China’s efforts to build up its security engagement with the nations of Southeast Asia are starting to make progress, Sydney’s Lowy Institute Analysis said in a new report, although the United States remains by far the region’s most influential security player.
The report, published yesterday, analyzed Southeast Asia’s defense agreements, dialogues, and joint military exercises with ten countries: Australia, Canada, China, France, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
It noted a broad expansion of these engagements over the past decade, as Southeast Asian nations have sought to diversify their defense partnerships in a context of growing strategic competition between China and the United States. As a result, the report said, “the landscape for defense cooperation in Southeast Asia is becoming more complex and contested.”
An important part of this, as the report notes, has been China’s attempts to bolster its defense engagement with the region, as a complement to its strong economic and trade ties. While this is intended to challenge the predominance that the U.S. has enjoyed since the end of World War II, Beijing’s efforts have had patchy results.
According to the Lowy Institute’s analysis, the U.S. was the top overall defense partner for Southeast Asia, leading the region for both military exercises and dialogue mechanisms, and ranking equal first with India for the number of defense agreements signed between 2017 and 2024. China only ranks eighth overall, and sixth for the number of dialogue mechanisms, defense agreements, and combined military exercises.
Beijing’s efforts have been heavily weighted toward the five nations of mainland Southeast Asia (Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam), which have, in general, seen much less interest from external defense partners than the maritime region. This is likely due to China’s growing maritime assertiveness, particularly in the South China Sea, which has led to a raft of new defense initiatives involving the Philippines in particular, but also with Indonesia and Singapore.
This has allowed China to make more substantial inroads in mainland Southeast Asia. China is now the top defense partner for Laos and Cambodia, while also bolstering its engagement with Thailand, which saw its security engagement with its U.S. treaty ally drop after the military coup of 2014. China also remains a key defense partner of the Myanmar military, which is currently fighting to maintain its hold on power in the face of a coalition of resistance forces and ethnic armed groups.
While China has made some recent gains in terms of strengthening its defense ties with Indonesia and Malaysia, the current trends point toward a possible intra-regional split within Southeast Asia into areas of relative Chinese and American defense influence.
The region “risks dividing into two camps: maritime countries with deep defense ties to the United States and its allies, and mainland countries lacking such cooperation,” Susannah Patton, the report’s co-author and the Institute’s deputy research director, said in a statement accompanying the report’s release.
However, it is also true that not all defense agreements are created equally. As the Lowy Institute report notes, U.S. and Japanese engagement tends to serve a more practical function. As an example, it cited the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement (ACSA) that the U.S. signed with Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand in 2005. This covers logistical support, supplies, and equipment used during exercises between U.S. forces and their Southeast Asian counterparts.
Chinese engagement, on the other hand, is more likely to be subordinated to diplomatic and political goals. China’s defense agreements with countries such as Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam “are mostly vague and symbolic, containing only general commitments to cooperation and dialogue.” Most of China’s agreements “lack substantive provisions for technology transfer, combined training, or intelligence sharing.”
The report notes that China is also more restrained and cautious in how it engages in joint military exercises with Southeast Asian partners. “Interoperability is conspicuously lacking in China’s military exercises with regional partners, a reflection of Beijing’s reluctance to expose its capabilities, and differences in systems and doctrines,” the report stated. “China’s cautious stance has in turn bred mistrust.”
Elsewhere, the report’s findings reflected the region’s attempts to escape the U.S.-China binary by building defense partnerships with other prominent regional partners. The report notes that between 2017 and 2024, Australia, India, and Japan have “signed more defense agreements with Southeast Asian countries than China and the United States combined.” Moreover, “If Canada and South Korea are included, the collective figures for the middle powers dwarf those of the United States and China.”
Overall, the report points to the limits of China’s defense engagement with the region, and suggests that the current trend, of deepening economic integration with China alongside growing security cooperation with the U.S. and its partners and allies, is likely to continue. Given that new defense cooperation initiatives from the United States and its allies focus largely on the maritime region – unsurprisingly, given the ongoing tensions in the South China Sea – this trend also “risks leaving mainland Southeast Asia more reliant on cooperation with China and Russia, increasing the geopolitical divide within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations,” the report stated.
