The first priority is to manage great power competition in the Indo‑Pacific.
— Australia’s Defence Minister Christopher Pyne

Optimists see the glass as half full, while strategists worry that it’s actually a coffin that’s half full.

Confronting our new era of great-power competition, optimists think that smarts and self-interest will achieve a balanced mix of intense competition and intimate cooperation. The pessimists see the coffin of great-power clash already in the front parlour.

As an optimist, I’m pushing the idea that this will be a hot peace not a new cold war.

I got a partial tick in Canberra last week from our second-longest-serving prime minister, John Howard, just back from leading the Australian delegation in Beijing for the high-level dialogue with China.

Howard responded to my cold war/hot peace question: ‘I think talk of a new cold war is overblown. I think we have to adopt a pragmatic assessment of relations between China and the United States.’

The Howard recipe for pragmatic management is not to twitch at every tweet by Donald Trump, and push hard to preserve the open economic settings that have delivered so much for Asia and Australia:

China and America are the dominant powers in the world. And how they interact has a big impact. And I, certainly, speaking as an Australian, don’t want a return to higher levels of protection and trade restriction. I’m totally against that. The debate between Xi and President Trump, I hope in the long term doesn’t make the world a more protected place when it comes to trade.

With the first track of government-to-government dealings becoming tougher, there’s more need for work via track 2 to understand and balance the hot peace.

For second-track heavy lifting, turn to CSCAP, the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, established in 1993 in Asia’s great burst of optimistic regionalism and institution creation following the end of the cold war.

I’ve been a CSCAPer since the wonderful insurgent intellectual Des Ball conscripted me, opining that even journalists should lend a hand in the long second-track trek.

CSCAP has been pondering our new era and the management theme Australia is pushing: the need for a rules-based order in Canberra’s geographic construct of choice, the Indo-Pacific.

The council’s published view is in the Regional security outlook 2019 and the latest round of debate happened in Perth at the 50th meeting of the CSCAP steering committee. Those offering Oz perspectives in Perth included Kim Beazley, Julie Bishop and Stephen Smith.

Some regional commentators see opportunities as well as threats in this increasingly stark competition. Southeast Asian countries may benefit if foreign companies move their production from China to their region. Major-power rivalry, in the view of key Vietnamese analysts (writing in CSCAP’s Regional security outlook), ‘creates more room for manoeuvre’ for Southeast Asians as Washington and Beijing strive to win partnerships and collaboration.

Bilahari Kausikan from Singapore makes the point that the world—at the end of the period of US unipolarity—is in ‘a more historically normal situation of a divided global and regional order and great power competition’.

There’s concern—not just from China, but also Russia and much of ASEAN—that advocacy of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ is antagonistic towards China.

The Vietnam essay portrays Washington’s ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS)’ and China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ as rival visions, representing ‘intensified engagement with the wider region in terms of economic[s], politics, diplomacy, and defence’. The IPS is ‘centred on the concept of the Quad’ (which is intended to bring together four democracies—the United States, Japan, India and Australia) and ‘may sideline ASEAN-led arrangements that prioritise … a more comprehensive approach to security’.

As ever, ASEAN is anxious about forging alliance-style alignments. The ‘DNA of ASEAN countries’, according to a senior Indonesian writer in CSCAP’s  Regional security outlook, is for ‘inclusive cooperation’ to maintain ‘equal distance from all the great powers’ to prevent the region from ‘becoming a theatre of proxy war’.

Australia views the ‘Indo-Pacific’ as primarily a geographic framing device, giving proper recognition to India’s rise. However, CSCAP commentary is a reminder that the concept carries other, more controversial significance for many in the region.

The notion of an international ‘rules-based order’ is also less straightforward than Australian official statements and academic commentary sometimes suggest. True, there’s support for the idea of ‘rules’ in international behaviour—but reference to a ‘liberal’ order is more contested. Also, the insistence that alliances are a part of this order—as some Australian leaders have done—fits uncomfortably with ASEAN international preferences.

