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Should Vietnam continue building its maritime forces or should it pivot landward to best ensure its security? Few would dispute that this is a critical question that merits close scrutiny. As an emergent middle power, Vietnam simply doesn’t have sufficient resources to simultaneously pursue a powerful navy and a muscular land army. Making appropriate strategic trade-offs is therefore vital to ensuring national security.

However, the recent discussion on this forum about Vietnam’s geostrategic orientation, sparked by Khang Vu’s article, misses a vital point. Debating whether the Vietnamese military should expand landward or seaward adds little value if the kind of future security threat and the scenario under which Vietnam would be attacked are not clearly and accurately specified. After all, beefing up a nation’s military doesn’t improve national security if the weapon systems purchased, and the military doctrine developed, don’t match the most probable threat.

In their Strategist piece, Euan Graham and Bich Tran essentially argue that the Vietnamese military should continue the current maritime focus because Vietnam’s export-oriented economy is dependent on freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. They are concerned that Vietnam could be vulnerable to a blockade should China have ‘uncontested control within the so-called nine-dash line, and acquire access to a naval base in Cambodia’. However, they don’t specify what ‘uncontested control’ means and what would trigger China to blockade Vietnam. Because of that, it’s not clear why this naval blockade should be the nightmare scenario for Vietnamese policymakers and how a Vietnamese naval buildup could forestall such an outcome.

While Nguyen The Phuong is sympathetic to Graham and Tran’s view that Vietnam should prioritise investing in its maritime capabilities, he does a better job of specifying the critical threats that Vietnam might face in the future. According to Nguyen, Hanoi should be most concerned about a military conflict in the South China Sea, which would follow (presumably Chinese) pre-emptive strikes using long-range weapons and cyberattacks. The other nightmare scenario would be ‘a maritime blockade of Vietnamese outposts in the Spratly Islands’. The clear assumption here is that by investing in maritime capabilities, Vietnam could deter China from contemplating or taking such aggressive action. However, as the Russo-Ukraine war has shown, when the attacker is much more powerful than the defender and is determined to wage war, it’s likely that no form of deterrence short of nuclear deterrence would be effective.

In contrast to the previous authors, Vu maintains that Vietnam should prioritise its land forces because fighting land wars has always been more critical to Vietnamese security than the maritime domain. While I agree with him that land-based threats clearly pose a greater danger to Vietnamese security, I can’t see how investing in a powerful land army would prevent China from turning Laos and Cambodia against Vietnam. Whether Vietnam can ensure that its two neighbors remain on friendly terms is up to its foreign policy and diplomatic agility, not its army. Also, it isn’t clear what Vu is arguing for in practical terms. Assuming that land-based threats are more severe, what should Vietnamese leaders focus on? More specifically, what kind of force posture should the Vietnamese army adopt and to what strategic ends?

Because Vietnam sits on mainland Asia but has a long coastline, it has to inevitably prepare for both kinds of threats over the long haul. However, because the sovereignty contest over the South China Sea will not conclude anytime soon and Vietnam has made great strides in demarcating land borders with all of its neighbors, it is more likely that armed conflicts in the near future will be maritime-based rather than land-based. The critical questions therefore are: under what circumstances would such conflict likely to erupt, and what would it look like?

In his 2008 study of China’s approach to territorial disputes, M. Taylor Fravel points out that Beijing has a pattern of acting aggressively in disputes over territory to halt a decline in its bargaining power vis-à-vis other parties. In other words, we should be most worried about China waging armed conflicts when Beijing feels insecure because its power is declining to the extent that it can no longer enforce its territorial claim, or because other states are taking drastic actions to expand their control over disputed territories. This logic explains why China has refrained from invading Taiwan yet always reacts forcefully to any hint of Taiwanese independence. Based on this line of thinking, a defensive posture that doesn’t seek to diminish Chinese control over a piece of disputed territory is likely to be more successful in preventing or at least delaying conflict.

