Minilateralism in the Indo-Pacific

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism, and ASEAN

Bhubhindar Singh, Sarah Teo, Bhubhindar Singh, Sarah Teo

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000060027
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Politics & International Relations
• Sous-sujet: International Relations

While US-centred bilateralism and ASEAN-led multilateralism have largely dominated the post-Cold War regional security architecture in the Indo-Pacific, increasing doubts about their effectiveness have resulted in countries turning to alternative forms of cooperation, such as minilateral arrangements. Compared to multilateral groupings, minilateral platforms are smaller in size, as well as more exclusive, flexible and functional.

Both China and the US have contributed to minilateral initiatives in the Indo-Pacific. In the case of the former, there is the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation mechanism—involving China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam—established in 2015. In the case of the latter, there has been a revival of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue in 2017—involving the US, Australia, Japan and India. This book examines the rise of these arrangements, their challenges and opportunities, as well as their impact on the extant regional security architecture, including on the ASEAN-led multilateral order.

A valuable guide for students and policy-makers looking to understand the nature and development of minilateralism in the Indo-Pacific region.

1

Minilateralism and US security policy in the Indo-Pacific

The legacy, viability and deficiencies of a new security approach

William T. Tow

Introduction

As 2018 drew to a close, events underlining US President Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ policy and rendering uncertain the United States’ long-standing post-war alliance politics accelerated. The resignation of Trump’s Secretary of Defense, James N. Mattis, followed the president’s decision, apparently without prior consultation, to withdraw US troops from Syria. However, ongoing events and trends pertaining to US alliance politics in Asia clearly contributed to Mattis’s disillusionment. Uncertainties also intensified over the future of US-South Korean and US-Japanese alliance relations in the aftermath of Trump’s June 2018 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore and his spontaneous decision to suspend a major US-South Korean military exercise. This was the case even in the absence of hard evidence that North Korea was following through with Kim’s pledge to implement North Korea’s comprehensive denuclearisation. As Mattis observed in his resignation letter to the president:

My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign and strategic competitors are strongly held … Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours, and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.

(New York Times 2018)

In August 2019, US strategic interests were further undermined when South Korea terminated a bilateral defence intelligence-sharing agreement with Japan over a reparations dispute involving Korean labourers being forced to work under the Japanese during the occupation of Korea in the Second World War (Lind 2019; Richardson 2019). An increasingly powerful China was likewise relentlessly asserting its territorial claims and strategic interests in the South China Sea and throughout Asia.

Notwithstanding the machinations and dramas associated with the Trump administration, it is doubtful that US post-war alliance politics in Asia or Europe is close to being relegated to the dustbin of history. One American president (not even Trump) cannot completely overturn 70 years of systematic collaboration between like-minded states who either relate to or support post-war Western values and norms. Most traditional US allies and security partners continue to view Washington as a useful counter to great power hegemonic aspirations in their regions. Their key policy calculation is to identify, explore and implement other forms of security collaboration with Washington and with each other that are less binding but still effective in realising mutual security objectives. This imperative helps to explain the rise of minilateral security politics as one means for operationalising such a vision.

The nature and rationales underlying minilateral politics will initially be considered here. It is fully acknowledged that minilateralism is not exclusively applicable to security politics. Indeed, it has been adapted for several decades as a means for advancing the politics of climate change, arms control, institution building and trade. Its recent emergence as a form of collective security and/or collective defence implementation, however, is an important aspect of contemporary international security that warrants closer examination, especially in an Indo-Pacific regional context. A second section in this chapter examines recent initiatives to introduce minilateral security as a complement to US alliance politics in the region. This trend has become increasingly notable as the Cold War system recedes further into history and as structural change in the Indo-Pacific’s power politics requires Washington to adopt new approaches for maintaining the relevance of alliances and security partnerships in a rapidly changing world. A third section reviews and examines an intensifying debate over the advantages and liabilities of minilateral security politics from both American and regional perspectives. If the regional and global balance of power is indeed transforming, members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other regional states may either reject US minilateral security approaches as inappropriate for their own regional security planning or may prefer to adapt variants of minilateral security which are a better fit for their own national and regional priorities.

The main argument advanced in this chapter is that minilateralism—if effectively applied—can indeed supplement US alliance politics in the Indo-Pacific region. It remains to be seen, however, whether US policymakers will adopt and implement this approach by design or merely as an afterthought in their quest to salvage what remains of the traditional US ‘hub-and-spokes’ alliance network that has endured throughout much of Asia over the past 70 years. Or, alternatively, Washington may elect to modify current US minilateral security approaches as part of its quest to achieve a neo-isolationist, offshore balancing, or other variant of an ‘America First’ strategic posture.

