An introduction to Asia-Pacific Regional Security

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The Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment 2020 investigates US–China great-power competition, US alliances and partnerships, the implications for Asia of the end of the INF Treaty, the breakdown in Japan–South Korea relations, the diplomatic deadlock on the Korean Peninsula and the role of regional and extra-regional middle powers like Australia, Indonesia and European actors.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) had planned to convene its 19th Shangri-La Dialogue (SLD), the Asia-Pacific’s leading annual intergovernmental defence and security summit, in Singapore from 5 to 7 June 2020. The event has been held every year since its launch in 2002, so it was a matter of real regret when – in light of the serious challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic – it was decided in late March 2020 not to convene the Dialogue. However, later in 2020 we will begin work to ensure an exceptionally strong IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in mid-2021, and a successful 9th IISS Fullerton Forum: Shangri-La Dialogue Sherpa Meeting for senior officials and officers earlier that year. 

As well as planning for the next major events in the SLD process, the IISS is pleased to be able to continue its momentum with this seventh edition of the Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment, part of the IISS Strategic Dossiers series. Each chapter in this book bolsters focused, empirically based analysis with maps, graphs, charts and tables. Like its predecessors, the 2020 dossier investigates a wide range of important regional-security questions, complementing the analysis of Asian strategic, military and security issues in the Institute’s annual Strategic Survey: The Annual Assessment of Geopolitics, The Military Balance and Armed Conflict Survey. For the first time, chapters in this Regional Security Assessment carry author bylines.

The themes of the chapters that make up this volume have all featured in Plenary and Special Session discussions at recent IISS Shangri-La Dialogue and Fullerton Forum meetings and will be highly relevant to the substance of the next SLD in 2021. Reflecting the reality that major-power competition in the region continues to grow, there are important assessments of not only relations between the United States and China, but also of the implications for Asian security of the collapse of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and of the trajectory of Washington’s alliances and security partnerships in the region. One chapter assesses the continuing challenge posed by North Korea’s nuclear-weapons and missile programmes to the security of the US, Japan and South Korea, and the ramifications for Beijing’s relations with Pyongyang. 

Several chapters in this Regional Security Assessment also pay considerable attention to the important contributions of middle powers to Asia-Pacific security, with authors investigating Japan’s increasingly assertive regional role; the security implications of worsening relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea); Indonesian policy towards the South China Sea; Australia’s evolving security and defence outlook; and the tentative efforts by the European Union and some individual European countries to enhance their security roles in the region.

The major powers and regional security

Relations between the US and China remain central to the equilibrium that underpins security and stability in the Asia-Pacific or, as the US government and some others now call it, the ‘Indo-Pacific’. However, as Bonnie S. Glaser emphasises in this volume’s opening chapter, the deterioration of the crucially important relationship between the world’s two most powerful countries has ‘deepened and accelerated’ during Donald Trump’s presidency. While the US leader’s attention – and that of the media – has been focused on US–China trade, there have also been important bilateral differences in the security sphere, particularly in relation to the South China Sea and Taiwan. The latter has emerged as a particularly dangerous potential flashpoint and Glaser highlights the view of some observers that ‘the risk of a military crisis [is] likely to increase dangerously in the coming years’. Regional states have responded to escalating competition between the US and China in diverse and often complex ways. Common elements of these responses include support for parts of Trump’s pushback against Beijing’s assertiveness; a fear of antagonising China by overtly supporting US positions; expressions of concern over the security and economic ramifications of growing US–China tensions; voicing support for multilateral cooperation; and efforts to strengthen security cooperation among regional states themselves. Glaser argues that structural factors underlie deteriorating Sino-American relations, and that the two sides’ policies are ‘exacerbating suspicions and stoking tensions’. However, she also writes that military confrontation is not inevitable: more effective dialogue mechanisms, combined with ‘improved risk-reduction and crisis-avoidance measures’, would enable the US and China to manage their competition better. 