Assuming that any future armed conflict between China and Vietnam would be over the South China Sea, it would most likely erupt when Beijing felt it was losing its grip over some of the disputed islands because it has experienced decline or because other parties are banding together to solve their disputes without China’s participation. And should China initiate conflict out of insecurity, it would likely aim for a swift fait accompli rather than start a massive naval war. For example, it could seize one or two islands controlled by another country and then challenge the defender to escalate the conflict and risk starting a war to recapture the lost territory. That would allow China to assert its sovereignty and regional dominance at lower costs and risks, similar to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The key challenge for Vietnam, therefore, is not to deter a maritime war but to develop the right kind of maritime capabilities that would allow it to fight effectively in the grey zone. More precisely, it needs a robust naval militia that could deny China outright control over any disputed island without openly escalating the conflict to the level of war. Missiles and fighter aircraft would not be helpful here. Radars and a robust fleet of well-equipped patrol ships that could react quickly and forcefully would play a more vital role in maintaining the status quo. The strategic goal is to deny a successful fait accompli and create space for diplomacy to defuse the crisis.

It’s in these specific terms that we should continue a debate about Vietnam’s strategic choices. The broad binary choice between a landward focus and a maritime orientation is unproductive. What’s critical is that the military be geared to fight and prevail in the sort of conflict that could break out, whether on land or at sea.

Since its October release in draft form, China’s new coastguard law has been the subject of dozens of news reports and analyses. Maritime law enforcement legislation rarely attracts such international attention, but in this case it is warranted. For 15 years, the China Coast Guard has led the country’s seaward expansion into areas long claimed but seldom (if ever) visited. International observers are right to wonder, what does the new law portend for Chinese behaviour at sea?

Many have focused on the law’s use-of-force provisions. In the past, the China Coast Guard has employed a wide range of coercive tactics to achieve Beijing’s strategic and operational objectives. Last April, for instance, a 3,500-ton Chinese coastguard ship rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing vessel operating in waters also claimed by Hanoi (Beijing implausibly suggested the wooden-hulled Vietnamese boat did the ramming). However, to date it has avoided using armed force against foreigners.

The new law signals that that could change. Article 47 authorises armed China Coast Guard personnel to forcibly board noncompliant foreign vessels ‘illegally’ engaged in economic activities in Chinese-claimed waters. Article 48 allows the use of shipborne weapons (that is, deck guns) in cases where coastguard forces face attack by weapons and ‘other dangerous methods’—which could mean anything. Even more ambiguous, Article 22 allows the coastguard to employ ‘all means necessary including the use of force’ to stop foreigners found infringing Chinese ‘sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdictional rights.’

While disturbing, the use-of-force provisions are not the most worrisome elements in the new law. Rather, it is the ambiguous geographic scope of the law’s application: China’s ‘jurisdictional waters’ (管辖海域). The draft law only vaguely defined the term (Article 74). In the final version, passed on 22 January, that content was removed, leaving no definition at all.

However, a close reading of authoritative Chinese sources reveals that Beijing claims jurisdiction over 3 million square kilometres of maritime space, often called China’s ‘blue national territory’. This comprises the Bohai Gulf; a large section of the Yellow Sea; the East China Sea as far east as the Okinawa Trough, including waters around the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands; and all the waters within the ‘nine-dash line’ in the South China Sea. By Beijing’s own reckoning, ‘over half’ of this space is contested by other countries.

If the China Coast Guard followed the letter of the new law, what would we see? In the South China Sea, any foreign fishing, survey or research vessel found operating anywhere within the nine-dash line would be subject to boarding and inspection (Article 18). Refusal to comply would mean a forcible boarding by armed personnel prepared to compel them to do so (Article 47). The China Coast Guard would send units to dismantle the structures on every Vietnamese-, Philippine- and Malaysian-occupied land feature in the Spratly Archipelago (Article 20). In the East China Sea, the coastguard would sail to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and ‘expel’ every Japanese ship it encountered (Article 17). In the Yellow Sea, East China Sea and South China Sea, the coastguard would track down and evict US Navy ocean surveillance ships like USNS Impeccable and hydrographic survey ships like USNS Bowditch for conducting ‘illegal’ activities in China’s exclusive economic zone (Article 21).

