institutionalize important aspects of these higher-profile relationships with individual countries and with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as a whole, the Evelyn Goh is Reader in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. She can be reached at . This essay is based on Evelyn Goh, “Southeast Asian Reactions to America’s New Strategic Imperatives,” in Asia Eyes America: Regional Perspectives on U.S. Asia-Pacific Strategy in the 21st Century, ed. Jonathan D. Pollack (Newport: Naval War College, 2007). 262 • Strategic Asia 2008–09 Bush administration provided a critical post–Cold War turning-point for Southeast Asia. This level of increased significance has, in turn, provided crucial reassurance and opportunities for Southeast Asia—a region with a driving imperative for strategic diversification in order to avoid being dominated by any one power. The following analysis departs from much of the prevailing literature that suggests that power in the region is shifting away from the United States toward China, criticizes the Bush administration for its inattention to the region, and makes the claim that U.S. unilateralism has alienated Southeast Asian states.1 This chapter argues that the strategically pragmatic Southeast Asian states prefer to have a strong U.S. presence in the region because they see the United States as playing a critical role in ensuring regional stability. This imperative has increased rather than decreased with the rise of China. As such, the Bush administration’s renewed focus on the region has been fundamentally welcomed at the larger strategic level, even as the administration’s policies...