The Australian academic Anthony Milner, currently a co-chair of CSCAP, says the region confronts the implications of a great transition in global power:

Most observers instinctively sense that moving to a new order is a fearsomely daunting undertaking, especially as we are not coming out of a major war with a clear winner who has the muscle and the moral authority to offer new solutions.

Henry Kissinger has argued that the future international order will involve not just a shift in power from the US to China but also a new ‘agreement on norms’—and he is uncertain whether it will be ‘possible to translate divergent cultures into a common system’. An understandably popular stance is to keep it simple, staying clear of ideology and focusing initially on trade and investment regimes. But even here, divergent philosophies of governance darken the horizon almost instantly.

More than being simply pragmatic, Australia must be nimble and smart as it adheres to the US alliance while simultaneously leaning towards Asia on economic and trade issues. It’ll be a complicated trek, on first or second track.

The shifting role of international media is akin to the changing-times tale told by the university economics professor retiring after 40 years of teaching.

At his farewell, the prof confessed that for those four decades he’d set exactly the same questions in the economics exam each year.

Wasn’t that boring as well as lazy?

‘Ah! That’s the point’, he explained. ‘The exam questions stayed the same, but every decade the correct answers changed!’

And that’s the story of the media in international affairs over the past 50 years. The questions—the obsessions—still tend to rhyme. Problem is, the correct answers—the journo’s reality—keeps transforming.

I used to joke that I’d had a wonderful hack career in two vanishing fields of journalism: starting on a broadsheet afternoon newspaper and then shifting to shortwave broadcasting. I’ve now added a third form that’s fading, or let’s hope being remade: foreign correspondent.

When I got into shortwave broadcasting to the South Pacific and Southeast Asia in the 1970s, Western media were at the height of their powers, as they had been for decades. Four major news agencies, based in London, Paris and New York, drove 80% of global news. Media, movies and advertising around the world came with an American flavour.

The developing world had started pushing back, through UNESCO, seeking what was called ‘the new world information order’.

The UNESCO call was for an end to news hegemony and a shift to information equity and equality. The new world information order was to be part of a broader new international economic order.

The new world information order drove a lot of conferences and was a wonderful platform for developing-country leaders and the non-aligned movement. But the remaking of world information flows UNESCO advocated never got going. The one clear result was that the United States and Britain withdrew from UNESCO.

Some of the shifts UNESCO pushed for did come to pass, but because of changing  trade flows, not information flows. Step forward what the World Bank dubbed the East Asian economic ‘miracle’. (That miracle report came out in 1993, and looked at what eight key Asian economies had achieved between 1965 and 1990.)

The miracle meant Asia got rich and powerful. And that’s where things started to get interesting for Australian reporters in Southeast Asia in the 1980s and 1990s.

The pushback, in big ways and small, was against Western media dominance and for what Asia was building.

It was in that period that Oz hacks actually had an impact on Australian diplomacy in Southeast Asia. Oh, for those long-gone days when reporting had the power to shift Australia’s diplomatic relations with Singapore or Malaysia or Indonesia.

I remember going to a closed conference in Canberra in 1991 with the foreign minister, Gareth Evans, and some of his officials where we argued/debated about the structure Evans was putting in place to enable the Australian government to formally disavow the work of Oz journalists if it was causing diplomatic difficulty.

The 1990s was the era of ‘Asian values’, driven by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad, arguing that Asia’s success rested on Asian values and Asia didn’t have to play by Western rules—and, in particular, Asia didn’t have to put up with pesky foreign journalists.

The Asian values argument was picked up by Suharto in Indonesia and, to a lesser extent, by China and Vietnam. The strongmen of Asia had to be careful about insulting the US. Berating Oz journalists was a low-risk way to attack the white guys.