One emerging area of competition between the US and China involves missile deployment. The Institute’s Douglas Barrie, Michael Elleman and Meia Nouwens focus on the implications for Asia of the end of the INF Treaty. While Russia’s alleged non-compliance was the stated cause of the treaty’s collapse, President Trump has argued that the US has also been disadvantaged by China’s deployment of intermediate-range missiles. As the authors point out, the end of the INF Treaty will allow Washington ‘to develop, should it wish, ground-launched cruise and ballistic missiles that could be deployed in the Indo-Pacific’. However, they also maintain that ‘it is far from certain that ground-based US missiles would be either more cost-effective or more survivable than sea- or air-delivered missiles’. And while US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has spoken of deploying ground-based missiles in the region ‘sooner rather than later’, practical challenges mean that this could take years rather than months. In the meantime, China has rejected any notion that it should join efforts to create a multilateral successor to the INF Treaty: compliance with restrictions equivalent to those in the treaty would imply the need to give up as much as 95% of its current ballistic- and cruise-missile inventory. Beijing has also responded with strong rhetoric to US plans to deploy ground-based missiles, which might lead to an action–reaction cycle of weapons development and deployment by the two powers. In sum, the end of the INF Treaty threatens to worsen an already tense regional security predicament in East Asia. The best way of avoiding a worst-case outcome might be a wider approach to regional arms control, which would involve the US making concessions beyond forgoing the deployment of ground-based missiles and China demonstrating a greater willingness to engage in strategic and regional arms control.

As William Tow points out in his chapter, the United States’ alliances and security partnerships in the region remain central to its efforts to sustain its national-security interests and ‘respond to the rise of China, North Korean nuclear ambitions and other regional threats’. However, the Trump administration has signalled its departure from established policy towards the region, claiming that existing arrangements for trade with a range of Asian countries work to the disadvantage of the US, and that allies (particularly Japan and South Korea) should make considerably greater commitments to defence burden-sharing. In addition, the administration’s tendency to overlook allies’ interests in responding to the threat from North Korea’s nuclear-weapon and missile programmes has worried Tokyo and Seoul. However, the Trump administration’s transactional and sometimes unilateral approach is not the only major challenge to US alliances and partnerships: a ‘concerted campaign’ by Beijing to undermine these relationships has accompanied China’s growing economic and military assertiveness. The alliances with Australia, Japan and South Korea remain essentially strong despite differences with Washington, but China has succeeded in gaining influence over the two US allies in Southeast Asia, the Philippines and Thailand. Nevertheless, in parallel with its existing alliances, the US has cultivated several significant security partnerships in Southeast Asia – notably with Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam – that may help to compensate for its weakening alliances there. Meanwhile, the ‘major defence partnership’ with India is potentially of great strategic significance, though considerable differences of perspective continue to impede its development. Overall, allies and partners of the US still view its power as ‘a vital component of the regional security order’ and continue to ‘encourage and facilitate’ its engagement in the region. 

North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes have continued to pose a major threat to US security interests. In May 2019, Pyongyang resumed testing short-range missiles and reportedly stepped up its efforts to develop a submarine-launched ballistic-missile capability while simultaneously continuing its nuclear-weapons programme. In ‘Diplomacy and North Korea’, Brendan Taylor writes that ‘much of the optimism which enveloped Korean Peninsula diplomacy at the start of 2019 has dissipated’. While the historic meeting in Singapore between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in June 2018 generated high expectations, the second and third summit meetings in February and June 2019 failed to produce progress towards resolving substantive issues. Initial working-level talks in October 2019 ended when North Korean officials purportedly ‘stormed out’. The main problem was the two sides’ widely divergent understanding of the meaning of the ‘complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula’, which Trump and Kim had agreed on as their joint target at their initial summit. Differences between the two sides’ negotiation styles also impeded fruitful talks, as did domestic political considerations for both leaders. Dialogue between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in also stalled during 2019, mainly because Washington insisted that ‘Seoul remain in lockstep with its maximum-pressure campaign’, thereby preventing Moon from advancing the cooperative measures that he and Kim had discussed in 2018. In these circumstances of failing dialogue between the US and North Korea and also between the two Koreas, relations between Beijing and Pyongyang strengthened during 2019. Taylor realistically concludes that the Korean Peninsula’s ‘deadlock will not easily be broken’ in the near term.

