Singapore: NUS Press, 2019. 296 pp. US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9789813250789.
Southeast Asia is at the epicentre of the evolving, and intensifying, great power competition between China and the United States. It is in this region that the balance of power is actively shifting, with global consequences. Ang Cheng Guan’s book, which details the years after the Cold War and the shaping of Southeast Asia to where it is today, is very useful for understanding the main drivers and limitations of the region’s responses to the great powers. The book follows on Ang’s seminal work Southeast Asia’s Cold War: An Interpretive History, published in 2018.
South East Asia After the Cold War takes us back to the 1990s, from the time before the collapse of the Soviet Union, through the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s and the resurgence of the South China Sea disputes in the 2000s, up until 2017, where the author wraps up, leaving Southeast Asia at the crossroads of history. The focus of the book is primarily on the foreign relations of the broader region, including the expansion and evolution of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the collective experience of the Asian financial crisis, and how the region responded to the flaring tensions in the South China Sea and the renewed competition between the US and China. An abundance of detailed historical facts and anecdotes highlight Ang’s skills as an author. Any teaching about this region should include Ang’s book, as it is one of the more useful compendiums published in recent years. He showcases the creation of Southeast Asia as we refer to it today, a region that in fact was not, has not, and likely will not, be uniform.
The ASEAN process, as limited and criticized as it often is, was a serious effort and commitment to making the region work, and to create opportunity for its growth by creating a stable peace. Since that time ASEAN meetings have been flooded with projects, from the expansion of ASEAN membership, through economic initiatives, to multiple efforts to address both traditional and non-traditional security challenges and other agendas. The outcomes of these efforts, have varied, but the tendency to discard ASEAN, especially knowing the painstaking efforts taken by the organization, unfairly downplays the challenges and goals of the ASEAN process.
The “new ASEAN” is no longer the ASEAN of the Cold War era that Ang chronicled in his Southeast Asia’s Cold War (2018). Despite the organization’s inertia, Ang emphasizes the creativity of ASEAN in detailing both greater integration efforts as well as attempts to work around the diversity of ASEAN, in the “10 minus X” principle that was intended to speed up some of its processes.
Ang also chronicles the transformation of China’s approach to its southern neighbours. While it might sound fantastical today, China used to be largely benign in its dealings with its neighbours, at least for some time. It worked hard to imbue a perception of peaceful rise, and while this sentiment never got full buy-in in Southeast Asia, for some period of time it was more accepted than not. Perhaps Vietnam and to a different degree the Philippines were exceptions due to the serious incidents in the South China Sea. But the disputes there had been contained as a “slow-intensity conflict” type, without escalating to hot conflict. Even in times of more assertive actions from China, Southeast Asians were able to adopt “dual-track engagement” and keep diplomacy as an active channel of communication with China.
The image and strategic weight of China really improved in the period since the Asian financial crisis, when it stepped up to help the Southeast Asian countries and integrated more economically with the region. On the other hand, to the bitter disappointment of some, especially its treaty ally Thailand, the US was nowhere to be seen. This was not easily forgotten and to date, the US still suffers from that lost opportunity to showcase commitment and leadership.
As Ang tells it, Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew stated “nature does not like a vacuum” when he referred to America’s reduced presence in Southeast Asia in the early 1990s, even before the Asian financial crisis. This was in reference to the US withdrawal from its bases in the Philippines, and foreseeing the potential for strategic opportunism, Singapore offered the US the Changi naval base as a way to ensure continued US presence in the region.
Subsequent US administrations have flip-flopped on the importance of Southeast Asia. The South China Sea has been one of the few areas of constant interest for the US, particularly regarding any contingency between China and Vietnam. US engagement in the South China Sea disputes has taken a different turn since the Obama administration explicitly declared its national interests in this body of water. However, Obama’s pivot, later renamed a rebalance, has received varying scores. What has been clear and constant is that China considers Southeast Asia as a core rather than a peripheral interest. Under Xi Jinping, Beijing’s plans for the region have expanded and intensified, though Ang does not embark on evaluating whether this is for the better or worse. The author ends when Donald Trump takes the reigns in the United States, leaving readers, and real-time observers, to grapple with a more dangerous world, one akin to Europe before World War II, where “war was already casting a shadow in the world” (241).
From 1990 to 2017, Southeast Asia as a region, and ASEAN as a political actor, had time to prepare for a more volatile world, renewed great power competition, complex challenges, and weakened institutions. Whether the Southeast Asians made the best of that time, and how they will tackle the challenges ahead remains for us to see. But in perilous times, history is a guide. Ang Cheng Guan’s contemporary history makes for a useful, if not essential, point of reference for policy makers and scholars of the present period.
Huong Le Thu
Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Canberra