A recent major research report co-authored by Dr Lavina Lee and Dr John Lee, published by the Hudson Institute Washington, DC and supported by the SP Grants program of the Australian Department of Defence, examines:

  • How Southeast Asian governments, elites, and experts think about their strategic environment and managing the deepening US-China competition.
  • How they think about a possible US-China conflict, which is most likely to occur over Taiwan.
  • How they might respond to a conflict over Taiwan.

The report focuses on the key Southeast Asian maritime countries of Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

An excerpt from Chapter 1: "The strategic mindset of Southeast Asian states"

In the American and Western tradition, proactive statecraft is defined as shaping the strategic environment to render it more favorable to a nation’s interests and values. However, the Southeast Asian notion of statecraft tends to be quite different, with many in the region starting from the premise that their nation, and Southeast Asia more generally, structurally lacks agency to influence strategic outcomes. In other words, shaping the external environment is not the object of statecraft. In fact, it is treated almost as an externality or independent variable, with the structure essentially given or imposed and not affected by other variables that Southeast Asians can manipulate.

Hence, proactive statecraft does not involve shaping the emerging regional hybrid order to Southeast Asian states’ liking, but maximizing the rights, privileges, and gains they can extract from the hybrid order while managing risks and minimizing threats. As a result, these smaller Southeast Asian states do not always focus on which principles or systems they prefer but on positioning themselves best to negotiate rights, privileges, and gains from the two great powers, regardless of what principles or systems are on offer—and to manage risks and threats in the process.

How Southeast Asian nations hedge and balance against China’s disruptiveness and assertiveness is therefore not always the most important question; rather, it is how they hedge and balance against China’s disruptiveness and assertiveness and US demands. Southeast Asians argue that just as some elements of Chinese policies and behavior should be countered and constrained, some elements of US behavior should as well. Indeed, they believe that the US attempt to prevent the partial emergence of a hierarchical authoritarian order is futile and could be as dangerous and disruptive to the region as assertive Chinese behavior.