អាស៊ាននិង Quad៖ ភាពជាប់គាំងយុទ្ធសាស្ត្រឬផ្លូវសម្រាប់កិច្ចសហប្រតិបត្តិការ?

 On  Friday, September 24, the Biden administration will host the first in-person leaders’ summit of the “Quad,” a quadrilateral grouping comprised of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. Established in 2007 as an informal security dialogue, the Quad faded away over the years but was revived during the Trump administration owing to shared concerns over China’s assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region. This week’s summit is expected to codify an expanded agenda and launch several new initiatives to promote a free and open Indo-Pacific. The gathering will be held at the White House with the prime ministers of Australia, India, and Japan all in attendance. Not surprisingly, China has slammed the Quad as an exclusive clique based on a zero-sum mentality, recently warning that the summit shouldn’t “target a third party or undermine its interests.”

The Biden administration’s embrace of the Quad is emblematic of its approach to China more broadly, framed as competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be, and adversarial when it must be. In addition to building up strength at home, the administration is carrying out this approach by working more closely with allies and like-minded nations to blunt China’s ambitions and temper its aggressive behavior on the regional and world stage. The most recent manifestation of this approach is the formation last week of the trilateral AUKUS security partnership in the Indo-Pacific — under which Australia will acquire nuclear-powered submarines, drawing on U.S. and British technology.

ASEAN PERCEPTIONS OF THE QUAD

In Southeast Asia, a hotbed of U.S.-China rivalry, the Quad has been greeted with unease by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Perceptions vary by country, with Vietnam participating in pandemic-related dialogues with Quad members and other partners. But most ASEAN nations remain suspicious of the four-country grouping, seeing it as a challenge to “ASEAN centrality,” the notion that ASEAN provides the central platform within which regional institutions are anchored. Simply put, the Quad’s revival has triggered worries about where ASEAN fits into the evolving regional architecture. The “Indo-Pacific” discourse is also viewed skeptically as a thinly-veiled containment strategy against China, with potentially destabilizing implications for the region. Although many Southeast Asians are deeply worried about China’s growing influence and aggressive actions in the South China Sea, they largely prefer to manage China’s rise by engaging and “enmeshing” Beijing in ASEAN institutions and mechanisms, rather than relying on a counter-coalition of major powers.

Yet, while ASEAN remains skeptical of the Quad, it has generally welcomed efforts of the Biden administration and other Quad members to expand the grouping beyond security, as announced at the group’s virtual debut leaders-level summit last March, to include a new vaccine partnership as well as working groups on climate change and emerging technologies. In this new framing, the Quad is not just a collection of democracies with shared concerns about China, but a potential source of public goods for Southeast Asia and the broader Indo-Pacific region.

Going forward, a critical question is whether the Quad and ASEAN can cooperate in the provision of these public goods. This cooperation could begin with technical-level communication and exchange between Quad working groups and existing ASEAN mechanisms, such as the ASEAN Working Group on Climate Change — or perhaps more loosely through ASEAN-affiliated initiatives and institutions such as the ASEAN Catalytic Green Finance Facility under the Asian Development Bank, or the ASEAN Center for Sustainable Development Studies and Dialogue in Bangkok. It could also build on individual country engagements like U.S. support for the new regional office of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Hanoi, which could support pandemic prevention initiatives in other ASEAN countries in coordination with Quad partners.

THE QUAD SUMMIT

The upcoming summit aims to sustain this focus on public goods provision by advancing practical cooperation to combat COVID-19, addressing the climate crisis, and partnering on emerging technologies and cyberspace, according to the White House. The summit will reportedly also result in new commitments on vaccine distribution and infrastructure.

ASEAN countries desperately need access to more vaccines and appreciate the roughly 25 million doses the United States had contributed to the region so far. From a broader strategic perspective, however, regional policymakers and analysts will be particularly interested to see whether the Quad — and especially the United States — can do more on infrastructure and other economic domains, providing some balance to China’s expanding economic role in the region. As U.S.-China rivalry has escalated in Southeast Asia, Beijing is increasingly achieving its strategic goals through economic statecraft, illustrated by its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and proactive role in forming the new Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the mega trade deal that is expected to accelerate ASEAN’s economic integration with China.

As if to one-up the Quad, Chinese economic diplomacy has gone into overdrive in advance of the summit. Just last week, China formally applied to join the 11-member Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the successor to the Trans-Pacific Partnership that Japan kept alive after President Donald Trump pulled the United States out. Beijing also held a virtual summit earlier this month with most RCEP signatories, including ASEAN countries, to ensure that the new trade agreement can enter into force by early January 2022 as targeted. In addition, it convened a virtual meeting with ASEAN on BRI, where ASEAN ministers asked Beijing to further increase Chinese infrastructure investment to support economic recovery from the pandemic.

China’s growing economic influence presents formidable challenges both to the Quad and to the United States. For Washington, the challenge is to move beyond the prevailing security-centric paradigm and dramatically improve America’s economic game in Southeast Asia. In the infrastructure domain, one opportunity is to operationalize existing platforms with Quad partners, such as the 2018 Trilateral Partnership for Infrastructure Investment in the Indo-Pacific with Japan and Australia. For the Quad itself, the challenge is to design and implement practical steps toward realizing and sustaining its expanded focus on public goods provision — ideally in close cooperation with ASEAN.

brookings

Australia’s nuclear submarines and AUKUS: The view from Jakarta

Last Thursday’s announcement of Australia’s plans to pursue nuclear-powered submarines and the launch of AUKUS — a new security grouping between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States aimed at promoting information and technology sharing as well as greater defense industry cooperation — will be serious considerations for Canberra’s neighbors and key strategic partners, particularly Indonesia. Despite the periodic disruptions, Australia-Indonesia ties have continued to deepen. Both sets of foreign and defense ministers met in Jakarta on September 9 for the seventh “2+2” meeting, upgrading existing bilateral agreements, announcing new initiatives, and pledging to uphold regional order. In light of this seemingly positive trajectory, how are these developments being viewed in Jakarta?

