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    Our Unstable Neighbourhood: The Contest for South-East Asia: Australian Foreign Affairs 57
    Our Unstable Neighbourhood: The Contest for South-East Asia: Australian Foreign Affairs 57
    Our Unstable Neighbourhood: The Contest for South-East Asia: Australian Foreign Affairs 57
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    Our Unstable Neighbourhood: The Contest for South-East Asia: Australian Foreign Affairs 57

    By Jonathan Pearlman

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    About this ebook

    The latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines the challenges confronting South-East Asia as it finds itself at the epicentre of the rivalry between the United States and China.
    Our Unstable Neighbourhood looks at the fragile state of democracy and the growing threat of instability in the region, as well as the risks for Australia as it navigates ties with nations which have vastly differing interests and outlooks.
      ·   Allan Gyngell on whether Australia’s diplomacy in the region is working
      ·   Nicole Curato on democracy troubles in South-East Asia
      ·   Kishore Mahbubani on why South-East Asia views China so differently to Australia
      ·   Sebastian Strangio on China’s deepening regional footprint 
      ·   Award-winning writer Richard Cooke on foreign policy jargon
      PLUS correspondence on AFA14: The Taiwan Choice
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateJul 11, 2022
    ISBN9781743822432
    Our Unstable Neighbourhood: The Contest for South-East Asia: Australian Foreign Affairs 57
    Author

    Jonathan Pearlman

    Jonathan Pearlman is the editor of The Jewish Quarterly. He is also editor of Australian Foreign Affairs and world editor of The Saturday Paper. He previously worked at The Sydney Morning Herald, and as a correspondent in the Middle East. He studied at the University of New South Wales and Oxford University.

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      Our Unstable Neighbourhood - Jonathan Pearlman

      Contributors

      Nicole Curato is an associate professor of sociology at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra.

      Sheila Fitzpatrick is a renowned historian of the Soviet Union and modern Russia.

      Allan Gyngell is national president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

      Kishore Mahbubani is a Singaporean academic, diplomat and geopolitical consultant.

      Adam Ni is director of the China Policy Centre in Canberra.

      Mercedes Page formerly worked for the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. She is a fellow with the Schmidt Futures International Strategy Forum.

      Sebastian Strangio is a journalist and author and is currently the South-East Asia Editor of The Diplomat.

      Thom Woodroofe is chief of staff to the president and CEO of the Asia Society and a fellow of the Asia Society Policy Institute, where he works on climate policy and diplomacy.

      Editor’s Note

      OUR UNSTABLE NEIGHBOURHOOD

      For his first bilateral visit as prime minister, Anthony Albanese, travelled, as expected, to Indonesia.

      But this thirty-year-old rite of passage for Australian leaders must amount to more than ticking off an item on an incoming prime ministerial to-do list. Unfortunately, these trips have not ensured that those who undertake them return with a lasting sense of the relationship’s importance. During his visit to Jakarta as a newly sworn-in leader in 2018, Scott Morrison spoke of bringing ties to a new level. Six weeks later, he flagged relocating Australia’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – a move that caused disquiet in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. Two years later, when Morrison pushed for an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19, he contacted the leaders of countries such as the United States and France, but not Indonesia.

      Beyond Indonesia, the grouping of countries that forms Australia’s immediate regional neighbourhood – South-East Asia – has, in recent years, been subject to similar patterns of neglect. Australian aid to the region has declined since 2014, though support has been lifted during the COVID pandemic. Prime ministerial visits to most South-East Asian countries have been rare and irregular; the last leader to make a standalone visit to the Philippines – a nation of 115 million people – was John Howard, in 2003.

      Yet Australia’s declining focus on South-East Asia has occurred at a time when the region’s importance has spiked. In 2020, the combined gross domestic product of the ASEAN countries was US$3 trillion, having more than tripled in fifteen years. South-East Asia has become central to the competition between China and the United States, as the contest between these powers has focused on the great shipping lanes that connect the Indian Ocean to Asia and the Pacific.

      But countries in South-East Asia tend to view China, and the consequences of China’s rise, very differently to Australia. Their approaches are not monolithic but tend to diverge from Australia’s for similar reasons – they are closer to China (some are neighbours), and have longer memories of ties with it, including histories that extend into the days when it was last a great trading empire. Unlike Australia, they have provided the battlegrounds for previous wars between great powers, which shapes their views of the rivalries between the great powers of today.

      The Albanese government has committed to improving ties across South-East Asia, including increasing aid and appointing a roving ambassador to the region. Significantly, Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, has suggested that Australia’s approach must be based on an appreciation of the region’s outlook. In a speech at the Australian National University in 2021, she said South-East Asian countries don’t want to choose between the great powers – but they want to exercise their own agency in how the region is being reshaped. Wong, it should be noted, is the first foreign minister who was born in the region. She told the Lowy Institute in 2019: Southeast Asia is not just our region; it is where I was born. I grew up with stories of the fall of Singapore, the occupation of Malaya and the unique American contribution to peace in the Pacific.