Suharto expelled the ABC correspondent from Jakarta in 1981 over Radio Australia’s reporting—especially by our Bahasa service—on East Timor. It took the ABC a decade to be readmitted. One of my jobs as the ABC’s Southeast Asia correspondent, based in Singapore, was to go to Jakarta to wave the flag—including the visit to the Department of Information for the ritual birching on how perfidious Australian journalists were.

Suharto centralised control of radio news bulletins—one national bulletin coming out of Jakarta ever hour—and had a strict system of daily ‘guidance’ to newspaper editors.

Malaysia and Singapore did their overt censorship at the airport gate: checking the International Herald Tribune, the Asian Wall Street Journal and the weekly Far Eastern Economic Review; blacking out offending articles or banning individual editions. It’s primitive compared to what China does today, but the intent was the same.

Television was CNN, the other American networks, and the ABC because its coverage in Asia was syndicated around the world through the Visnews cooperative. Shortwave came from the BBC and Radio Australia. So despite the Asian pushback Western norms still set the terms of much international coverage.

The 1998 Asian financial crisis was an end moment for a lot of things in East Asia: Suharto’s regime and the claim of distinctive Asian values that translated into economic success, plus the subsidiary argument against Western journalism.

Then the real revolution started.

The digital disruption arrived with the 21st century. For commercial media, advertising revenue no longer supports journalism. The ads and the reporting that were once part of the same package have been split.

The world still needs good journalism. But the gatekeeping role hacks and editors once played is in ruins. Digital citizens now have all the tools once held solely by the hacks.

The old gatekeeping truth was that journos couldn’t tell you what to think, but they could tell you what to think about. No more. Mark that as one of those answers that’s changed forever.

As Malaysians go to the polls tomorrow, 9 May, observers are holding their breath. Many unexpected turns have already taken place, few of which provide optimism or confidence in the political scene.

The return from retirement of Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the 92-year-old former prime minister for 22 years (1981–2003) was among the surprises of this race. Another was the announcement of a new anti-fake news law by the incumbent Prime Minister, Najib Razak, who has been in office since 2009. The law sparked controversy because it could allow a clampdown on media and free speech. Penalties include imprisonment for up to six years.

Najib has been linked to many corruption cases, including of misappropriating some US$700 million in public money from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MBD). The ‘anti-fake news bill’ doesn’t provide a clear definition of what would constitute ‘fake news’, but reportedly bans talking publicly about 1MBD without government approval.

The veteran ‘Dr M’—who once gained international prominence for his anti‑Western views and his popularisation of the ‘Asian values’ debate in the 1990s—warned that the upcoming elections will be ‘the dirtiest vote in history’. He’s unlikely to be right—not because the Malaysian election will be a model of transparency, but unfortunately because political transparency is increasingly rare in Southeast Asia.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2017 Democracy Index rates countries in five categories: ‘electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture’. It then classifies countries as ‘full democracies’, ‘flawed democracies’, ‘hybrid regimes’ or ‘authoritarian regimes’. Not a single country in Southeast Asia was rated a full democracy:

All indicators have shown a noticeable deterioration from the 2016 Democracy Index, when both Cambodia and Myanmar were ranked as hybrid regimes. This regression to authoritarianism (or autocratic tendencies) has been prompted by chronic problems, including political corruption, as well as weak electoral and justice systems. Other rankings, such as those measuring the progress of human rights or freedom of speech, reveal similar declines.

Notwithstanding the ever-debatable methodologies used to create the indexes, trying to understand the political mood in Southeast Asia is a daunting task, and any generalisation is risky. But critical reflections on the state of democratic regression cannot simply be labelled ‘Western’ narratives. They’re cause for concern among prominent regional thinkers too. The late Dr Surin Pitsuwan, a Thai diplomat and former ASEAN Secretary-General, noted that ‘democracy has not been very good in Southeast Asia’.

