By John Lee
The bloc has a role in keeping the regional peace, but it must overcome its tendency to paralysis.
At the annual Shangri-La Dialogue meeting of regional defense ministers over the weekend in Singapore, the two great democratic powers in East Asia – the United States and Japan – in referring to China’s behavior reaffirmed their opposition to the use of intimidation and force in settling maritime disputes in the region, opposed “unilateral attempts to change the territorial status quo” through coercion, and insisted that all claims should be settled through recourse to international law.
These are hardly novel sentiments but reflect standard diplomatic fare long pushed by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – something Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and American Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel both acknowledged. But while ASEAN-led forums remain the clearinghouse for regional ideas and debate on security issues, the organization could be drifting toward slow, albeit dignified, irrelevance.
When it comes to helping manage China’s rise peacefully, ASEAN’s first problem is one of declining relative scale and size. When China became a full ASEAN Dialogue Partner in 1996, military spending by China was a little over 1.3 times that of the combined defense budgets of the ASEAN nations. By the end of 2013, Chinese spending was almost five times more than that of ASEAN’s.
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