The State of Play in the South China Sea
My colleague Yohanes Sulaiman recently participated in a CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) conference on the South China Sea. Below Yohanes and I discuss his panel, his remarks at the conference, and assess America’s role in the South China Sea. As you will see, Yohanes and I are fairly in sync about the kinds of policies the U.S. should pursue in Southeast Asia.
Brad Nelson: You participated in a panel at a recent CSIS conference in Washington. (See here. Yohanes’s panel begins at 34:00 in the linked YouTube video). For the sake of our readers, why don't you set the scene? For instance, what was the topic of the conference and your panel specifically? And who was on the panel with you?
Yohanes Sulaiman: I attended the Twelfth Annual CSIS South China Sea Conference and my panel was on the state of play in the South China Sea: Essentially, what is currently going on there and who are the key players. I was specifically asked to discuss ASEAN's perspective in general and the Indonesian perspective specifically. There were two other panelists. One was Jung Pak, the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Department of State, who talked about the South China Sea from America’s perspective, while Shuxian Luo, a Post-Doctoral researcher at the Brookings Institution, spoke on the Chinese perspective. It was a good panel that set the scene for further discussions in subsequent panels in the conference. Perhaps because it was an open conference, the State Department’s Pak painted an overly optimistic view of the region, that the U.S. has been increasing its engagement in Southeast Asia, and it has been able to build a coalition of the willing to support its policy. Of course, my quibble is that the U.S. tends to discounts the interests and views of ASEAN nations, which, I guess, why they invited me in the first place.
BN: All right, so let's get into the nitty gritty of your panel. To start, what's your take on the "state of play" in the South China Sea? What arguments did you make during your panel discussion?
YS: The usual stuff, frankly: China has behaved aggressively, and there's growing tension in the South China Sea. My argument is that the U.S., while it has been increasing its engagement with Southeast Asia, is still not engaged enough, and hasn't paid much attention to the region, especially to Indonesia. The last U.S. president to visit Indonesia was Obama. In contrast, Xi Jinping and high level Chinese officials have visited Indonesia more than the United States over the last few years. Yes, the U.S. faces many internal and external distractions, from growing partisanship and polarization to the war in Ukraine. Still, the U.S. cannot and should not neglect the region too much.
BN: Did you get any push back from Jung Pak? After all, she's at the State Department and the U.S. (regardless of who is in the White House or in any senior level national security/foreign policy position) usually doesn't agree with assertions that it's "not doing enough" in its competition with China.
YS: No, Jung Pak didn’t oppose or counter my argument. Keep in mind that we were not in a debate. We simply received questions from the moderator and the audience, as you can see on the recording of the event, and answered them as best we could. After the conference ended, though, one of the speakers, not in my panel, approached me and said that they would like to thank me for saying what they wanted to say for years but couldn't, which is my assertion that China is gaining ground throughout Southeast Asia because Beijing is willing to give money without any strings attached (e.g. human rights, environment, labor, etc.) while the U.S. constantly talks about domestic reforms and usually wants to them implemented in exchange for aid, investment, and the like. Granted, the Chinese Way does not necessarily bring a good outcomes—just look at the current economic mess in Sri Lanka, Laos, and Pakistan—but most countries are tired of the America’s moralizing and sermons.
YS: I’m curious, what do you think of the comment that the U.S. should invest more in the region and should stop giving a lot of hassles such as on human rights, environmental, and labor issues in order to garner more support from the region?
BN: Well, there are two ways to respond to your argument. First, should the U.S. adopt your recommended approach to Southeast Asia? And second, can the U.S. adopt that approach? With respect to the former question, yes, I am in favor of that foreign policy path. Better to engage Asia through money and soft power rather than mainly through arms and military planning. The defense/military part is important, to be sure, and should be part of America's overall strategic Asia policy. But in the 21st century, the White House has almost exclusively viewed and therefore strategized about Asia through the lens of conflict, war, and the military domain. Not surprisingly, that's created a real world security dilemma in Asia, in which the region is becoming a tinderbox of arms racing and intermittent dispute spirals. And while the security/dispute spirals are a bit less intense in Southeast Asia, that region hasn’t been spared from those processes from taking hold there.
The better policy is to approach Asia through non-violent tools and mechanisms. See, if arms and defense systems and training exercises and the like are the currency of the day, then the bipolar competition between the U.S. and China will manifest itself through those tools. But if the competition can be routed through money and soft power, as examples, then that's a safer avenue for both powers to compete. At least for now.
Now, can the U.S. go the aid and investment and soft power route? That's trickier to answer. Today, many Americans don't like to hear about the White House sending millions, let alone billions, of dollars to foreign countries, especially foreign countries they know little about. That's one (not the only one, of course) of the main criticisms American opponents of the Ukraine War have with Biden's Ukraine policy: that he's pouring money into a strange foreign war, in a distant venue with little at stake for the U.S., when that precious money could be better used back home in various cash-strapped localities. Moreover, Americans definitely know little about Southeast Asia. They knew little about that region during the Vietnam War and they know even less about it these days. That said, Congress is definitely in an anti-China mood these days, and so getting the House and Senate on board with an aid and investment package designed to boost America's standing and check China in Southeast Asia just might get passed, despite likely formidable GOP opposition.
