United States Institute of Peace

USIP’s Brian Harding, Jason Tower and Andrew Wells-Dang discuss how Myanmar’s civil war is being addressed at the ASEAN summit, how Southeast Asian countries view U.S.-China competition and the Biden administration’s legacy in the region.

What regional issues will Southeast Asian countries look to focus on?

Harding: ASEAN is the building block for the region’s major multilateral meetings and institutions, including the East Asia Summit. That one ASEAN country — Myanmar — remains in tatters more than three years after a military coup, will continue to be a key area of focus for leaders in Vientiane and a drag on the bloc’s ability to guide regional action on other issues of interest.

That said, leaders will also be focused on escalating U.S.-China competition, conflict in the Middle East and transnational crime. Many will also seek to highlight China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the South China Sea and posture toward Taiwan. Ultimately most business will be done outside the East Asia Summit itself in a variety of bilateral and multilateral meetings focused on discrete topics.

How was Myanmar’s civil war addressed during the ASEAN summit?

Tower: The summit illustrated the ongoing failure of ASEAN to make any progress in compelling the Myanmar military to end violence against the people, to release political prisoners and to permit humanitarian access. Three recent trends highlight the challenges ASEAN faces:

1. Growing Chinese support for the regime and moves to bring the junta into China-dominated multilateral security platforms have resulted in ASEAN losing any leverage it might have once held over the military regime. Following major regime loses on the battlefield, China became openly hostile toward Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG) and demanded that powerful ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) in its sphere of influence cut off resource flows to the resistance, end all revolutionary activity and even abandon liberated territories in the northern part of the country. This has given the junta cause to dramatically scale up violence against the EAOs with the hope that Chinese pressure might help it recover lost territory while undermining resistance unity.
   
   Meanwhile, China has also invited senior leaders of the Myanmar army and junta ministers to participate in high-level multilateral platforms like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, among others. In doing so, China and other participants in these platforms have legitimized the regime’s violence, sending a signal that the junta need not fear international isolation or consequences. These moves by China have reduced the junta’s reliance on ASEAN for legitimacy, particularly given that multiple ASEAN states have joined Chinese-led platforms offering the junta new options.
2. Under Laos’s ASEAN leadership this year, the bloc’s position on the Myanmar issue has become unclear, and political will to push the military to end violence and take genuine action to resume political reforms has lessened. As the head of ASEAN last year, Indonesia introduced several innovative approaches, establishing an envoy’s office and platforms for engagement with Myanmar’s EAOs. Laos has not been comfortable spearheading a process to address Myanmar’s crisis. It has instead looked to Thailand and China to provide leadership. At this year’s summit, Thailand offered to host an informal dialogue to address the crisis, but domestic political instability has made it difficult to develop and implement a strategy. Meanwhile, China has simply pushed Laos to engage more closely with the military regime. Indonesia has tried to continue involvement, notably by providing space for Myanmar’s resistance actors to convene, including with various international envoys and mediators.
   
   There are signs within ASEAN that many member states are increasingly desperate for any type of off-ramp, with some even signaling they would recognize a junta-led election as a means of achieving a “new normal.” But any junta-led election would only trigger higher levels of violence, as the junta has no legal basis or capacity to hold such an election, particularly given that its control of Myanmar’s territory continues to dwindle.    
3. With the junta’s representative now participating in ASEAN summits and foreign ministers’ meetings, deliberations on Myanmar are much more easily derailed. Back in 2021, ASEAN determined that Myanmar’s participation in high-level ASEAN meetings would be limited to the “non-political level,” meaning that a permanent secretary would participate rather than a senior representative of the junta’s State Administrative Council. Up until earlier this year, the junta opted not to participate, but this changed under Laos, with the regime now sending a so-called “non-political” representative to the summit.
   
   In reality, any regime participation in high-level ASEAN meetings will be highly political, with the regime representative interjecting its official narratives into proceedings amid the absence of any participation from the NUG or resistance. While some ASEAN states are having informal dialogues with the resistance — particularly Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand — others are not.

