Southeast Asian maritime states are hedging to stay afloat amidst US-China rivalry

19 September 2023

In response to China’s grey zone coercion and an increasing power struggle between the United States and China, Southeast Asian states are deepening hedging strategies to shape a stable regional environment.

In the past two decades, China’s increasingly expansionist tendencies and willingness to use force to coerce or intimidate smaller South China Sea claimants have reinforced growing threat perceptions vis-à-vis Beijing. Yet rather than prompting a concerted military response, the growing power asymmetry between China and Southeast Asian states has motivated more intense hedging.

No Southeast Asian country wants to truly alienate China. For regional leaders, the risk of economic contraction as a result of wider conflict looms larger than the direct security threat posed to individual countries. Consequently, Southeast Asian countries have deepened bilateral and multilateral engagement with China on the one hand, while simultaneously bolstering domestic defence capabilities and expanding security cooperation with external partners such as Australia, Japan, Korea, and the United States, on the other. Considering ongoing Chinese intimidation of South China Sea (SCS) claimants, states have begun to prioritise maritime security as a central component of national defence and security strategies.

Examining the link between maritime security and hedging

In Southeast Asia, maritime security strategy reflects states’ broader preference for hedging and mirrors the same fundamental tensions as hedging: power asymmetry, geographic proximity to a security threat, lack of political consensus, and profound strategic uncertainty — namely fear of abandonment or entrapment in a great power conflict. Seen in this light, maritime security strategy is a manifestation of deeply ingrained preferences for ambiguity and an unwillingness to choose sides in the brewing superpower competition.

As US-China rivalry hardens, becoming more zero-sum, and China continues to challenge the territorial sovereignty of maritime Southeast Asian states, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain such hedging policies.

Rather than pursuing closer alignment with one or more great powers, Southeast Asian states prefer to keep their foreign relations fluid. Therefore they frequently engage in security, economic, and diplomatic cooperation with the United States and China, as well as Australia, the European Union, India, and Japan, in order to signal ambiguity concerning their alignment. The oft-heard mantra — “don’t make us choose sides” — is as much an exhortation of this preference for non-alignment as it is a warning to great powers not to attempt to pressure smaller regional states into alignment positions with which they are not comfortable.

This deep-seated commitment to non-alignment stems from Southeast Asian countries’ armed struggles for national liberation from colonial occupation in the first half of the 20th century, as well as the hard lessons learned during the Cold War. In response to that previous bipolar era when the United States and Soviet Union vied for influence across the region, small states that aspired to remain neutral were forced to take sides when great powers intervened militarily, such as in Laos and Cambodia. Vietnam allied itself with the Soviets and found itself alone in its brief but fierce border war with the Chinese in 1979. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Vietnamese leaders were forced to invent a new foreign policy that explicitly eschews alliances.

Diverging threat perceptions drive varied responses

Naturally, various states and policymakers perceive risks and threats in differing ways. For littoral SCS states, the risk of interstate conflict (with China or another claimant state) is higher than that facing many mainland Southeast Asian states, which tend to be preoccupied with internal security.

In February 2023, a Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) vessel targeted Filipino counterparts with a military-grade laser in the Spratly Islands. The following month, a CCG vessel caused a dangerous encounter with Vietnamese patrol boats during a patrol of Vietnamese oil and gas fields around Vanguard Bank. Around this time, a CCG vessel was also seen operating in close proximity to Malaysia’s Kasawari gas project near Luconia Shoals, prompting the Malaysian Navy to dispatch a Keris-class littoral ship to the area.

Due to divergent threat perceptions, maritime security strategies across Southeast Asia demonstrate varying levels of deference (downplaying or deflecting) and defiance (military modernisation, deterrence, and expanding external security partnerships to counter a threat) to offset risks.

For example, Malaysia has employed a combination of deference and defiance to bind Beijing to regional norms while hoping to mitigate the likelihood that the latter will use force to achieve its aims. It has consistently opposed intervention by outside powers lest the South China Sea becomes an arena for great power struggles. Therefore, rather counterintuitively, it frequently downplays Chinese coercive behaviour with the aim of blunting the latter’s might and deterring others, such as the US or Australia, from getting involved.

Vietnam has utilised a combination of tactics, from appeals to international law, internal balancing (i.e., enhancing its domestic defence capacity as a deterrent), diversifying its network of security partners, to direct party-to-party ties as a means of enmeshing the Chinese Communist Party and thereby mollifying its behaviour.

By contrast, the Philippines has exhibited the greatest inconsistency in its strategy for managing the threat posed by China’s maritime expansionism-cum-assertiveness. Across multiple administrations, including Gloria Arroyo (2001-2010), Benigno Aquino III (2010-2016), Rodrigo Duterte (2020-2022), as well as Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. (2022—), Philippine foreign policy has oscillated from reliance on its traditional ally the United States to attempted re-alignment with Beijing.

Uncertainty will continue to propel hedging in Southeast Asia

The variation of maritime security strategies reflects the wide range of threat perceptions among SCS states. Maritime security strategies support states’ overall hedging policies, but they are merely one element of comprehensive national security strategies, which include diplomatic as well as economic engagement, and even limited security cooperation, with China.

At their core, Southeast Asia’s varying maritime security strategies are indicative of a broader preference for continued hedging despite increasing coercion from China (not limited to the maritime domain) and mounting tensions as a result of great power competition.

As the US-China rivalry hardens, becoming more zero-sum, and China continues to challenge the territorial sovereignty of maritime Southeast Asian states, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain such hedging policies. At the core of hedging lies a tension: ambiguity is unpopular, whereas clarity of alignment by a junior ally tends to beget clarity of commitment from a great power patron (along with more generous deployment of military resources that underpin security). Such security guarantees might become more tempting as SCS claimant states face greater challenges to their overstretched and under-resourced navies and coast guards.

However, as long as doubts about US credibility persist, Southeast Asia’s “frontline” states may have no choice but to stand up to and get along with China at the same time. Hedging is therefore likely to remain the least bad option for the region.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Hunter Marston is Australia Associate with 9DASHLINE, an Adjunct Research Fellow at La Trobe Asia, and a PhD candidate at the Australian National University.

This piece is based on a report published by the Blue Security Program: ‘Fair Winds and Following Seas: Maritime Security & Hedging in the South China Sea.’ Blue Security is a collaboration between La Trobe Asia, Griffith Asia Institute (GAI), the University of New South Wales Canberra (ADFA), the University of Western Australia’s Defence and Security Institute (DSI) and the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defence Dialogue (AP4D). Image credit: Flickr/US Pacific Fleet.