YS: I agree with you that at this point, domestic politics seems to be the biggest shackle to the America’s foreign policy in Southeast Asia. The U.S. is having a hard time matching China's investment dollar to dollar due to American domestic politics. Of course to be fair, the U.S. at this point is actually one of the biggest investors in the region, and actually even bigger than China if we include U.S. allies such as Japan. The problem, however, is the lack of exposure, not to mention that that investment has been underway for years already and mostly done by private sectors and in private sectors, unlike China's direct investment that focuses on big (white elephant-ish) infrastructure projects.
How the U.S. should go from here?
BN: My view on China is mostly in line with John Mearsheimer's. China is a rising, growing power that is looking to expand its power and influence globally. It will continue to succeed in these efforts until at least one of two things happen. One, it experiences some kind of domestic disturbance/instability (social unrest, massive domestic terrorism, major internal political battles, economic decline, etc.) or external resistance (containment, deterrence, etc.). It's difficult to speculate about the former, although many scholars/analysts nowadays do engage in that line of discussion. The precise chance of domestic instability in China is unknown, of course, but the odds are unlikely that something even remotely like that will happen anytime soon. So that leaves us with the external resistance factor. Is there any external force/actor—whether individually or in a coalition—that is both capable and willing to contain or deter China in the South China Sea? I don’t think so.
The local states—either individually or collectively—aren't strong enough to do much of anything about China's expansion and militarization of the South China Sea. I was hopeful that India would throw its lot more meaningfully with various Southeast Asian states to thwart China there, but India's not strong enough yet, not motivated enough yet, and doesn't have strong enough military links to ASEAN nations to matter much right now. Meantime, Japan and South Korea, like many in the region, are still hedging, and to the extent they're willing to jump off the fence, they're primarily concerned about their little neighborhood, particularly the islands and waters in the East China Sea and Taiwan. That leaves the U.S. The U.S. has talked a tough game with respect to the South China Sea, saying that China has to follow international law (esp. the Hague Tribunal’s ruling in 2016), respect the rights of its neighbors, allow free and open navigation through the waters, and stop (and preferably unwind) its island building and militarization of the South China Sea. Sounds good, right? But let’s face it, the U.S. isn't willing to push back against China in those waters. It thinks that sailing a few ships through the South China Sea is sufficient, that that's enough to signal to China that the U.S. means business there. That’s not enough. It's simply empty words and gestures. The U.S. is reluctant to really enforce its words in the South China Sea, and it probably will never go beyond what it's been doing over the last decade--which is to let China salami slice those waters into a Chinese lake, just like Mearsheimer predicted years ago.
Put simply, this is the issue: U.S. citizens don't know much about nor care much about Southeast Asia. And they certainly don't care much about a bunch of rocks in some waterway thousands of miles away. American politicians are well aware of that. And frankly, so are Chinese officials. And so China knows that if it takes its time, goes slowly, gobbling up the South China Sea bit by bit, with no single move being ultra-provocative, then the Sea is theirs in fairly short order. Furthermore, unlike say Taiwan, there are no people at stake in the standoff over the South China Sea, so it's almost impossible for the U.S. to make convincing and emotional appeals to its citizens so as to drum up support for stronger coercive moves in that waterway. The White House can't really talk about democracy or human rights or freedom in this case. Freedom for who? The rocks in the South China Sea? The fish? As a result, the U.S. is in a bind, as there are severe limits as to how far the U.S. can go to preserve a free and open South China Sea.
The best hope is for the U.S. to work with Southeast Asian claimants (that is, claimants to the waters, islands, and resources) and China to get a binding agreement on navigation rules and sharing resources in the South China Sea. Of course, China wants the U.S. to butt out, claiming that America isn't a party to the dispute and thus has no right to insert itself in the situation, and Beijing has also resisted "internationalizing" the dispute more generally, as it doesn't want any outside actors to get involved (whether states or international institutions). Relatedly, China also wants to keep the U.S. out because it would prefer to deal directly with a far, far weaker ASEAN, realizing it has power and leverage over that bloc. Despite all of that, I think working the diplomatic angle is America's best option, as difficult as and as unlikely to succeed as that probably is—as it stands now, China doesn't really have an incentive to work with others on the South China Sea. The U.S. needs to offer China a very compelling narrative as to why it should cooperate, why it’s in China’s best interests to work and play well with others in the South China Sea. The U.S. also needs to invest in its relationships with ASEAN much, much more than it has and is currently doing—the main point you made in your CSIS presentation. At bottom, China needs to feel a united front of states aligned against it, willing to defend their interests, and prepared and capable of imposing costs on it. And so, in the end, as you can see, my main policy recommendation is actually very, very similar to yours, Yohanes: The U.S. needs to step up its act in Southeast Asia if it has any desire to .