Rather, he suggested that it was a ‘misunderstanding of democracy’ that had brought about a generation of leaders—riding a wave of populism, corruption  and patronage—who created a ‘charade’ of democracy. Moreover, there were too many expectations to be achieved in the short term. As a result, there has been a tendency to turn against democracy, giving rise to what former Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called ‘a set-back of democracy’ last year at the Democracy in Southeast Asia conference organised by the Kofi Annan Foundation.

A popular explanation is that, historically, there has been a preference for strong rule and strongmen in Southeast Asia. This can be observed in the electoral results in Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as in the increasingly illiberal electoral practices in Cambodia. There, elections will take place in July, and Prime Minister Hun Sen has dissolved the main opposition party and clamped down on the press. Like everywhere else, rising inequality and lasting socio-ethnic (and in some cases, religious) tensions provide an opportunity for demagogic promises.

Moreover, there are rising new challenges and vulnerabilities—including cyber disruptions. Southeast Asian countries’ weak institutions and limited capabilities to monitor cyber activity increasingly expose them to more meddling. Even some mature democracies, well-off and with a wide array of institutional preparedness, aren’t immune to disruptive cyber threats. The use of automated fake Twitter accounts (bots) have been reported ahead of the Malaysian election. The results can be pernicious. The Democracy in Southeast Asia conference report noted:

Technology can complicate the conduct of elections because it is hard to audit or monitor. For this reason, it can easily generate public distrust of election results, which in turn may generate tension or violence.

The fragility of democracy in this region has been a long-term concern. The Southeast Asian political experience—despite its distinctiveness owing to its complex history and power relations—isn’t detached from global democratic ‘health’. The mood and global support for democracy some 20 years ago differed significantly from the environment today. That is true not only in Southeast Asia, but in the rest of the world.

Of 167 countries, the 2017 Democracy Index categorised only 19 as full democracies and 57 as flawed democracies. It categorised 39 as hybrid regimes and 52 as authoritarian regimes. In that light, Southeast Asia’s statistics don’t differ significantly from the global norm.

From Budapest to Washington, nations struggle to strike a balance between supporting lasting liberal values and winning elections. Yet Southeast Asia’s considerable, and ‘collective’, swing back to authoritarianism attests to its greater vulnerability. Dan Slater, head of the Weiser Centre for Emerging Democracies, suggests the ‘flu of social and political illiberalism is circumnavigating the globe’. If so, Southeast Asia is in urgent need of a ‘super vaccine’, and one with lasting effect. After the elections this year in Malaysia and Cambodia, Indonesia and—one hopes—Thailand will hold elections in 2019, followed by Myanmar and Singapore in 2020.

This weekend Malcolm Turnbull will host the leaders of the ASEAN countries attending the ASEAN–Australia Special Summit. The summit draws from the 2016 Defence White Paper and the 2017 foreign policy white paper, both which underlined the importance of ASEAN and the Indo-Pacific region to Australia’s security and prosperity.

Southeast Asia is the key to the Indo-Pacific because it links the Pacific to the Indian Ocean and straddles the world’s busiest trade route. This strategic geography explains the government’s aspirations for closer, broader Australia–ASEAN relations (see for example Graeme Dobell’s advocacy for Australia becoming a full member of ASEAN).

The special summit will include two sub-summits: a business summit and a counterterrorism (CT) summit. The goal of the former is to capitalise on the massive economic growth that ASEAN countries have experienced over the past few years by enhancing business relations between Australia and the ASEAN region. The region is home to more than 600 million people with a combined GDP of $3.4 trillion, and ASEAN economies have been growing at an average rate of 4.6% per year.

The CT summit, which—disappointingly but unsurprisingly—will only be open to officials, is meant to build on the 2016 ASEAN–Australia Joint Declaration for Cooperation to Combat International Terrorism. Its declared goal is ‘enhancing regional connectivity and cooperation to combat terrorism and violent extremism’.

Clearly, Marawi was a game changer. That a small band of dedicated Islamists was able to take over the city and withstand the Philippines army’s assault underlined the potential for Marawi to become ‘the region’s Raqqa’. There was also evidence of Islamic State (IS) financing.

