Introduction

As foreshadowed in Southeast Asian Affairs 2017, key developments in 2016 helped shape Southeast Asia's regional environment in 2017 and the domestic developments of the eleven countries covered in this volume.² As discussed by Lee Hwok-Aun, the improvements in the global economy and the wider East Asian one meant economic headwinds were positive for Southeast Asia in 2017. The beginning of the Trump administration in the United States of America has added a new source of regional geostrategic and geoeconomic uncertainty. In contrast, China's growing influence and assertiveness in the region is a source of geostrategic and geoeconomic certainty. The five-month siege of Marawi City and fears of Rohingya radicalization in Myanmar and the refugee camps in Bangladesh are a reminder that the threat of violent extremism is a structural rather than a cyclical factor. Election cycles in the region's democracies and leadership renewal cycles in the non-democracies were the most important determinants of domestic politics in most regional states.

Southeast Asia and the Great Powers

The year 2017 heralded the coming of more great power rivalry in the Indo-Pacific region, a geopolitical framework of Japanese origin but one adopted by U.S. president Donald Trump and featuring prominently in official U.S. documents like the National Security Strategy (NSS) of December 2017 and the National Defence Strategy (NDS) soon after. China's assertiveness and pressures on other countries had been leading to a pushback from the United States and its allies.

There were at least two important indicators of this. The first was the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad), an informal forum of Japan, Australia, the United States and India to discuss security challenges in the Indo-Pacific. Though not a formal military alliance and still at the discussion stage, it is likely to evolve further. Second, the NSS and the NDS for the first time describe China (together with Russia) as a strategic competitor and the most significant security challenge to the interests of the United States and its allies and friends in the region, replacing terrorism. There were also more freedom of navigation (FON) operations conducted by the U.S. Navy in the South China Sea.

The Trump Administration

Two chapters in the regional section of this volume deal with major-power policies for the region, by Joseph Liow Chin Yong and by Walter Lohman. Lohman argues that, after the early alarums and uncertainties, by the end of 2017 much more continuity in the Trump administration's security and political policies was evident than change. U.S. alliance commitments remained strong. The president had bilateral meetings in Washington with several of the leaders of Southeast Asian states and also attended the APEC leaders' meeting in Hanoi and the important meetings under the rubric of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Manila in November. The United States remained committed to ASEAN centrality in the ASEAN-centred regional security architecture.

Although this was reassuring to many countries in the region, some unease remained. As Liow points out, the administration's "America First" approach could mean a narrower conception of U.S. interests in the region and some abandonment of America's traditional leadership role. There were worries in particular about the protectionist feature in the administration's economic policies, which Lohman also underlines, which has been generating considerable uncertainty. The U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was a significant setback for the United States in its competition for influence with China. As Liow points out, the TPP had been seen as a crucial expression of American commitment to the region. The Trump administration will need to have a judicious mixture of diplomatic, economic and military instruments to sustain U.S. engagement in the Indo-Pacific region. Nguyen Manh Hung's thematic chapter on Vietnam addresses Hanoi's concerns regarding the "Trump Surprise".

China's Influence

Meanwhile, China continued to advance its influence and presence through increasing trade and investment flows, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and an assertive "neighbourhood" diplomacy. It was also rapidly modernizing and expanding its air and naval forces and militarizing...