Malaysia will take the helm of ASEAN next year and surely face growing challenges stemming from Myanmar, including the continued proliferation of transnational crime; a growing humanitarian crisis and potentially even a major food crisis; and the prospects of much greater violence triggered by a fraudulent election. These challenges will be compounded by China’s growing interference and the junta’s participation in regional platforms and ASEAN meetings. Malaysia will need to consider: (1) whether and how to pushback on China; (2) how to ensure that the NUG and resistance have a voice within ASEAN; and (3) how to enhance ASEAN’s leverage over the military regime.

How do ASEAN countries see U.S.-China competition?

Wells-Dang: ASEAN countries want good relations with both China and the United States, which are the region’s largest and second-largest trading partners, respectively. It is broadly correct, but too simplistic, to state that most ASEAN countries depend more on China for trade and investment, while favoring the United States on security. In fact, no country wants to make a choice between the two powers. Even the ASEAN members perceived to be closest to China, such as Cambodia and this year’s ASEAN chair, Laos, value their economic ties with the United States and would welcome the chance to diversify from dependence on Chinese capital. Meanwhile, China has scaled up its Global Security Initiative, an aim to change global standards on security that has received both enthusiastic and critical reception in Southeast Asia. The tension between economic and security ties is perhaps strongest in the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore, which are U.S. treaty allies yet with strong economic and cultural links to China.

Given ASEAN’s geography, close relations with China are unavoidable. This is especially the case for Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, which share a land border with their northern neighbor. The fact that ASEAN members cooperate with China does not mean that they are necessarily siding against the United States; conversely, their relations with the United States do not mean that they are agreeing to an alliance against China.

The apparent exception to this hedging strategy is the Philippines, which under President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. has strengthened its U.S. alliance and defended its internationally recognized maritime boundary against incursions from China. Yet the Philippines has also attempted to maintain communication with China. The previous Philippine administration under Rodrigo Duterte attempted to appease Beijing and avoid confrontation in the South China (or West Philippine) Sea, only to find that China refused to soften its position to claim all of the so-called “nine-dash line.” As Philippine analyst Renato Cruz de Castro explains, Duterte already began to change course during his last year in office, and Marcos has continued where his predecessor left off.

Overall, U.S.-China rivalry meets the criteria of a “Goldilocks problem”: too much competition, and ASEAN’s security and stability may suffer; not enough, and ASEAN’s economic advantage may be weakened, or China will have too free a rein in reshaping regional norms. The challenge is keeping competition at a healthy level that does not heighten the risk of violent conflict.

This will be the last East Asia and ASEAN summits that the Biden administration participates in. What will be its legacy in the region?

Harding: Despite a series of crises elsewhere in the world, the Biden administration made meaningful progress in reorienting U.S. policy toward the Indo-Pacific. The administration would point toward revitalized treaty alliances, a new latticework of minilateral groupings and newfound emphasis on the Pacific Islands as its keystone accomplishments, and less so ties with ASEAN as a bloc and or revitalized multilateralism. Southeast Asia itself has not made progress easy — its biggest economies have been focused internally and the crisis in Myanmar has taken up a great amount of oxygen. Ultimately, the administration will be remembered differently in different capitals, including quite positively in Hanoi and Manila where developments have been bright.

Wells-Dang: The United States and ASEAN agreed on a comprehensive strategic partnership (CSP) in November 2022, following a “special summit” that President Biden hosted in Washington that May. A CSP is the highest level of partnership agreement short of a treaty alliance. These events attracted little attention in the U.S. media, but formal partnership agreements carry weight in Southeast Asia; they are the way that ASEAN does business. Without the U.S.-ASEAN CSP as a model, for instance, it’s difficult to see how Vietnam and the United States would have agreed on their own bilateral CSP in 2023, raising the official status of the relationship up two levels.

Biden’s decision to go to Hanoi in September 2023 instead of attending the 2023 East Asia Summit in Jakarta, sending Vice President Kamala Harris instead, was a disappointment for some ASEAN members, who expect the presence of top leaders at regional events as a sign of diplomatic commitment. Yet the Vietnam CSP was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, while the East Asia and ASEAN summits happen annually.

Similarly, the absence of Biden (and Harris) at this year’s summits should not be misinterpreted as a lack of U.S. interest in the region. It is rather a sign of cascading domestic and global events that U.S. leaders are dealing with. Southeast Asia, to its credit, is an area of relative stability that can and should partner with the United States in seeking to resolve conflicts both within and outside the region’s borders.