I forget which comedian it was who joked, “A friend will help you move house; a good friend will help you move a body.” My mind, of late, has been preoccupied with broken friendships and impending doom. Perhaps it’s to be expected given the events since Donald Trump’s inauguration just two months ago. “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,” Lenin apparently said. As I sit writing in Central Europe, bombs are being dropped not too far from me by a despotic regime that the United States is now aligning with and which, without too much convincing, would march further westwards into currently peaceful parts of the continent. Europe is rearming for the first time since the 1930s. NATO is a bad sneeze away from death. “The end of Pax Americana is clearly in sight,” Ian Buruma wrote last week. “The free world needs a new leader,” Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, has said.
As I sit writing, Southeast Asia is also looking destined for more instability and less peace. The Myanmar civil war is well into its fourth year and shows no signs of letting up. The term “failed state” is now on the lips. Irredentist claims are becoming mainstream again. Tensions continue to mount between Cambodia and Thailand. I cannot see how the region is going to tackle the insurmountable menace of cyberscammers without either greater direct involvement of the Chinese police or some sort of intrusion into a neighbor’s national sovereignty (or the latter by the former). I needn’t point out that as many countries in the region are desperately trying to rearm, increasingly so in light of Washington’s abandonment of Ukraine, and history suggests that this tends to snowball towards confrontation. It isn’t a coincidence that as one once again hears, however slight, the “drumbeats of war,” to use an overused cliche, around half of Southeast Asia’s premiers or presidents are now former generals.
Manila and Kuala Lumpur are talking about the desperate need for unity on security. Last month, Malaysia called for a unified Southeast Asian defense industry, which would be “vital for reducing reliance on external suppliers and fostering regional self-reliance in defense acquisition and technological development.” According to Malaysian Defense Minister Mohamed Khaled Nordin, “The region faces both traditional and non-traditional security threats that no single country can tackle alone.” Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. has declared that “peace is now under threat, not due to our incapacity to preserve it, but because of the absence of unanimity on key issues.”
Hear, hear to all of that! But it’s cheap talk. The question that actually matters is whether Thailand or Indonesia or any other Southeast Asian state will lift a finger to maintain peace on behalf of a neighbor. Would they consider raising funds jointly to support rearmament, as the Europeans are now doing? Would they agree to a common front against China and the United States? Would one be prepared to cut trade with China if Beijing were to launch an attack on Taiwan or a South China Sea claimant? Or would they look after themselves? Would one offer up its troops to support a neighbor?
Let’s say that Southeast Asia has enjoyed a remarkable and historically quite rare period of peace since the early 1990s. I have some theories on why, but that’s for another day. What’s obvious, though, is that despite decades of relative peace, Southeast Asians haven’t sorted out their own internal disputes; every mainland Southeast Asian state has a disputed border with a neighbor, while territorial disputes between Malaysia and the Philippines or Malaysia and Singapore have been pushed to the wayside, so are at risk of springing up again. There is no great love of ASEAN among ordinary people. I dare say there is no groundswell of Southeast Asianness. A recent academic article noted that “common values are shared to some extent among elites, diplomats and technocrats” in Southeast Asia, but “when it comes to ordinary citizens, there appears to be a notably limited sense of collective identity.”
Even then, the latest State of Southeast Asia survey found that 52 percent of the region’s “elites” think ASEAN is becoming increasingly disunited, some 77 percent think ASEAN to be “too slow and ineffective,” and 76 percent reckon regional states are becoming superpower proxies. Indeed, even among the elites, there is nothing approaching regional solidarity at a level in which any one country would be willing to make a sacrifice to help another. For all the admonishments of Myanmar’s brutal junta, no Southeast Asian country has chosen not to continue making money in the war-torn country. The majority of Southeast Asian respondents to a 2022 survey said that they wouldn’t want their government to cut ties with China if Beijing attacked Taiwan. I haven’t seen a poll that asks Southeast Asians what they think their governments should do if China were to attack Vietnam or the Philippines or any other ASEAN neighbor, but my guess is that the majority would choose economic self-interest over regional solidarity.
I’m in complete agreement with the earlier mentioned Ian Buruma, who also wrote last week that “If Pax Americana were to end in East and Southeast Asia, the only way to stop China from turning its neighbors into vassals would be to create an Asian NATO. This would include democracies such as South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, but also some semi-democracies (Singapore and Thailand) and perhaps even some autocracies (Vietnam).”
Such a creation, though, would mean moving on from history. Japan (like Germany in Europe) would have to lead the alliance, but this means the Japanese finding trust in themselves to bear military might for good. Southeast Asia would also need to trust that Japan can harness such authority for their interests. It would mean Southeast Asian states need, in a serious manner and not pandering to jingoists, to resolve their own disputes and decide whether ASEAN is today a strength or a hindrance. It is quite obvious that the Southeast Asian public is not yet ready for war, nor even the sacrifices that may have to be made to stave off conflict.
The most tempting pathology for any person is to think that the good times won’t end. Perhaps it’s the hereditament of our imperfect species; the result of the fact that we know that one day the party will be over for each of us, so keep the beer and music flowing for as long as possible. Given the difficulties posed by a new world order where international law is bunk and America won’t abide by its security promises, it is only natural to clutch to wishful thinking. Some say that the Trump administration is actually dancing to the tune of the likes of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elbridge Colby, soon to be undersecretary of defense for policy, who have long argued that America needs to refocus all of its military might in the Indo-Pacific – so Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine is a good thing, and his alignment with Moscow is actually a wily, Nixonian move to alienate China.
But that’s a grand theory to bet your country’s security on. And even if some in Washington aspire to this, it must be funneled through Trump, who would more readily sign a grand, “win-win” deal with Xi Jinping than send U.S. troops to die for Taiwan or an atoll in the South China Sea. At the end of the day, no Asian country has as much to offer the United States as China. The world looks bleak. As Russian propaganda now claims, there is a coming “great troika,” a world carved up between the United States, Russia, and China.
I began with a joke, so let’s end with a poem:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