      But the test for the Albanese government will be, as always, whether its commitment to the region endures as other political and international challenges arise. Wong had hoped her first bilateral visit would be to Indonesia and Malaysia, her birthplace. But China’s Pacific outreach sent her rushing to Fiji, three days after her swearing in.

      Developments in the Pacific have highlighted the danger of waiting for trouble before stepping up our diplomacy. Australia must start developing and improving relations with South-East Asia now. Albanese should visit the region, regularly, and build meaningful contacts and partnerships there, as should the rest of government and the business community. But, to succeed, Australia must first understand the outlooks of our potential partners in the region, and the causes of their concerns and anxieties – and then the reasons for our neglect, and the ways in which we can enhance ties and remain committed, permanently.

      Jonathan Pearlman

      TESTING GROUND

      A new statecraft for South-East Asia

      Allan Gyngell

      South-East Asia is the hyphen in the Indo-Pacific. Shaped by the great river systems of the Mekong, the Irrawaddy and the Salween, the subcontinental bulk of the mainland states of Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos fractures into the archipelagos and islands of Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia and the Philippines. Linking the Indian and Pacific oceans, the Malacca, Sunda and Lombok straits are critical to the security of China, Japan, the Republic of Korea and, because of its alliance commitments, the United States. Its 650 million people constitute a combined economy of around US$3 trillion.

      The region is vital to Australia’s security, too, stretching across its northern approaches and sea lanes, the most likely approach for any military attack.

      Over seventy-five years, South-East Asia has tested Australia’s foreign-policy capabilities like no other part of the world. After World War II, it was where the country came to terms with the newly independent states that replaced the departing European colonial powers. A good part of Australia’s diplomatic history in the second half of the twentieth century can be read as a response to the intertwined challenges of decolonisation and modernisation in the region: first the Indonesian independence struggle, then the creation of Malaysia, the Vietnam War, the Cambodian genocide and peace process, and finally the independence of Timor-Leste.

      With the creation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967, bringing together Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, then expanding to take in Brunei, the Indochina states and Myanmar, Australia had to learn how to deal effectively with regional institutions.

      Over these years, Canberra had larger security stakes in Washington and London. Economically, Japan, South Korea and then China were more important. The ties of language, religion and sport were more significant in the South Pacific. But South-East Asia was where Australia had to learn to manage, mostly on its own, the politics of its neighbourhood.

      These were not great powers that needed to be handled warily. Neither were they small states like those of the Pacific, which could be ignored or patronised. Like Australia, they were big enough to have a global outlook and international impact. Their actions had consequences for us.

      Although, Thailand apart, they were all emerging from European colonial control, they brought to their statecraft and foreign policies centuries-long experience of responding to and absorbing the clashing interests of dynasties and empires from China in the north and India in the west, from Europe and most recently Japan. All the main religions of the world – Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam – had passed through and left watermarks of influence.

      On balance, Australia handled the challenge well. The management of Indonesia’s attempts to prevent the creation of Malaysia in the 1960s – Konfrontasi (Confrontation) – still stands as an example of best Australian diplomatic practice. Skilfully and alone, Australian leaders sustained high-level relations with Jakarta and the mercurial President Sukarno, while making clear in words and actions their opposition to his policies. The Cambodia peace process under Gareth Evans, Peter Costello’s championing of the US$1-billion Australian contributions to the IMF’s financial stabilisation packages for Thailand and Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis, John Howard’s generous response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and the careful nurturing over many years of military-to-military ties all benefited our interests and built habits of cooperation.

      How Canberra sidelined South-East Asia

      South-East Asia is where Australia first learned the difficult lessons of managing intimate relationships with countries and cultures unlike our own. We had to balance our concern with human rights in Suharto’s Indonesia with our interest in stable economic growth and regional peace. We had to weigh our horror at the millions of deaths in the Khmer Rouge’s genocide with the objective of ending further death and conflict in Cambodia.

      South-East Asia was not forgotten, but by 2022 it had been sidelined

      But over recent years, South-East Asia has become less central to Australian foreign policy. The war on terrorism diverted the attention of our American ally to the Middle East, and Australia followed. Terrorism had an important regional dimension, as the Bali bombings of 2002 showed. It opened new avenues for security and intelligence cooperation. These included the Australian Federal Police’s work with its Indonesian and other regional counterparts, and the Australian Defence Force’s support for counterterrorism operations in the Philippines. But Australia’s primary attention was on Iraq and Afghanistan.

      The wars in the Middle East also generated flows of refugees and asylum seekers. Often facilitated by people-smugglers, some of them transited through South-East Asia, looking for Australian sanctuary. Much else, including regional relationships, suffered as the objective of stopping the boats became an

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