Definition

What is ‘minilateralism’? Perhaps the most widely accepted definition of the concept was offered by Naim (2009), a distinguished economist and journalist writing for the journal Foreign Policy a decade ago: bringing together ‘the smallest possible number of countries needed to have the largest impact on solving a particular problem’. Until recently, the minilateralism concept was largely applied to discussions about international trade and about deriving greater flexibility in global governance and international diplomacy (Brandi et al. 2015; Brummer 2014; Hampson and Heinbeker 2011; Patrick 2014). In part such discussions were fuelled by a dawning realisation that American global hegemony may be drawing to a close, and that the multilateral institutions that US predominance spawned such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and, indeed, the United States itself were suffering increasingly from ‘middle age’ and potential irrelevance. As Brummer (2014, pp. 1–2, emphasis in the original) has observed, such multilateralism has been gradually supplanted by ‘an array of more modest and seemingly less ambitious joint ventures … to coordinate diverse sectors of the international economy and export shared policy preferences of member governments … [they] can be described distinctively as minilateral strategies of economic statecraft’.

Without relinquishing the entire post-war multilateral framework cultivated for more than half a century and credited with generating greater prosperity for many of those developing states associated with it, the United States, along with its friends and allies in both Europe and greater Asia, began to implement selective minilateral security initiatives to complement and revitalise the multilateral framework. Four distinct approaches to minilateral politics, addressing specific economic and security issues, initially emerged. Haass (2010) has described them collectively as ‘messy multilateralism’ but they are perhaps more accurately viewed as minilateral typologies (see also Moret 2016). Haass included (1) elite minilateralism in which great and middle powers formalise groupings within the G20 framework to address specific issues; (2) regional minilateralism within trading arrangements such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) (and, more specifically, that organisation’s annual summit involving member states’ heads of government) or utilisation of the European Union’s individual trading arrangements with African states; (3) functional minilateralism in which states coalesce to address a specific task or issue at hand without intending to permanently maintain such an arrangement once the issue is either resolved or proven to be implacable (that is, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) ‘smart defence’ initiatives to coordinate greater cooperation in such areas as cyber and ballistic missile defence or the Six-Party Talks on Korean denuclearisation); and (4) informal multilateralism whereby national governments collaborate to promote or reinterpret global norms (that is, various arms control arrangements or China-ASEAN deliberations over shaping a ‘code of conduct’ in the South China Sea). A fifth variant, minilateral security, specifically applicable to US alliance adaptation, has materialised over the past two decades, most prominently in the Indo-Pacific sphere.

Minilateralism’s development and history

Minilateral security politics intensified as the post-Cold War era unfolded. The viability of the United Nations, NATO and the ASEAN Regional Forum and other multilateral groupings was increasingly questioned as their member states’ national interests diverged more sharply in the Middle East, Europe and the Indo-Pacific. These diverse interests often obfuscated multilateral institutions’ original principles and norms while minimising prospects for collective gains—critical preconditions for the successful management of regional and international security. With the global balance of power shifting from a Soviet-American global bipolar rivalry to a more complex multipolar configuration, the longevity of a stable ‘international liberal order’ appeared to become increasingly tenuous.

Unlike its ongoing adherence to multilateral security in Europe via NATO, the United States has traditionally favoured engaging its Indo-Pacific allies and security partners bilaterally. Various observers have pointed to the United States’ higher levels of ‘collective identity’ with post-war Europe than with an Asia that was wrestling with the challenges of decolonisation and development politics (Hemmer and Katzenstein 2002). US policymakers have asserted that a bilateral alliance network in the Indo-Pacific, underpinned by US power and commitments to its friends and allies, fits the ‘geopolitical realities’ of that region where ‘no single threat [has been] commonly perceived’, unlike the Soviet Union’s danger to the Atlantic community which was the rationale for maintaining and strengthening NATO. The Indo-Pacific area has multiple security concerns ‘that differ from country to country and within the sub-regions of this vast area’ (Baker 1991, p. 5). As the Cold War receded, China’s power and ambitions evolved in ways which encouraged the United States’ post-war bilateral treaty allies—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand— either to remain solidly within the US hub-and-spokes system or (in the case of Thailand and an increasingly nationalist Philippines) to at least hedge against growing Chinese power by maintaining their alliance affiliation with Washington. North Korea’s nuclear aspirations reinforced the logic of America continuing its deterrence guarantees on behalf of its Northeast Asian allies, Japan and South Korea.

