Last month’s Shangri-La Dialogue again showed that the real task of sustaining maritime rules in the South China Sea had fallen to those states willing and able to uphold them.
Japanese Defence Minister Koizumi underscored the "severe reality" of unilateral efforts to change the status quo by force. A free and open region, he said, wouldn’t be realised by wishing for it: action, deterrence, and response were required.
The best possible future appears to be a highly contested but stable balance in which China’s assertion of control meets determined and effective resistance. Achieving such a balance depends on the application of countervailing effort, and its stability on how states manage the dangers.
While this has likely been true since China’s seizure of Scarborough Shoal in 2012, years of hand-wringing and fruitless diplomacy ensued. Now, as the unravelling of order quickens, even harder problems of aligning rules and power in Asian geopolitics present.
One discomfiting fact is that American power will remain a necessary condition for the preservation of maritime rights enshrined in international law. It is hard to envisage concerted middle power action without assurance that the United States would come to the aid of its allies.
This is more than a little ironic given the attitude of the Trump administration to global institutions, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
As US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said, rules not backed with power might not be worth the paper they’re written on.
Another is that the purposes and forms of regional diplomacy may not be well suited to what’s coming. There are plural and competing conceptions of order at play. Rules may be determined through contest, not consensus. Vietnam’s president, To Lam, pointed out at the dialogue that strategic trust didn’t require the elimination of differences but rather their responsible management: risk reduction may be the most urgent task for multilateralism.
We got here via China’s "talk and take" strategy in the South China Sea, as Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr described it: dragging out talks with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) while steadily changing the realities of its presence and control over land features, air, and water.
The Philippines won a stunning arbitration victory a decade ago. Binding on both parties at international law, the award found China’s claims to be incompatible with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. China ignored the ruling and gradually extended physical control.
Many states want to sustain the rules-based order set out in the UN Charter, ASEAN’s core documents, and international law. But as US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said, rules not backed with power might not be worth the paper they’re written on. This appears to be the lesson of the past 16 years.
The Philippines’ international legal position is impeccable. But China has step-by-step extended its presence and control, effectively extinguished rights of Southeast Asian claimants, and challenged freedom of navigation and overflight for all. It has promulgated its own concept of historic rights while using coercion and intimidation.
China’s claims and conduct in the South China Sea haven’t been constrained by international rules, dispute mechanisms or normative declarations. Only in tactics and presentation has China sometimes adjusted its actions in response to international opinion.
Processes that allow the can to be kicked down the road have their place, especially when the alternatives may lead to conflict.
Framing the South China Sea as an ASEAN matter hasn’t helped. ASEAN members (including claimants), have distinct interests and complex relationships with China. ASEAN can foster diplomatic exchange, but it can’t mobilise collective weight to resist Chinese pressure. Nor can it represent the interests of non-members that are deeply vested in the maritime rights at stake.
Too many unrealistic ambitions have been projected on ASEAN-based regionalism (such as the East Asia Summit). Negotiations between ASEAN and China on a code of conduct have served primarily as a device to manage pressure: somewhere to point at when asked and channel irreconcilable expectations.
That may be no bad thing in itself. Not every problem in the world has a solution. Processes that allow the can to be kicked down the road have their place, especially when the alternatives may lead to conflict. And ASEAN is at its best when managing dialogue, navigating disagreement and preserving diplomatic space.
But, given the divergent interests, it’s hard to see how a meaningful code of conduct could ever be reached and certainly not one that genuinely narrowed differences.
Focusing on risk reduction measures might be more promising, especially if other states using the sea and air were included. But China hasn’t wanted them precisely because it would reduce the risks it is creating for others.
The upshot is that the future of the regional maritime order (and rules such as they are) is being made on the water and in the air by what states do and what they accept.
Article reprinted with permission from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's analysis and commentary site The Strategist.