Abstract
This chapter examines the challenges and opportunities Southeast Asian countries confront as a result of a transformed international order. More specifically, this chapter investigates how Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members are responding to growing uncertainty regarding the US’s role in the Indo-Pacific under the Trump administration as well as an increasingly assertive China. Although neorealists, by focusing on changes in the distribution of capabilities of various regional actors—a potential erosion of American power vis-à-vis the Indo-Pacific and an increase in China’s military and economic capabilities—can explain why ASEAN countries are reevaluating their foreign policies, neorealists have trouble accounting for the range of strategies chosen. More specifically, while neorealism might be able to shed light on why particularly weak countries, like Laos and Cambodia, in this asymmetric regional power structure bandwagon with China (accept bilateral deals in the hope that China will leave them alone), it encounters problems accounting for why other Southeast Asian countries, like the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, or Indonesia, do not engage in straight balancing behavior (aggregate capabilities with allies to offset an increasingly powerful China). Instead, to guard against the possibility of US abandonment and to tackle excessive dependencies on China, these countries avoid having to choose sides and pursue hybrid strategies which, I argue, are best explained by neoclassical realism. This chapter ends on an optimistic note suggesting that, since the Trump administration’s policies toward the region in the economic (less so the military) realm represent a significant departure from those of his predecessor, there is reason for cautious optimism post-Trump.
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Notes
- 1.
Hillary Clinton, Former Secretary of State, coined the term in an article in Foreign Policy which appeared in October 2011.
- 2.
He resigned on February 24, 2020, and has since been replaced by Muhyiddin Yassin.
- 3.
For a discussion of the EU’s foreign policy changes vis-à-vis the Indo Pacific, see Weber (2021 forthcoming).
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Weber, K. (2021). Trump’s America in the Indo-Pacific: Southeast Asians Coping with Harsh Realities and Trying to Come Out Ahead. In: Akaha, T., Yuan, J., Liang, W. (eds) Trump’s America and International Relations in the Indo-Pacific. Contributions to International Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75925-4_7
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