Fortunately, just because Beijing has a law on the books doesn’t mean that it will actually enforce its provisions. This is certainly true in the maritime realm. For example, China’s national fisheries law, last updated in 2013, authorises China’s maritime law enforcement forces to punish and expel (Article 46) foreign fishing vessels operating illegally in China’s jurisdictional waters. Yet there remain vast sections of China’s ‘blue national territory’ where they continue to operate unmolested.

In recent years, China has adopted several new laws and regulations that seemed to presage new coercive behaviour that never occurred. For example, in 2012 and 2013 Hainan province issued two new maritime laws, one on fisheries management and one on public security. Nether has apparently made things worse for foreign mariners, despite concerns they would.

In August 2016, the Chinese supreme court issued judicial interpretations authorising the China Coast Guard to charge foreigners for criminal offences if caught ‘poaching’ in Chinese jurisdictional waters. Since then, the coastguard has not enforced this provision, despite many chances to do so. Thus, new laws have not necessarily meant new coercive behaviour. It seems unlikely that this one will either.

Why? Because enforcing these laws against foreign mariners is above all a political decision. It is a question of foreign policy, not domestic policy. And applying them by the book would be terrible foreign policy. Beijing would further alienate its neighbours, pushing them closer to its rivals, the US and Japan. It would make it much harder for Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam to remain neutral in the current period of great-power competition. It would risk erasing all the hard work done to lure Manila away from its alliance with Washington. And it would mean war with Japan and the United States.

This doesn’t mean that regional states should simply ignore the coastguard law. Far from it. When the draft was issued in October, an official ‘explanation’ listed four reasons why it was urgently needed. The first cited requirements associated with building China into a ‘maritime great power’ and ‘safeguarding maritime rights and interest’—the code words for ‘do a better job defending China’s maritime claims’.

Clearly, Beijing expects the law to benefit its cause in some way. Moreover, Chinese policymakers inserted the most coercive provisions in the new law because they clearly imagined situations when applying them would make political sense. So, even if the chances of a major new provocation are small today, regional states must take substantive steps to prepare for that possibility in the future.

Smart leaders will do more than that. In June 2012, Vietnam passed a new maritime law that defined the geographic extent of its own maritime boundaries, including territories occupied by China. In retaliation, China established Sansha City, opening the door to major expansion of Chinese administration of disputed space in the South China Sea. If China can take foreign legislation seriously, so can others.

Aside from being vigilant and shrewd, what else might regional states do? At the very least, they should tell Beijing that they will never accept the law’s application against their citizens in disputed waters and warn of severe consequences if China does so anyway. In the age of great-power competition even small states have leverage. They should also demand that China provide a precise definition of its ‘jurisdictional waters’.

In authorising its coastguard to use deadly force to uphold its maritime claims, Beijing has crossed a line. Foreign diplomats should tell their Chinese counterparts that ambiguity of any kind is simply no longer acceptable.

Vietnam assumed the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations last November for 2020—perhaps the most challenging year ever to take on the role. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed the nature of diplomacy, particularly the somewhat old-fashioned style that ASEAN most favoured: frequent consultations, informal negotiations and confidence building through meetings and retreats—none of which are possible given the restrictions.

But an even greater challenge to ASEAN’s usual diplomatic style has been posed by the critical tensions between the United States and China. The growing competition jeopardises regional trade and economic cooperation and contributes to the sense of confrontation and unpredictability of international conduct. As both Washington and Beijing escalate the conflict and bilateral channels shrink, multilateral forums are becoming proxies for their disputes.

Vietnam has been preparing for the challenges and had been gearing up for this important year, when it not only chairs ASEAN but also serves as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. It has already proved its ability to host important regional forums and even high-level meetings of global importance, such as the challenging US–North Korea summit in Hanoi last year—a remarkable makeover, given its relatively recent diplomatic isolation from which it only broke out with normalising relations with the US and joining ASEAN in the mid-1990s. But beyond merely holding the chair, many already harbour hopes that Vietnam can take a stronger leadership role within ASEAN.

ASEAN has lacked leadership for some time, which has led to hard questions about the group’s effectiveness.