It’s important, however, to put the Marawi battle in context and to recognise that what appears to have sparked the conflict had more to do with local politics and the approach adopted by President Rodrigo Duterte. This has led to questions regarding IS involvement in igniting the insurgency.

There are justified concerns about violent extremism taking root in the region and in Australia, but before adopting security measures that could substantially undermine basic human rights, such as Indonesia’s draft CT law, there’s a need to define and properly assess the threat.

First, it’s estimated that up to 1,000 people from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines travelled to the Middle East to join IS. This compares with the EU, which has a combined population of more than 300 million—about half of Southeast Asia’s population—yet saw more than 5,000 of its citizens travel abroad to join IS.

Second, democracy is in decline in the Indo-Pacific, civil–military relations are uncertain and authoritarian regimes pervade the region. This means that there’s a need for caution in supporting CT practices across the region. That’s because human rights issues aren’t always on the minds of regional policymakers, who may use the threat of terrorism to suppress dissent.

Indonesia’s newly established National Cyber and Encryption Agency (BSSN) is a case in point. The agency’s budget is unknown and its statutory power isn’t clear. The agency reports directly to the president and is empowered to wage war on cybercrime, online radicalisation and fake news. That gives it considerable powers that could potentially be used to suppress civil society activities.

Third, several of the CT initiatives adopted by ASEAN member states are weak if not illusory: they may sound attractive, but their implementation moves at a snail’s pace. There’s a history of mistrust between many of the states, which makes cooperation—particularly in the security field—problematic.

Since the battle for Marawi and the demise of IS, concern over terrorism has remained high in Australia and across Southeast Asia. At the June 2017 trilateral meeting on security between the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, ministers agreed to step up CT intelligence and information sharing and adopt further measures to curb terrorist financing.

There’s evidence that IS is seeking to establish a presence in our region. In the post-caliphate period, IS is likely to do that through online platforms and virtual planning. It’s notable that Southeast Asia now has the world’s third-largest population of internet users. Southeast Asians spend more time than anyone else on the mobile internet. Thais, for example, spend around 4.2 hours per day on the web, and Indonesians 3.9 hours, whereas Britons spend 1.9 hours.

Nevertheless, by blocking internet usage or adopting more aggressive security measures, the ASEAN member states aren’t really addressing the factors that breed violent extremism. We’re missing key motivators, which are increasingly linked to socio-economic and political disillusionment. It’s notable that the ASEAN countries (and Australia) have done little to stop the Myanmar government’s actions against the Rohingya, which some Islamists have highlighted in their calls for action.

The CT summit is an opportunity for Australia to not only enhance its security relationship with its ASEAN neighbours, but to make sure that new CT measures are consistent with basic human rights and dignity. Security is important, but we must remember that political oppression, social dislocation and economic insecurity spur violent extremism.

Does Indonesia pose a strategic risk for Australia? The answer might be ‘no’ if one looks at the recently released Australian foreign policy white paper. It argues that Indonesia—along with Japan, India and South Korea—is an ‘Indo-Pacific democracy’ that is bilaterally and regionally important to Australia. Australia, it says, will therefore ‘work closely with Indonesia in regional and international forums to support and protect a rules-based regional order’.

The premise that Indonesia and Australia can leverage their relationship into a strategic partnership with regional effects perhaps follows the vision in the 2016 defence white paper. That document shifted the bilateral tone away from the traditional security ambivalence into a partnership based on shared geo-economic and maritime interests.

Nonetheless, parts of the Australian strategic community still consider Indonesia a possible strategic risk. One example is a recent ASPI report, Australia’s management of strategic risk in the new era, by Paul Dibb and Richard Brabin-Smith. The report wasn’t about Indonesia as much as it was about China. It focused on key warning indicators and defence capabilities Canberra should consider, as ‘a major power threat’ can’t be ruled out.

