Southeast Asia: Patterns of security cooperation

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) today released a new report which explores the changing patterns of security cooperation in Southeast Asia. Strategically, Southeast Asia sits at the intersection of the wider world and Australia’s local neighbourhood; what happens there matters to Australia. But the broader Asian security environment is in flux, and an era of strategic quiescence in Southeast Asia may be drawing to a close.  Security trends there are increasingly being shaped by a set of global and broader Asian concerns as well as local ones. In consequence, traditional patterns of strategic influence and cooperation are shifting in Southeast Asia.

In this paper, Professor Carl Thayer from the Australian Defence Force Academy ‘unpacks’ four patterns of strategic influence in the region, assessing the interactions between them and what they mean for Australian strategic interests. Those patterns increasingly overlay in new and complex ways, ways that might undermine the stable, consultative Southeast Asia with which we have become so familiar.

What can Australia do?  Over the next five to ten years, we are likely to become much more involved with strategic developments in Southeast Asia, working where we can to reinforce patterns that best serve our interests.  That would include working to enhance practical multilateral security cooperation where we can, encouraging and supporting a larger US role in the region where we can, and building hard-power strategic links of our own to regional partners to bolster Southeast Asia’s own strategic weight.  We should be exploring opportunities for closer strategic partnerships with key Southeast Asian states, and be willing to invest the time, attention and resources that it will take to turn those partnerships into genuine strategic assets.

Carl Thayer is widely acknowledged as one of Australia’s experts on Southeast Asia, and the author of over 400 publications.