The lack of a formal leader was a deliberate part of ASEAN’s design to ensure equality among a diverse group, but it became an inherent weakness. Indonesia is traditionally closest to such a position as de facto leader, but by virtue of size rather than by authority or legitimacy. But Jakarta’s notable withdrawal from that role since Joko Widodo became president leaves a leadership vacuum, even if informal. Many in ASEAN think that there could be no better country to stand up to the mounting challenges than Vietnam.

In fact, Vietnam’s impressive early response to Covid-19 has earned further respect and recognition from its neighbours, including much wealthier and more developed ones, like Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. Economists from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Asian Development Bank predict that Vietnam has the highest chances in the region to come out of the post-coronavirus economic crisis in relatively better shape. This is a significant shift in Vietnam’s position in ASEAN, which, as a latecomer to the market economy, used to be labelled among the ‘second tier’ economies.

Diplomatically, Hanoi has also been taking on a more pivotal role. It is a de facto front-liner in South China Sea matters, where it has strong disputes with Beijing, but it’s also increasingly among the few that truly advocate for a powerful ASEAN role in regional matters. Hanoi’s leadership attaches strong importance to ASEAN norms and maintains a consistent foreign policy and has stepped up to socialise these norms to the other newer members. The stability of Vietnam’s government makes it unusual in a region that has recently seen many dramatic changes in national leadership.

Given the crisis enveloping the world, the main objective of Vietnam’s 2020 chairmanship is to preserve ASEAN’s unity and solidarity and prevent further erosion. The high expectations from the other ASEAN members and dialogue partners reflect a level of confidence in Vietnam’s diplomatic capability. Hanoi is strategically astute and aware of both the value and limitations of the regional body. But its commitment to the region’s security, and its unchanging posture on the South China Sea, show that Hanoi is keen to preserve ASEAN’s role in security and international affairs and to invest more diplomatic capital in the regional body.

Vietnam has been holding the line in the maritime disputes, at times rather diplomatically isolated in its determination from its Southeast Asian peers. But this year, it looks as if that has paid off. Hanoi shepherded a strong joint statement following the 36th ASEAN Summit, which openly reflected the tense situation in the region—a departure from ASEAN’s usual evasive statements on the matter. In his speech opening the summit, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc called for ‘full and strict compliance’ with the rules in the South China Sea and said ASEAN was ‘making every effort to establish an effective’ code of conduct with China.

The joint statement expressed concerns about recent developments in the disputed waters, ‘which have eroded trust and confidence, increased tensions and may undermine peace, security and stability in the region’. It reiterated that the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is ‘the basis for determining maritime entitlements, sovereign rights, jurisdiction and legitimate interests over maritime zones’. Vietnam is also insistent that UNCLOS remains the basis for the negotiated code of conduct. All of that addresses China’s intensified military presence in the South China Sea and its repeated unilateral blockage of oil and gas exploration, as well as reports about Beijing’s intentions to announce an air defence identification zone.

Vietnam’s consistent South China Sea policy may have cost it some diplomatic points with China, as well as serious monetary losses from disrupted exploration projects in partnerships with international companies. But China’s overreach may have turned the tide, as the recent wave of formal complaints to the UN rejecting China’s excessive claims in the South China Sea indicates. In recent months, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia and even the US have issued complaints that explicitly reject Beijing’s formal claim to offshore rights and sovereignty of the ‘Four Sha’ island groups—which is inconsistent with UNCLOS and the 2016 ruling by an arbitral tribunal in The Hague.

This will be considered in Hanoi as a sign of success in its policy of uncompromising internationalisation of the disputes and keeping the South China Sea a regional security issue, rather than a bilateral issue between China and individual Southeast Asian claimant states. By taking up this role when few ASEAN members wanted to, Vietnam has taken on a security leadership role, at least partially, in ASEAN. Not bad for a latecomer and certainly not an irrelevant contribution over 25 years of membership.

When the Cold War ended, many pundits anticipated a new era in which geoeconomics would determine geopolitics. As economic integration progressed, they predicted, the rules-based order would take root globally. Countries would comply with international law or incur high costs.

Today, such optimism looks more than a little naive. Even as the international legal system has ostensibly grown increasingly robust—underpinned, for example, by United Nations conventions, global accords like the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and the International Criminal Court—the rule of force has continued to trump the rule of law. Perhaps no country has taken more advantage of this state of affairs than China.