The North Korean example

Minilateral security politics was pursued in earnest in response to North Korea’s intensified nuclear weapons programme in Northeast Asia during the late 1990s. A Trilateral Cooperation and Oversight Group (TCOG) was established in 1999 by the United States, Japan and South Korea to coordinate responses by the three allies to the North Korean nuclear weapons programme. However, this early initiative to apply an inter-alliance approach to a major emerging threat in the Indo-Pacific was short-lived and, arguably, fell short of its formulative purpose. This initiative was impeded by progressive South Korean governments’ efforts led by President Kim Dae-jung and his immediate successor, Roh Moo-hyun, to pursue independent diplomatic initiatives with the North Korean government. This ‘Sunshine Policy’ arguably decoupled South Korea’s approach to North Korea from American and Japanese efforts to preserve a credible deterrent against future North Korean nuclear aggression in Northeast Asia. Kim and Roh maintained that North Korea felt threatened by the George W. Bush administration’s efforts to eradicate the regimes of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya, due to their efforts to build a nuclear weapons capacity in their own countries (Lee 2018, p. 8; see also Kang 2013, pp. 59–102). (Prior to President Bush’s inauguration in January 2001, independent American negotiations with the North Koreans had appeared to complement South Korea’s reliance on diplomacy for interacting with its northern neighbour.) Subsequent non-minilateral approaches such as an independent bilateral consultation process between the United States and North Korea, and the Six-Party Talks (from 2003 to 2009) were equally unsuccessful.

The TCOG also floundered because South Korea and Japan were hardly natural allies. Both countries are democratic and beholden to the post-war international liberal order for their impressive economic growth. However, they have been unable to overcome their historical animosities, territorial disputes and diverse outlooks on North Korea—even with substantial and long-standing American mediation efforts—to the extent that their bilateral politico-security ties could overcome such impediments. As Heginbotham and Samuels (2019) state, ‘TCOG meetings continued for a time, but only informally, at lower levels, and without generating actionable recommendations’ (see also Tow 2018, p. 3). The recent hardening of tensions between Seoul and Tokyo (including South Korea’s cancellation of a bilateral intelligence agreement with Japan) renders any American role of arbitrating a modus vivendi between its two key Northeast Asian allies extremely difficult. However, if left untended, the recent deterioration of Japanese-South Korean ties is a risk for the overall American strategic position in Asia (Silverberg and Park 2019). In this context, the revival of a minilateral approach to modify this crisis may be an appropriate US policy response.

The Trilateral Strategic Dialogue

The Trilateral Strategic Dialogue (TSD) has been a relatively more successful venture in multilateral security policy. The TSD was the product of a consultation process initiated in 2001 by Japanese, Australian and American defence officials as the ‘Trilateral Security Dialogue’, conferring at the vice-ministerial level. It was characterised by the three participating countries’ policymakers as providing a complementary instrument to the TCOG in deriving policy responses to the emerging North Korean nuclear threat (Tow 2017, p. 28). In mid-2005, TSD consultations were upgraded to full ministerial status and this was fully implemented when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with her Australian and Japanese counterparts in Sydney. On her way to Australia, Rice made it clear that she and Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs Taro Aso ‘shared concerns about Australia’s growing accommodation with China’ and implied that the TSD could be employed as a balancing or containment mechanism directed against China (White 2017, p. 109; see also Terada 2013, p. 134). However, Australian efforts to soften this posture were successful and the inaugural TSD statement issued at the end of the Sydney meeting actually ‘welcomed China’s constructive engagement in the region’—a statement clearly designed to modify Chinese concerns about the TSD constituting a de facto ‘mini-NATO’ (Jain 2006).

The Sydney summit represented a benchmark in the Indo-Pacific’s minilateral security politics, signalling that the TSD would gravitate towards primarily addressing non-traditional security issues such as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, development politics, climate change and counter-terrorism. Nuclear non-proliferation issues such as the Korean peninsula’s denuclearisation remained an important agenda item, but they were pursued in line with international norms created to address this problem. The 2018 joint statement released at the end of the TSD’s eighth ministerial meeting was instructive in this regard:

The Ministers reiterated that the international community needs to achieve the dismantlement of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs in accordance with United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions … The...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction Minilateralism in the Indo-Pacific
• 1. Minilateralism and US security policy in the Indo-Pacific: The legacy, viability and deficiencies of a new security approach
• 2. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and Indo-Pacific minilateralism: Resurrection without renewal?
• 3. The future of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue: Possibilities and challenges
• 4. Lancang-Mekong Cooperation: Minilateralism in institutional building and its implications
• 5. Lancang-Mekong Cooperation: The current state of China’s hydro-politics
• 6. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and ASEAN centrality
• 7. Minilateralism in Southeast Asia: Facts, opportunities and risks
• 8. ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus: Multilateralism mimicking minilateralism?
• Index