China's ASEAN invasion.

• Author: Lee, John
• Position: Association of Southeast Asian Nations

PRESIDENT BUSH'S November 2006 visit to Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum was of enormous interest to Southeast Asians. It was a rare but excellent opportunity to discuss America's strategic role in the region--one, unfortunately, that was not taken. While there was a full agenda--fighting terrorism and disease, promoting economic freedom and human rights--the president failed to lay out a U.S. vision for regional security. And he seemed to ignore the reality of intensifying Southeast Asian security dilemmas and competition.

China, anticipating an "Asian century", does not underestimate the region's strategic importance--including the shipping lanes within the Malacca Straits and South China Sea. Moreover, it is clear that China's Southeast Asian ambitions exist at the expense of current and future American strategic influence. Behind all of this diplomacy lies a hardened but creative application of realist strategy.

While the United States remains ascendant in the region, it lacks the capacity to imagine strategic disaster. Americans think they hold nearly all the aces, because U.S. influence, maintained through a network of security partners, appears impregnable. AS such, the American military presence is conspicuous, robust and generally welcome.

But America is becoming a careless and tired superpower. To most observers in Southeast Asia, the Chinese are outthinking, out-enthusing and out-flanking America's more sedate and settled diplomatic efforts. While the United States remains the backbone of the region's security structure, China's flurry of diplomatic activity is gradually wearing down traditional Southeast Asian resistance to, and reasoning against, a rising China. Regional politics and the strategic balance are complicated, and the United States cannot simply revamp Asian alliances to face "unnamed over-the-horizon threats" (i.e., China).

America has been losing ground since the late 1990s, when China decided to charm rather than intimidate. The good news is that there is still time to re-engage Southeast Asian states at little cost. To do so, however, requires more adaptive and flexible thinking--and changing America's psychology remains the essential challenge.

Recent History

THE ASSOCIATION of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was stitched together during the height of the Cold War (in 1967) as a pact pledging the signatories--many of whom were facing domestic insurgencies--to "non-interference" in each other's affairs. The original signatories were the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. ASEAN was never intended as a genuine security community or even as a membership alliance. Instead, an ill-defined consensus approach to regional concerns took shape with loosely stated goals of promoting regional economic growth, political stability, social progress, and cultural development and understanding. Nevertheless, in the words of former Indonesian Foreign Minister, Ali Alatas: "The truth is that politics attended ASEAN at its birth." Interstate rivalries existed and other countries could exploit internal threats to the association. Its principles of respecting sovereignty and renouncing the use of force played an important reassuring role for these fledging countries and regimes.

The fledgling five founding members had concerns about internal Communist-led revolutionary movements and felt vulnerable to Soviet and Chinese activity in the region. Consequently, ASEAN received strong U.S. support, which helped stabilize and restrain interstate rivalries and provided security against Soviet and Chinese interference. When the Cold War ended, the United States lost strategic interest in the region. Unsurprisingly, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Cold War--era proxy wars, many predicted ASEAN's demise. Greatpower interest waned and some predicted the re-emergence of unsettled rivalries between member states.

But the rise of China, in particular, spurred the organization's revival in the mid-1990s. Even though the collective military might the group could project was never that formidable, the appearance of unity proved effective against China following various incidents in the South China Sea.

A continued U.S. presence was crucial to holding Chinese ambitions in check while stabilizing ASEAN rivalries, planting the seeds of American complacency. The United States need not re-think and resell a vision of why its continued engagement in the region served the interests of Southeast Asian states. During the 1990s there was often a lack of any genuine appreciation of the vital interests of both sides. And the best American strategic minds were focused on other regions.

This meant that peripheral issues in Southeast Asia...