Consider China’s dam projects in the Mekong River, which flows from the Chinese-controlled Tibetan Plateau to the South China Sea, through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. By building 11 mega-dams near the border of the Tibetan Plateau, just before the river crosses into Southeast Asia, China has irreparably damaged the river system and wreaked broader environmental havoc, including saltwater intrusion in the Mekong Delta that has caused the delta to retreat.

Today, the Mekong is running at its lowest level in 100 years, and droughts are intensifying in downriver countries. This gives China powerful leverage over its neighbours. And yet China has faced no consequences for its weaponisation of the Mekong’s waters. It should thus be no surprise that the country is building or planning at least eight more mega-dams on the river.

China’s actions in the South China Sea may be even more brazen. This month marks the sixth anniversary of the country’s launch of a massive land-reclamation program in the highly strategic corridor, which connects the Indian and Pacific oceans. By constructing and militarising artificial islands, China has redrawn the region’s geopolitical map without firing a shot—or incurring any international costs.

In July 2016, an international arbitral tribunal set up by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea lacked legitimacy under international law. But China’s leaders simply disregarded the ruling, calling it a ‘farce’. Unless something changes, the US-led plan to establish a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ will remain little more than a paper vision.

China’s open contempt for the tribunal’s ruling stood in sharp contrast with India’s response to a 2014 ruling awarding Bangladesh nearly 80% of 25,602 square kilometres of disputed territory in the Bay of Bengal. Although the decision was split (unlike the South China Sea tribunal’s unanimous verdict) and included obvious flaws—it left a sizeable ‘grey area’ in the bay—India accepted it readily.

In fact, between 2013 and 2016—while the Philippines-initiated proceedings on China’s claims in the South China Sea were underway—three different tribunals ruled against India in disputes with Bangladesh, Italy and Pakistan. India complied with all of them.

The implication is clear: for large and influential countries, respecting the rules-based order is a choice—one that China, with its regime’s particular character, is unwilling to make. Against this background, Vietnam’s possible legal action on its own territorial disputes with China—which has been interfering in Vietnam’s longstanding oil and gas activities within its exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea—is unlikely to amount to much. Vietnam knows that China will ignore any ruling against it and use its trade leverage to punish its less powerful neighbour.

That is why an enforcement mechanism for international law is so badly needed. Disputes between states will always arise. Peace demands mechanisms for resolving them fairly and effectively, and reinforcing respect for existing frontiers.

Yet such a mechanism seems unlikely to emerge anytime soon. After all, China isn’t alone in violating international law with impunity: its fellow permanent members of the UN Security Council—France, Russia, the UK and the US—have all done so. These are the very countries that the UN charter entrusted with upholding international peace and security.

Nowadays, international law is powerful against the powerless, and powerless against the powerful. Despite tectonic shifts in the economy, geopolitics and the environment, this seems set to remain true, with the mightiest states using international law to impose their will on their weaker counterparts, while ignoring it themselves. As long as this is true, a rules-based global order will remain a fig leaf for the forcible pursuit of national interests.

Two millennia of history is no guide to the next two decades. But it can help to provide a broader perspective, in this case on China and its relationship with its southern maritime neighbours.

Much of this history has been overlooked by Eurocentrists, for whom history begins in the 16th century; by those whose histories focus on anti-colonialism and nation-building; and by Sinocentrists, who see China’s neighbours as more or less tributary.

Usually forgotten, too, is that the maritime region—the whole archipelago and peninsula—has a common Austronesian linguistic and cultural identity. This region, sometimes referred to as Nusantaria, now has some 400 million people and in principle commands the major straits, including Malacca, Lombok and Sunda.

The region has always been key to east–west commerce—west, in this case, being India, Persia and Arabia before Europe entered the scene. For almost all of the two millennia, traders from China played only a minor part; foreigners went to China because of its market. From the 18th century, Chinese migrant traders played an increasing role but were never dominant. Nor are they today in international commerce, which remains, as ever, dependent on ships and not on high-cost journeys over mountains and deserts—the over-rated Silk Road.

