It takes a lot for anything to make the Taiwan Strait no
longer seem the most dangerous place in Asia, but a set of tiny rocks and coral
reefs in the South China Sea is once again punching above its weight in this
regard.
Manila has taken the legal high ground. The 2016 decision by
the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in the Hague, though making no ruling
on sovereignty, stated clearly that whatever claims China made to the sea based
upon its famous ‘nine-dash’ line delineating what it calls its ‘historic
rights’ to the South China Sea had no basis under the UNCLOS.
The rest is history. The Duterte administration wasted its
opportunity to build a diplomatic coalition within ASEAN that was the best hope
of steering China towards compliance with the 2016 ruling, with the bilateral
dispute remaining unresolved.
With President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. now in a protracted
falling out with the Duterte political clan, all his political incentives point
towards repudiating Duterte’s approach to the South China Sea issue by more
forcefully asserting the Philippine maritime claims.
Manila is between a rock and a hard place about how to
respond to its territorial disputes with China. Go it alone, and it faces the
prospect of bilateral negotiations with a more powerful adversary that sees the
issue as a matter of national credibility and — if hypotheses about Beijing’s
plans to make the South China Sea a haven for its nascent submarine-based
nuclear deterrent are right — a national security priority.
At the same time, by dragging its security patron the United
States into the matter, it risks quickening a dynamic whereby Beijing — cursed
by all great powers’ inability to empathise with the anxieties of smaller
neighbours — comes to see its neighbours’ pushing back against its claims as
part of a US strategy of containment-via-proxy.
One can’t blame Marcos’ administration for taking the second
option, given the widespread perception in Manila that China isn’t interested
in good-faith negotiations to de-escalate the situation in Scarborough Shoal
and the Spratlys.
But the upshot for the whole region is that the more the
Philippines leverages its alliance with Washington, the greater incentive China
has to test US commitment to its treaty commitments to the Philippines in a
cycle of brinkmanship that undermines the stability of the whole region, and
make it harder for ASEAN, for instance, to do what it clearly must and call
more vocally on China to respect the 2016 PCA ruling.
That these two sub-optimal options loom large in Manila’s
policy choices speak to a lack of institutional avenues through which it might
leverage the collective political influence of Asia’s small and middle powers,
who together have an urgent interest in holding China accountable to rules that
protect their interests — but who individually have little incentive to do
anything that antagonises Beijing or join with Manilla in dragging the United
States into this particular dogfight.
As the South China Sea crisis illustrates vividly, Asia’s
small and medium powers need better options than being subject to the power imbalances
inherent in their bilateral relations with China if and when things go awry, or
exacerbating China’s paranoia about containment by dragging their
extra-regional patron, the United States, into the mix.
Joseph Liow takes up this theme in this week’s lead article,
outlining the particular interest Southeast Asia has in building regional unity
in the face of great-power competition. Such unity, he writes, ‘is paramount in
Southeast Asia’s response to these challenges. Despite the different strategic
outlooks of Southeast Asian states, there needs to be a realisation that
against the backdrop of great power rivalry, all countries involved need to
look beyond national interests to discern the common interests that they
share’.
ASEAN unity needs to find its expression in institutions and
the like-minded cooperation they facilitate. The ASEAN-centred regional
architecture is under-utilised not just as a place for the United States and
China to work out their bilateral differences under the cover of multilateral
engagement, but also as a platform for the articulation of the collective
interests of the Asian majority in an open and pluralistic order.
As Liow observes, because of the importance of the
economic order for Southeast Asia, the changing geoeconomic landscape — yet
another function and extension of great power rivalry — poses challenges to
which the region will have to respond’, with the Biden administration trying to
save its political bacon before November’s elections by embracing Trump’s trade
war with China in ways that make all of China, the United States and the whole
world less prosperous in the not-too-long run.
A key part of this apparatus of regional unity-building is
RCEP which, at a time when the prestige of globalisation is collapsing in key
Western capitals, can be this region’s platform for defending economic
openness.
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