The issue with Indonesia was ‘whether Islamic extremism is entering the mainstream of Indonesian politics, and so eventually posing a direct threat to Indonesia’s domestic stability and having implications for’ Australia. If Indonesia becomes ‘some sort of aggressive Islamist extremist state’, the authors argue, it could pose ‘a fundamental threat to Australia’s security’. After all, Indonesia’s growing economy would ‘give it the option of developing much more serious military capabilities’.

Concerns over Indonesia’s strategic trajectory are certainly not new; they go back to the 1960s and 1970s. But today, the argument that Indonesia could pose strategic risks for Australia (in the way Dibb and Brabin-Smith conceive it) is fundamentally flawed because it’s based on problematic assumptions, not sound or systematic analysis.

First, the ‘Islamist extremist state’ argument assumes that (1) the ‘mainstreaming’ of Islamic extremism will lead to a ‘takeover’, (2) the process of such a takeover will lead to ‘domestic instability’, and (3) such a state will be ‘hostile’ towards or perhaps intent on attacking Australia.

Putting aside the fact that none of the key terms (such as mainstreaming extremism or instability) are properly defined, these assumptions rely on a logic whereby the entry of Islamic extremism into mainstream politics automatically leads to ‘takeover’ and ‘hostility’. Given that logic’s complexities, the analysis should be empirically supported rather than conjectured through assumptions.

Further, the assumptions aren’t about contested strategic interests if an ‘Islamic extremist state’ arises or about whether Indonesia has the requisite offensive capabilities or hostile intentions. Instead, they’re about Indonesia being ‘different’, whether defined by religion (Islamic) or regime type (non-liberal democracy). Assuming that a different Indonesia will pose a strategic risk just because it’s different sidelines any effort to understand the country on its own terms—a hallmark of strategic analysis driven by ethnocentricity.

One could misinterpret such analysis as a variation of the erroneous myth that Islam as a religion or Islamic societies are inherently or irrationally hostile towards a ‘liberal Western’ state like Australia. While I don’t believe that’s what Dibb and Brabin-Smith are arguing, without a clear elaboration one could misread it as such.

Second, the argument that economic growth leads to improved and offensive military capabilities assumes that (1) defence planning is externally oriented and ‘rational’ (that is, a threat-based, value-maximising assessment of the strategic environment and goals within existing constraints), and (2) Indonesia could be threatening because its intentions could change overnight.

Indonesia’s economic growth has indeed been correlated with the rise of its defence spending (roughly US$6–8 billion in recent years). But most of that money (around 65% to 75%) goes to personnel in the form of salaries, education and other benefits. Indonesia spends only around US$1–2 billion annually on procurement (divided equally among the three services).

Indonesia also faces numerous challenges to modernising its defence forces. Planning has been erratic and subject to bureaucratic politics and civil–military contestations. The operational readiness of most of its ships and aircraft is currently in doubt too. Overall, Indonesia doesn’t have the offensive capabilities to attack Australia to begin with, nor does it plan to acquire them.

The question of intentions, on the other hand, is always elusive. But Indonesia’s military has always been strategically defensive—major military exercises, along with doctrinal developments since the 1990s, can attest to that.

Even the examples invoked to paint Indonesia as a possible ‘threat’—the 1960s West Irian campaign and Konfrontasi, as well as the 1975 Timor invasion—were driven by domestic concerns rather than regional expansionism. Politically, Indonesian elites often express annoyance about and a lack of trust in Australia’s intentions. But except for the occasional political scandals, Jakarta hasn’t seemed to care much about Australia in recent years.

Perhaps Dibb and Brabin-Smith’s arguments are based on worst-case forecasting, which makes sense given Australia and Indonesia’s turbulent bilateral history. But the assumptions that spring from such a premise could crowd out efforts to better see Indonesia in its own terms. If so, perhaps Ken Booth is right: worst-case forecasting is to strategic analysis what the ‘god of the gaps’ is to theology—it fills in for what we don’t understand.