Sea of conflict: ASEAN powerless over Myanmar, caught in 'asymmetric struggle' with powerhouse China
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00:00 to Indonesia next, where President Joko Widodo is hosting leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Jakarta.
00:07 Topping the agenda then is the ongoing political crisis in Myanmar and tensions in the South China Sea.
00:13 Leaders say they hope to reach a consensus on those issues. Myanmar isn't taking part in the summit.
00:20 Let's get you some analysis on this. Bill Hayton is an associate fellow at the Asia-Pacific Program at Chatham House.
00:27 Bill, thanks very much for speaking to us this afternoon. Asian countries then remaining deeply divided on the issue of Myanmar.
00:34 Could this particular summit provide any clarity on the way forward there?
00:38 I think it's unlikely. I mean, they've had more than two years since the coup to try to get a sort of coherent push against Myanmar.
00:48 They agreed, you know, shortly after the coup, a five-point consensus that they thought that Myanmar's new military leaders
00:56 would be able to agree to, but they haven't. And instead, what we've seen is different ASEAN members making their own
01:05 unilateral attempts to try to engage the military junta there and not really getting anywhere.
01:12 Meanwhile, Myanmar situation there gets worse and worse. The conflict gets nastier and nastier every day,
01:18 with people dying and violence and instability spreading to more parts of the country.
01:23 So people refer to ASEAN as being ambiguous. I mean, is that owing to this kind of principle of non-alignment,
01:31 this consensus-based decision-making, which in the end doesn't always provide anything concrete?
01:38 Yeah, I mean, ASEAN's core principle is about non-interference, and they really do place the highest priority on sovereignty.
01:48 So they don't want to create an organization that goes around telling its member states exactly what they can do
01:54 inside their country, because it could be Myanmar today, it could be Vietnam or Laos or Cambodia tomorrow.
01:59 So they don't want that. They want ASEAN – so the 10 countries that are members of ASEAN want ASEAN to be
02:06 a relatively weak organization, nothing like the EU, for example, one that helps them control their own countries
02:13 but doesn't interfere too much. So it works at a consensus level, and it only takes one of the 10 members
02:19 to disagree for that consensus to be blocked. And so, for example, if Thailand, the government there,
02:27 wants to promote its own sort of outreach to the Myanmar military authorities, then maybe it can stop ASEAN
02:35 as a whole building a consensus. That's just one example.
02:40 So likely to top the agenda today, as will tensions, I should say, or conflicts in the South China Sea.
02:48 Frustratingly, some might say, negotiations around a code of conduct have been going on for three decades now.
02:55 Yes, I mean, negotiations might be pushing it a bit far to say they've been going on for three decades,
03:00 but certainly the idea and discussions about a code of conduct in the South China Sea have been going on
03:06 a very long time. And it just keeps going round and round the same issues. Basically, ASEAN wants a code of conduct
03:13 to constrain China's behavior in the South China Sea, and China doesn't want its behavior to be constrained
03:19 in the South China Sea. It would rather see a code of conduct used to constrain American or Japanese
03:25 or other outside powers' behavior in the South China Sea. They can't agree over exactly which parts of the
03:32 South China Sea this would apply to. The Southeast Asians want it to apply to the whole of it.
03:37 The Chinese say it should just apply to the Spratly Islands in the south. They can't agree whether it should
03:42 be legally binding or what that phrase actually means. And there are many other issues as well.
03:47 So it keeps going round and round and round. ASEAN and China always put a brave face on it.
03:52 They always come up with a new piece of paper. They're talking about a negotiating text or whatever it might be.
04:00 But the actual resolution of this code of conduct is always as far away as ever. That said, the process,
04:06 the fact that everyone is talking to each other, is itself a good thing.
04:10 Speaking of talking together, Jakarta seems to be the place to be at the moment because of course,
04:15 later on in the week, there'll be the East Asia Summit, a rather disparate group, you might say, of countries.
04:22 You'll have China, you'll have Russia, you'll have the US. I mean, again, can we expect anything to come out of that
04:28 given the very differing diverse viewpoints of the countries attending?
04:32 Well, the East Asia Summit is basically hosted by ASEAN. It's the core of the East Asia Summit.
04:38 And it invites its chosen partners to come and attend. Hence, you get Russia and China and North Korea
04:44 and South Korea and the United States and other countries all turning up.
04:48 It's a really interesting and unusual grouping of people. The EAS is often most useful to those countries
04:55 because it allows a lot of bilateral meetings, the things that take place on the sidelines of the main summit.
05:00 When things are going well, it can come up with some useful initiatives.
05:04 But by and large, it's a lot of sort of statementing and boilerplate.
05:11 And particularly with questions like Ukraine or tensions over Taiwan,
05:15 it'll be very hard to reach any kind of consensus on that.
05:18 So I wouldn't expect any kind of major announcements, just the usual good stuff about
05:23 we must do something to tackle climate change and promote regional security.
05:27 Bill, just a final question briefly. In August, President Biden spoke about the explicit aggression,
05:34 if you will, or aggressive behaviour of China in the South China Sea.
05:39 He was joined by Japan and South Korea who echoed that sentiment.
05:43 Can we expect Beijing to respond at this summit?
05:47 China in the South China Sea is doing what China always does.
05:51 It has a territorial claim which everybody else disagrees with.
05:55 And it behaves as if the sea and the islands belong to it.
06:00 And increasingly, China's navy and its coast guard are so strong,
06:04 there's very little Southeast Asian states can do about it,
06:07 except work with outside powers like the United States and Japan or Australia to try and show a presence
06:14 and to use things like the ASEAN summit to issue bits of paper that express concern
06:19 and somehow warn China not to go too far and to push back.
06:23 So I think we'll see more of the same with this.
06:25 It's an asymmetric struggle between a giant China and a relatively weak set of Southeast Asian countries
06:32 who try to use as many different tactics as possible just to maintain their positions in the South China Sea.
06:38 All right, Bill Hayton of Chapman House, thanks for speaking to us today.