INTRODUCTION

Our guest today is Bilahari Kausikan, who served as a Singapore diplomat for over three decades, including as permanent secretary of the foreign ministry, permanent Representative to the United Nations and ambassador to Russia. We start our conversation talking about how Southeast Asian countries are positioning themselves in the current global order. Make sure you watch, listen, or read the full episode as we go through a number of other subjects, including contingencies related to Taiwan, flashpoint management, and Southeast Asia stakes going forward.

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SOUTHEAST ASIA AND THE SHIFTING GLOBAL ORDER

ASEAN Wonk: So welcome to the ASEAN Wonk Podcast Bilahari. Thank you for joining us, and let's get started. Southeast Asia, as you've written, is no stranger to major power competition. There are various ways to characterize US-China competition today and the state of the global order. If you look at the Lowy Institute's Asia Power Index, it's very clear the United States and China are in kind of in a league of their own, but then you have a range of other powers as well that sit below that, which is a very complex sort of regional landscape. You've suggested that the order you see is kind of a version of dynamic multipolarity – there are different versions of that and what that means. But the key is that it's very different from some of the other analogies that have been advanced, including notions of a new Cold War, which was quite different historically, and also not very cold in Southeast Asia in terms of some of the conflicts that occurred there. What is your sense of the global order today moving forward? And what are Southeast Asia's stakes within it?

Ambassador Bilahari Kausikan: Yeah. Let me make one general point first about global order in general. I think it is a fundamental mistake to think about global order as necessarily reflecting our consensus. If you look throughout history, whatever order we had was defined by contest and efforts to create parameters for those contests so they were minimally dangerous, shall we say. Right? And that was certainly the case for the forty odd years of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. I think you know my views on this. I think that to call the US-China competition a new cold war is really intellectually sloppy and lazy. Because there are superficial similarities, of course, but they are superficial. It's fundamentally different.

The Cold War, the US-Soviet Union Cold War, was one between two systems. It was an existential struggle to see which was the better way of organizing modern industrial society. I think that that debate has been settled. Right? And you're not going to revive it by trying to impose this rather artificial framework of democracy versus authoritarianism on US-China relations. Yeah. China is authoritarian, but it's authoritarian in its own way. There are many variants of authoritarianism. Just as there are many variants – in fact more variants – of democracy, right? So I think the US-China competition is a competition not between two systems, but within a single global system. They are both vital parts of this system. I don't think they can bifurcate into two separate systems.

There will be partial bifurcation. It's already happening. And neither the US nor China is particularly comfortable with their interdependency because it exposes their vulnerabilities. They're both trying to mitigate it. And you know how they're trying to do it. US is trying to be less reliant on China and its supply chains, and China is trying to be more self-reliant in certain technologies. And I think both are going to fail, or at least they're not going to succeed to the extent they hope. Right?

“There will be partial bifurcation. It's already happening.”

But I think this is good news for Southeast Asia because competition between systems is binary. Your choice is a or b. And that was much of the case during the Cold War, which as you have pointed out, was really hot in Southeast Asia. So even those of us that pretended to be non-aligned, we knew where our bread was buttered. Competition within the system as it exists between the US and China today is not binary, it's complex. And in complexity, there is at least in principle more opportunity to exercise agency. And, you know, Southeast Asia, as you pointed out, has lived in the midst of major power competition for centuries. And it's nothing new. This is just the latest iteration of what is probably a natural phenomenon for a region that is a strategic crossroads between two major oceans and therefore trade routes, energy routes, supply routes, and so on.

In complexity, there is opportunity to exercise agency. And that's in principle, what all Southeast Asian countries, with one or two exceptions, try to do. Now I don't say we always do it very well. And there have been some disastrous mistakes in recent Southeast Asian history, particularly in the sixties and seventies. But I think we can cope pretty well as long as we each maintain a very clear idea of our national interest and look out for and maintain the agility. The agility to either seize opportunities to advance our national interest or get out of harm's way in good time. And I think by and large, most Southeast Asian countries with a couple of exceptions are doing that with various degrees of success, but generally, successfully.

INTRAREGIONAL BALANCE OF POWER

ASEAN Wonk: Right. And that's an important characterization that you made there in terms of there being opportunities and agency for Southeast Asian states, but a lot of it depends on how these countries actually exercise that. And a lot of that depends on individual governments, leaderships and regimes. I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit about the intra-regional balance of power within Southeast Asia, which you, as a practitioner, also experienced. And sometimes I think this is a little bit taken for granted for those who don't know the region well. So if you look at aggregate indicators, there are always these characterizations like Southeast Asia is the fifth largest economy now collectively; it’s going to be the fourth largest economy – depending on which estimate you look at – by 2040 for example. But I'm also interested in your thoughts about the intra-regional balance of power. Since the end of the Cold War, we've seen really the, for lack of a better term, the two sub-regional giants, right – a democratized Indonesia in maritime Southeast Asia, and then Vietnam in mainland Southeast Asia –get a lot of attention in terms of some of its growth rates relative to where it was in the sort of pre-Cold War sort of days, for example. But there are obviously long standing intra-regional tensions as well, and dynamics that periodically pop up. And you do have other powers as well in those regions like Malaysia, Thailand, so on and so forth. So if you're a policymaker or an expert who's looking at the region sort of from the outside in or trying to understand what the region looks like, how would you characterize the intra-regional balance of power going forward, even as Southeast Asia's sort of collective importance continues to rise in the coming decades?

Ambassador Bilahari Kausikan: Alright. I think that's a very important point you have raised. When outside observers – whether in the United States or China or Japan or Europe – look at Southeast Asia, they look at ASEAN, first of all, because it is the regional organization. But they don't quite understand that the fundamental and enduring purpose of ASEAN is to manage relations between its members.

Management of external relations has always been primarily a national responsibility. And ASEAN is a secondary factor. Sometimes a bit more important, sometimes less important. This is one of those times where it's less important, but it is always a secondary factor. The primary purpose of ASEAN is to manage this intra-regional balance, the intra-regional tensions, some of which have very long historical roots, and some of them start from very primordial things like race, language, religion, and therefore, they are never going to go away.

And I think from that point of view, ASEAN has been terribly successful. You just think about the state of Southeast Asia. I'll just use Singapore as an example. We had independence thrust upon us in 1965. Now what was the state of Southeast Asia in 1965. Think about it. First of all, the cold war was hot, very hot on mainland Southeast Asia. Secondly, Singapore had just been asked to leave Malaysia and the relationship was fraught with racial tension. Indonesia was still fighting an undeclared wa