Starting with the submarines, one of Jakarta’s major concerns will be the impact on the region’s military balance. Not only will Australian nuclear-powered submarines be able to undertake long-endurance, high-speed, stealth operations, but they could be equipped with upgraded missile systems. The Indonesian government issued a statement on Friday saying that it was viewing the submarine decision “cautiously” and was “deeply concerned over the continuing arms race and power projection in the region.”

To be clear, the long-range operations that Australia is likely to pursue won’t be in the seas directly to its north. And while strategic trust and communication have improved in recent years, suspicions arising from Australia’s involvement in East Timor’s independence ballot and revelations of Australian spying remain. These open the door for hawkish figures in Jakarta to call for more muscular military capabilities in light of a potentially threatening southern neighbor. As Evan Laksmana flagged on Twitter, questions will be asked about whether Australia will take its new subs further down the nuclear road, going quickly from nuclear-propelled to nuclear-armed.

Also of concern to Indonesia is how Australia’s enhanced ability to conduct long-range operations, particularly alongside the U.S. and other Indo-Pacific partners, will factor into Beijing’s strategic calculus. The Indonesian government’s statement reiterated Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi’s declaration after the recent 2+2 joint press conference that both Australia and Indonesia were committed to be a part of an “effort to maintain peace and stability in the region.”

Canberra’s decision to power up its maritime capability, in addition to the assets of other allies and partners, increases the costs for China to engage in conflict. However, this could equally provoke China into developing more sophisticated anti-submarine options and expanding its operating areas, both of which would generate anxiety not just in Jakarta but in other Southeast Asian capitals.

Raising the costs for major Indo-Pacific powers of going to war is in Indonesia’s interests, but not if that means China has greater maritime capabilities which threaten Indonesia or are used in grey-zone operations. Strengthening the Indonesian archipelago against maritime incursions has been a particular concern for President Joko Widodo’s administration, with Chinese fishing fleets accompanied by coast guard and other vessels flagrantly operating in Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone.

The threat of the Chinese navy has remained over the horizon. Jakarta has watched Beijing use not just white but grey hulls against the Philippines and Vietnam. While Indonesia has been slowly modernizing its military, particularly its navy and air force, the government would prefer to focus on internal matters like post-COVID-19 economic recovery and infrastructure upgrades.

Looking more broadly at the launch of AUKUS, from Indonesia’s vantage point it is a sign of greater Australian alignment not just with the U.S.’s strategic interests but with its identity. AUKUS is a pact described by the White House as binding Australia “decisively…to the United States and Great Britain for generations.” This coalition, as John Blaxland wrote, “puts more eggs in that basket,” sending an even clearer signal that Canberra is investing in a strategic destiny tied to Washington.

The optics of AUKUS contrast with Canberra’s desire to expand its regional outreach. The government’s 2020 defense strategic update clearly states an intent to deepen Australia’s alliance with the U.S.. But it also says Australia will “prioritise [its] engagement and defence relationships with partners whose active roles in the region will be vital to regional security and stability, including Japan, India and Indonesia.” Australia’s increasing appetite for greater Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) engagement as well as for trilateral groupings with India and Indonesia and with India and France (possibly awkward under a cooling-off period) suggested a posture leaning towards regional enmeshment and away from American dependence.

Despite concerns in Jakarta about appearing to contain China, the Quad’s inclusion of Japan and India render it a more credible grouping of Indo-Pacific states with, crucially, both Western and Asian representation. In some ways, AUKUS could become a necessary complement to regional strategic bonds like the Quad and the U.S.’s bilateral alliances.

If optics matter, history does too. Certainly the U.K. has interests in the Indo-Pacific and is playing a more active role, particularly in the South China Sea. However, AUKUS feels like a throwback to the colonial era, when Great Britain held strong interests in the region via its colonies in South and Southeast Asia. There are benefits in keeping the U.K. engaged in the Indo-Pacific beyond the Five Power Defence Arrangements, yet from an Indonesian point of view, AUKUS risks entrenching even further a Western-dominated narrative about regional order, sidelining Asian states, especially Indonesia.

Since U.S. President Joe Biden took office, Indonesia hasn’t received any official visits by high-level American officials, despite Vice President Kamala Harris traveling to Singapore and Vietnam in August and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visiting Singapore, Vietnam, and the Philippines in July. While Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman dropped by Indonesia, Cambodia, and Thailand in May and June, the Jakarta Post’s editorial team expressed disappointment in the “two successive snubs.” An unsocialized announcement that potentially heightens a sense of military competition in the region is certainly not going to ease these concerns of dismissive exclusion. In this Western-led vision of the Indo-Pacific, AUKUS unequivocally signals which relationships really matter for Australia.

While it’s early days for AUKUS, the pact will bring a number of key technological benefits for Australia — in cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing, among others. And there is comfort in that.

However, it’s worth remembering that what helps some in Canberra sleep better may keep others in the region up at night.