ASEAN holds the world’s busiest sea lanes and its most contested waters. Its strategy is to refuse to choose between the United States and China.
Published 14 October 2026 · 06:00 GMT
Southeast Asia has a word for its survival strategy: centrality. The idea, repeated in every ASEAN declaration, is that the region’s 600 million-plus people must sit at the centre of Asia diplomacy, not on its edges, and that no outside power should be allowed to set the terms. It is a doctrine born of weakness and sharpened by experience: small and mid-sized countries that band together can matter; alone, they get dictated to.
ASEAN works by consensus, which is both its strength and its curse. Every member, from Indonesia to Laos, holds a veto, and decisions emerge slowly, in language so bland it can offend no one. Critics call the bloc a talking shop. Defenders answer that the talking is the point: a region that spent the twentieth century at war with itself, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, has spent the twenty-first at peace, and ASEAN gets some of the credit.
The refusal to choose is the core of the strategy. Every ASEAN state trades heavily with China and relies, directly or indirectly, on the United States for security. Picking a side would split the bloc and endanger the economy. So ASEAN picks neither, and courts both, hosting American bases and Chinese ports, American tech and Chinese infrastructure. The balancing act is exhausting, and it is also the only game in town.
Timor-Leste admission as the eleventh member in 2025 completed a process decades in the making and gave ASEAN the full map of the region. The symbolism mattered: a country that won independence through enormous suffering joining the club of its neighbours. The practical effect was smaller. ASEAN is still a club whose members disagree about almost everything except the value of the club itself.
The South China Sea is the most dangerous water on earth. Through it passes a large share of world trade, including much of the oil bound for East Asia. Beneath it lie fisheries that feed millions and, by some estimates, oil and gas reserves. Around it sit six claimants, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan, whose claims overlap in a tangle of reefs, shoals, and nine-dash lines.
China has been the most assertive claimant. Over the past decade it built artificial islands on disputed reefs, installed runways and radar, and pressed its claims against the Philippines and Vietnam with coast guard ships and fishing fleets. In 2016 an international tribunal ruled that China expansive claims had no legal basis under the law of the sea. Beijing rejected the ruling and has behaved as if it does not exist.
The Philippines has been the most vocal challenger, taking its case to the world and publicising confrontations at sea. Vietnam has quietly built up its own outposts and its navy. Malaysia and Brunei have kept quieter, protecting their oil interests without provoking Beijing. The differences among the claimants are ASEAN central weakness: the bloc cannot agree on a common position, because each member has a different exposure to Chinese anger.
A code of conduct for the South China Sea has been under negotiation for more than two decades, and it remains unfinished. China negotiates slowly, and ASEAN negotiates by consensus, so the two slownesses multiply. Meanwhile the water gets more crowded: American warships, Chinese coast guard vessels, Vietnamese fishing fleets, and Philippine resupply boats, all operating in the same contested space. The sea that feeds Asia could also be the sea that starts its next war.
The second story of Southeast Asia is economic, and it is a story of opportunity. As wages rose in China and as the US-China trade war pushed firms to diversify, factories moved south. Vietnam became the biggest winner, absorbing electronics, footwear, and furniture production. Malaysia drew semiconductor packaging and testing. Thailand courted electric vehicles. Indonesia bet on nickel, the metal at the heart of EV batteries, and banned raw nickel exports to force processing at home.
Demographics help. Southeast Asia is young by the standards of East Asia, with a growing middle class and expanding cities. Indonesia alone has more than 270 million people, and the region as a whole is a consumer market that global firms can no longer ignore. The digital economy, e-commerce, ride-hailing, fintech, has grown faster here than almost anywhere, built by a generation that skipped the desktop and went straight to the smartphone.
The risks are as real as the opportunities. Supply chains that moved to escape one dependency can create another. Infrastructure, ports, power, roads, lags behind ambition in several countries. Corruption and political instability remain costs of doing business. And the region’s dependence on exports makes it hostage to the very superpower rivalry it tries to avoid: a trade war between Washington and Beijing hits Southeast Asia first, because Southeast Asia assembles what both sides fight over.
The region learned caution the hard way. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 began in Thailand, spread to Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Korea, and wiped out years of growth in months. The International Monetary Fund programmes that followed imposed austerity that still colours the region’s memory of Western advice. ASEAN’s response was institutional: the Chiang Mai Initiative, a network of currency swap arrangements among ASEAN plus China, Japan, and South Korea, was built so the region would never again have to beg for liquidity. The lesson of 1997 is still the region’s operating system: build reserves, avoid debt, and never depend on a single patron.
ASEAN bet is that economics can outrun geopolitics: that trade, investment, and a rising middle class will keep the region peaceful and prosperous even as the great powers circle. It is a bet the region has made before, in the 1990s, and it paid off until the Asian financial crisis of 1997 taught a harder lesson. The question now is whether the bet holds when the rivalry is not a crisis but a permanent condition. Southeast Asia’s answer, so far, is to keep building, keep trading, and keep refusing to choose.
The Western lens reads ASEAN as the swing region: the countries whose alignment decides whether China dominates Asia. In this telling, the US must offer economics, not just warships, because Southeast Asia joins the side that pays, not the side that lectures.
From the East, ASEAN looks like a buffer that China must keep friendly. Beijing offers infrastructure, trade, and non-interference, and asks in return that the South China Sea not become an American lake. In this telling, the tribunal ruling is a Western artefact, and the real law is the law of proximity.
From the Global South, ASEAN is the model: mid-sized countries that refused to be pawns and built a bloc that kept the peace. In this telling, centrality is not evasion but sovereignty, and the region refusal to choose is the most mature foreign policy in the world.