Roles of the middle powers

Against a background of intensifying major-power competition in the region, Japan has continued to become a more assertive security actor. Writing on ‘Japan and Indo-Pacific Security’, Christopher W. Hughes pinpoints the Abe administration’s concern that China is seeking to use mechanisms such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to ‘marginalise’ Japanese and American influence in Asia and, at the bilateral level, ‘to use a growing relationship of asymmetric economic interdependence to exert leverage on Japan’. At the same time, Tokyo is worried that China’s territorial irredentism threatens Japan’s sea lines of communication and even the security of its own littoral and outlying islands. Japan has also faced a pressing ongoing security challenge from North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes. In response, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo’s government has been notably active in attempting to engage with China while simultaneously balancing Beijing’s growing influence, both ‘through its own diplomatic, economic and military efforts’ and by trying to bolster its alliance with the US. But Hughes concludes that Japan’s achievements have been mixed. While Abe has succeeded in using statecraft to shape the region’s political economy through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), its successor the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), its success in other areas of foreign and security policy has been less clearly demonstrable. Despite Tokyo’s efforts to increase defence spending, to buy more US defence equipment and to loosen constraints on the Japan Self-Defense Forces’ deployment, the US remains ‘a fickle ally’. At the same time, reaching rapprochements that are likely to endure with China and Russia has proved difficult, as has exerting influence with regards to the challenge from North Korea and managing neuralgic relations with South Korea.

In the context of the ‘downward spiral’ in bilateral relations that began in the second half of 2018, William Choong’s chapter investigates in detail the complex connections and disputes between Japan and the ROK. While the two countries share superficial similarities, a complex and highly contentious shared history clouds their relationship. Two matters have proved particularly troublesome: the dispute over the Dokdo/Takeshima Islands (occupied and administered by South Korea, but claimed by Japan) and the so-called ‘comfort women’ issue. The current downturn in relations was triggered by a November 2018 South Korean court ruling that a Japanese company should compensate South Koreans who had been exploited as wartime forced labour. Soon afterwards, Japan claimed that a South Korean naval vessel had locked its targeting radar onto one of its maritime-patrol aircraft. Subsequently, Japan accused South Korean companies of breaching sanctions on North Korea, and imposed export curbs on high-technology materials to the ROK; Seoul retaliated by removing Japan’s fast-track bilateral trade status and also by announcing its intent to withdraw from the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) with Japan. Choong argues that the prospects for significantly improved bilateral relations are ‘bleak’. Domestic political environments on both sides are charged, and the US has not been willing to focus great attention on mediation between its two Northeast Asian allies. Resumed functional cooperation is unlikely to make a long-term impact unless it is followed by more fundamental efforts to address the historical grievances that underlie the deterioration in relations since 2018.

Southeast Asia is composed of both small and medium powers. Of those countries, large and populous Indonesia has the greatest potential to play a significant role in regional security affairs. However, since 2014 the government of President Joko Widodo, or ‘Jokowi’ as he is widely known, has consciously moved away from its predecessor’s relatively highprofile international posture towards an emphasis on ‘down-to-earth diplomacy’ that prioritises consular services and support for Indonesian exports. Aaron Connelly explains how this change of emphasis has had a particular impact on Jakarta’s policy towards the major regional security challenge impinging on its interests: China’s increasingly prominent forward policy in the South China Sea. Jokowi has emphasised the importance of Chinese investment for Indonesia, and particularly for his own ‘signature initiative’, a national infrastructure programme. This has provided the context for Jakarta, during Jokowi’s presidency, to step back from its previous ‘active role in the resolution of regional disputes, including over the South China Sea’. Instead, Indonesia has become ‘a conservative actor focused on protecting its own narrow interests around the Natuna Islands’. Jokowi’s government has been particularly concerned over foreign vessels’ illegal fishing activities inside Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone. Chinese – along with Vietnamese – vessels posed particular problems. Chinese boats were largely exempted from a policy of sinking illegal fishing vessels, but in 2016 Jokowi assumed a personal role in directing the strengthening of the Natuna Islands’ security after Indonesian Navy ships reacted to intrusions by Chinese fishing boats supported by Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) vessels. 

Since late 2019, Jokowi’s second presidential term has seen new challenges in the form of renewed incursions by Chinese fishing vessels supported by the CCG in December, prompting Jakarta to deploy ships, combat aircraft and troops to the Natunas. This in turn led to calls in Indonesia for a ‘new strategy’ on the South China Sea. However, Connelly argues that during his second term Indonesia’s president is likely to prioritise intra-governmental political manoeuvring, domestic economic legislation and plans to build a new capital, and is therefore unlikely to refocus on the challenges for Indonesia posed by China’s rise.