The first known direct contact between imperial Rome and China was not over land but by ship. Romans arrived in Nusantaria by sea in the second and third centuries, when Rome had massive trade based out of Alexandria with India, which in turn was linked by traders and Hindu and Buddhist preachers with the archipelago. Chinese goods reached India and beyond via the archipelago or the Kra isthmus. Chinese monks visited Sumatra, where Buddhism was thriving, but the traders and sailors were not Chinese. Fast-forward to the Tang dynasty, which lasted from the 600s to the early 900s, and whose prosperity led to a surge in trade. Guangzhou was a trading hub to which came Malays, Arabs, Tamils and others. The Chinese stayed home to make their money from the domestic market.

Chinese traders began to play a role from the late Song dynasty (960–1279) onward but were never predominant. The first Chinese communities that permanently settled in Nusantaria appear to have been those left behind by Kublai Khan’s failed invasion of Java. The Yuan emperor tried to force King Kertanegara to accept his overlordship. A huge invasion fleet should have overwhelmed the Javanese, but, tricked and ambushed, the invaders had no time to finish the job before the seasonal wind change and a lack of supplies forced them to leave. Asymmetric war won.

The next effort to spread Chinese power was the seven Ming voyages under Zheng He with his huge fleets in the early 1400s. He persuaded several minor states to acknowledge the emperor’s supremacy. But it was a short-lived power projection—30 years—because it cost too much with scant return. China was a giant compared with the coastal states of the archipelago and India, but fragmentation was a disadvantage for a centralising land-based power. The Srivijayan and Majapahit empires, on the other hand, thrived by being loosely organised and trade based.

A mythology has grown up over the size of Zheng’s ships and his navigational achievements. The voyages were made a thousand years after Asian Austronesians began to colonise Madagascar. The Portuguese, who arrived at Melaka only 75 years after Zheng, viewed the Javanese as the region’s leading navigators with the largest ships they had ever seen.

Another convenient (for China) myth is that states from the archipelago were ‘tributary’ to China. Tribute was mostly an exchange of goods, or a tax for the right to trade. Chinese merchants often had to pay tribute to local rulers if they wanted to trade at a port in the archipelago.

Over time, European commercial imperialism undermined the power and trade wealth of the various sultanates. Europeans made the trade rules and created demand for labour for mines and plantations, which brought huge numbers of Chinese and spurred the rapid growth of regional trade with southern China. That, in turn, led to the emergence of an ethnic Chinese business class. But the demographics that partly drove the shifts in the 19th and 20th centuries are reversing as China’s population declines while the populations of the countries of maritime Southeast Asia grow.

China’s need for large-scale foreign trade is a very recent phenomenon. It only started about three decades ago, and a shift back to self-reliance has already begun. As in the past, threats to China are more likely to come from its overextended western and northern land borders.

Meanwhile, China’s recent expansion in the South China Sea has sparked a reawakening of pan-Malay sentiment. Even the Philippines, so long forced by Spain and the United States to look across the Pacific, is refocusing. Obsessions with Pakistan and Kashmir remain an impediment to India’s reorientation, but in India’s port cities there’s the potential for reinvigorating historical trading links to the archipelago, as well as Persia and Arabia. ASEAN can barely paper over the interest gap between its naturally more vulnerable mainland member states and the maritime ones, which include once-Austronesian Vietnam (Champa).

China’s plan to influence politics and trade through the Belt and Road Initiative seems likely to produce many projects that have little economic justification or that, like the Tanzam railway in Africa, quickly decay. The BRI comes at a time when transcontinental trade shows signs of stalling and growth prospects lie more in smaller ports that serve regional traffic, particularly in the archipelago but also in India, with its long, two-faced coastline. China’s accumulated capital in the region is small compared with the investments made by Japan and the West, and its surpluses for foreign investment are shrinking. Equalling the US in some fields of technology—as the Soviets did during the Cold War—is of limited relevance.

In short, there’s little basis in history or economics for Chinese hegemony over the southern maritime region of Asia (the Nanyang), however much it militarises the seas. The cost in money and relationships will be too high as the Chinese Communist Party dynasty and its people age.