Despite being a relatively small country in terms of its population, Australia plays an important role in regional security owing to its economic prosperity, significant defence capability and close alliance with the US. As Andrew Davies points out in his chapter on ‘Australia’s Security and Defence Outlook’, Australia’s government is acutely conscious of the ‘rapid’ evolution of its strategic environment since its 2016 Defence White Paper. The ‘most threatening geopolitical development’ has been the fast increase in China’s ‘military, economic and political clout’ and its willingness to ‘challenge established international conventions’. There are also doubts over the ‘enduring commitment’ of its US ally to its ‘security-underwriter role’ in Australia’s neighbourhood. An overall increase in the technological sophistication of Asian armed forces prompts the questioning of Canberra’s own security and defence policies. In these circumstances, Australia’s defence ministry is reassessing the ‘strategic underpinnings’ of the white paper, and Davies suggests it is likely that it will find that most of the challenges identified in 2016 have ‘significantly increased in scope or intensity’. While Canberra has already responded to those challenges with increased defence spending and plans to increase Australia’s military capabilities (for example, through a thoroughgoing modernisation of the air-force equipment inventory to create ‘a fully integrated fifth-generation force’), Davies concludes that ‘current plans may well prove inadequate’.

Since the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from ‘east of Suez’ over 50 years ago (which followed slightly earlier French and Dutch retrenchments from the region), no European country or grouping has played a major security role in the Asia-Pacific. This is unlikely to change in the future but, as IISS Shangri-La Dialogue Senior Fellow for Asia-Pacific Security Euan Graham argues in the final chapter in this volume, ‘the European Union and Europe’s two most significant military powers, the France and the United Kingdom, identify a continuing security role in the Asia-Pacific as being in their interests’. Germany and some other European countries are also paying increased attention to the region. Individual European states and the EU are ‘broadly aligned’ in support of the much vaunted ‘rules-based international order’, but ‘duplication and a degree of competition’ hinder effective engagement in regional security. Nonetheless, European defence companies are significant suppliers of military equipment to countries in the region, and the UK and France have stepped up their short-term naval deployments to Asian waters. Although Europe is absent from some existing regional security institutions centred on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), many regional states welcome European economic, diplomatic and military presences. While some European governments have been keen to bolster the existing Asia-Pacific order, the EU and many of its member states have simultaneously become concerned over China’s strategic intentions towards – and clandestine operations on – their continent, and Beijing’s deepening security relations with Moscow. These developments provide important new reasons for seeing the security of Europe and Asia as interconnected. Graham concludes that ‘EU contributions to security in the Asia-Pacific are likely to remain piecemeal’ and that ‘coordinated and consistent presence operations by member states are a more realistic goal than power projection’. The UK and France could usefully coordinate their military activities in the region, but it is unclear whether Brexit ‘will help or hinder such coordination’. 

By April 2020 it was already clear that the Asia-Pacific regional-security agenda was likely to widen further in light of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic not just on health and human security, but also on economic growth, political stability and foreign policy in regional countries and those states with significant security interests in the region. The pandemic will have undoubtedly significant effects on the defence sector, notably in terms of threatening to undermine armed forces’ operational readiness while simultaneously forcing them to adapt to new roles, and by heightening competition for government-spending allocations. These ramifications will doubtless feature in discussions at the next IISS Fullerton Forum: Shangri-La Dialogue Sherpa Meeting in January 2021, and in Plenary and Special Sessions at the Shangri-La Dialogue later in the year. However, despite having already proved to be perhaps the most dramatic international development since the end of the Second World War, the COVID-19 pandemic seems unlikely to reshape the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific fundamentally. Questions relating to major-power competition and the roles of other powers, many of which are assessed in detail in this Regional Security Assessment, will continue to provide the main substance for discussion in the Shangri-La Dialogue process, notwithstanding our readiness to incorporate new elements into its agenda. We intend that the essays in this volume will help to inform and stimulate important exchanges on these questions among security policymakers and experts in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond, before the major meetings in the Shangri-La Dialogue process resume at the start of 2021.